Monday, July 20, 2009
Learning from our customers - ThomasNet
Learning from our customers: ThomasNet's migration to the cloud
Inspired by what Marc Benioff said at Structure 09 last month, we've begun a new series on learning from our customers. We are kicking off the series with Brian Makas, Manager of Business Intelligence at ThomasNet. Brian helped ThomasNet move sales, marketing, support and recruiting to the cloud over the past few years. ThomasNet is the leading online industrial marketplace and business-building site connecting buyers and sellers worldwide.
Brian is a frequent speaker on marketing and cloud computing. He spoke at a marketing ROI panel at Dreamforce last year and also presented the ThomasNet story (with us) at a recent salesforce.com executive event in Falls Church, Virginia. In his spare time, Brian is an NHL and UFC fanatic. He shares his thoughts on all four of his interests (marketing, cloud computing, NHL and UFC) on Twitter (@brianmakas).
What problem was ThomasNet looking to solve that lead to using salesforce.com?
We had two very specific problems to address: managing existing prospects and distributing new leads. For prospect information, we used to print out massive book directories that were created once a year. These were then mailed out to regional sales representatives who used that information for the year. It was a nightmare, as we had no centralized place to store prospect information and of course the information would get stale pretty quickly. When it came to distributing new leads, our previous process was based around a "fire and forget" mentality - after we distributed a new lead to a sales representative we really had no way to enrich that record, that is to add more contacts, activity history, etc. that we might acquire after it was first sent out.
In order to solve these problems, we evaluated a number of CRM solutions and salesforce.com's solution had a strong functional fit. The fact that Salesforce is in the "Cloud" was more of an afterthought at the time, but turned out to be critical. We have an independent sales organization; worse than just not being on a single active directory, each office has their own preferences for what computers they use and how they set up their network. Not only would it have been complex and expensive to rollout an on-premise application but the burden of maintenance (especially with an application that needs to be upgraded several times a year) would have severely limited our ability to focus on actual business needs.
What were the results of the rollout?
Once we rolled out Salesforce, our prospect management and lead distribution processes changed completely. Salesforce gives us one place to maintain our prospect and customer information and track all our touch points with them. This is incredibly powerful because we're all working from the same information, can get a full view of the customer and can eliminate inefficient manual processes like our annual prospect book creation process. One very tangible example of this was something that happened recently. I needed to filter all our prospects by a specific set of criteria and get it out to our reps in each region. In the past, this
would've been an extensive process starting with collection of data from multiple different silos, to the development of numerous Excel sheets used to segment data by territory and ending with hundreds of emails flying around to the sales reps. With Salesforce, which already includes all of the relevant information, I was quickly able set the criteria and create reports by region that I could send directly our reps. What would've taken weeks took me hours - start to finish. Salesforce's reporting and built-in filtering capabilities are a lifesaver, in this and many other instances.
One of the interesting things that happened within our company is that the success we had with Salesforce in Sales and Marketing became infectious. Other departments saw how successful the Salesforce effort was and were begging to be a part of it. I've done my fair share of server-oriented programming in my career and I've never been part of a project that people begged to be a part of! We now use Salesforce across many of our core functions including: Sales and Marketing, Sales Resource Helpdesk, Telemarketing, Web Solutions and Recruiting.
As we've expanded our use of Salesforce internally at different departments, we're able to close the loop in terms of customer interactions: "Web2Lead" forms / Force.com Sites / Telemarketing / Helpdesk / Updates from the Editorial team ... Nearly every time a prospect or customer is touched by a member of the ThomasNet team, it's documented in Salesforce.
Salesforce has helped us generate a lot of savings but it also enables us to do things that we couldn't have done before. A great example of this the careers page that you guys built for us Without salesforce.com, we couldn't have built that careers page. Like most of us, our recruiting manager already has a full plate, the last thing he wanted was more work and managing content on a website certainly falls within that category. What really made http://careers.thomasnet.com a success is that is it is not only an applicant tracking system, but also a content management system. What this means is that as our recruiting manager manages current openings, the magic of Force.com Sites not only takes this structured data and auto-populates the website but the applications to those openings are automatically associated as well. With this detailed information, our qualified resume submissions went up 5X and it's transforming the way we recruit.
What has been your experience with Force.com, salesforce.com's platform for building custom applications?
In server-oriented programming, you always had to worry about scaling, it wasn’t enough to know what the initial audience was, you had to predict what the audience would look like several years down the road, before development even started. With salesforce.com’s software as a service (SaaS) offerings, we can focus on the business problems first, rather than worry about servers, hardware restrictions, databases and networks. This reduces our development time because we can start small and work more iteratively with the business. This alignment significantly reduces upfront costs and time-to-market.
In addition, we're almost “forced” into using best practices by using Force.com. When I previously approached business problems, I often found myself forced to treat each development request as its own distinct project, while this approach often met the stated needs of that project, it ended up putting both code and data into silos which didn’t meet business needs as a whole. With Force.com, while it will allow you to build silos and there’s very little you can’t do if you’re willing to bend the rules, there’s often a simple, point and click solution that meets most of your needs. The standardization on Force.com helps us define better solutions because we’re working with common development practices and a common set of business objects and workflows.
The other thing that's cool about a cloud platform like Force.com is that it's always improving and we get more and more new capabilities. It's not like older platforms where you have to upgrade to get the latest functionality or apply patches to get the latest security. With Force.com, we're always on the latest and greatest version.
My advice to anyone who's looked at salesforce.com and discounted it in the past is that you have to reevaluate it again. With the addition of APEX Code, Visualforce, Force.com Sites and more, the salesforce.com of a year or two ago is barely a shadow of what the Force.com platform is today.
Which applications would you say are best and least suited to the salesforce.com platform?
There are a number of areas that I think are particularly well suited to Salesforce. First off, Customer-facing processes are an obvious place to start. Applications or processes that you're currently using to interact with customers can typically be moved to Salesforce with great benefits. Sites has changed my philosophy about what Salesforce is suited for. Other than massive data processing, I'm not sure there's much it can't do. Any situation that requires an interaction between web and company data is now also a good fit, with the new Force.com Sites technology. Related to that, situations where you're collecting information from your users and displaying it back to them are also great fits for Salesforce, e.g., customer surveys, applicant forms, etc.
The only application that isn't particularly well-suited is large scale data processing. Salesforce is not a datawarehouse, or I should say, not yet anyway.
Please detail any unexpected benefits and challenges you came across during your implementation:
Unexpected benefits include how easy it was to expand Salesforce to different areas based on need - lots of synergy in terms of data and training, and automatic centralization of our key information. I also noticed synergy in our tool development, for example, a de-duplication tool we created for lead management worked seamlessly with our recruiting application as well.
In addition, salesforce.com's AppExchange has been a lifesaver, allowing us to take advantage of generic de-duplication tools and lead nurturing applications as packaged programs rather than trying to build our own custom apps.
Unexpected challenges were around the limitations we faced having to follow salesforce.com's development methodology since it's very structured. In the long run though, this challenge is minimized and far outweighed by the benefits realized via abiding to these structures.
What were the initial concerns upon your rollout?
First thing people are afraid of is a loss of control. There are also worries about downtime, but quite frankly, it's much less so than in a traditional IT environment. As much as I’d like to believe our IT department would respond to any problem 24/7/365, without a platform like Saleforce, it’s very rare to have that amount of support.
What would you recommend to those who are getting started with a transition to Salesforce?
(1) Getting started - You must have well-defined problems with well-defined defined solutions. Then you can move on to solving data management problems.
(2) Do the right things - Start small, pick a specific problem and solve it. Don't worry about how big it needs to be, with Salesforce, size and scalability aren’t issues. Don't over-engineer, keep adoption in mind as you move along.
Many thanks to Brian for a lively and insightful discussion. We're excited about many more of these and learning from you, our customers! If you'd like to be a part of this series, please leave a comment below or contact me directly.
Labels: appirio, Customer_Voice, Force.com, salesforce.com
Monday, June 29, 2009
Structure 09: Cloud Computing is Changing the World, But My Old Products Will Still Work
Balakrishna Narasimhan
Last week, I attended GigaOM's Structure09 conference, which was an interesting and well-run conference. It was fun to see industry thought-leaders like Werner Vogels, Marc Benioff, Chuck Hollis, James Urquhart and many others. For me, the conference confirmed many of the things we've written about recently:
1) Broad acceptance that enterprises are interested
There's absolutely no question that cloud computing has moved into the mainstream of enterprise technology. Everyone from Microsoft to Accenture to HP to IBM to SAP admitted as much. With the worsening economic conditions and the maturation of cloud computing services, enterprises are actively investigating cloud computing. The main differences of opinion between the legacy vendors and companies like Salesforce and Amazon lie in how quickly and broadly companies will adopt cloud computing.
2) Big vendors still at conceptual level, and trying to constrain the cloud
Large vendors like HP, IBM, SAP and Microsoft are still grappling with cloud computing at a conceptual level. It's clear that they recognize the importance of the profound shift that's happening in the industry but are not sure what to do about it.
Russ Daniels, HP's CTO of Cloud Services, talked about cloud computing as the brain that sits above the nervous system of the internet, and HP's vision of "everything-as-a-service". While interesting conceptually, there was little beyond abstract concepts in Russ' talk. If you were listening closely, there were also hints of how HP wants to preserve the status quo. While saying that the cloud was transformational, Russ made a point of saying that the cloud is best for solving new problems rather than for business automation, which current systems and processes do very well. I agree that the cloud can help solve new problems or enable new processes but it's also very disruptive to the status quo. Current approaches to business automation are expensive, brittle and leave CIOs managing the entire stack. Cloud platforms and applications change this completely and enable nimbler, faster processes.
Microsoft's Yousef Khalidi admitted that every enterprise he's talked to recently wants to move to the cloud but are held back by concerns about trust, performance and availability. He went on to say that enterprises have a variety of workloads, many of which will stay on-premise for a long time. It's hard to disagree with that premise but the question is whether Microsoft is really going to accelerate the movement of the majority of workloads to the cloud, given what that would mean to their revenues and profits.
SAP's Vishal Sikka continued along the themes he used in a recent CIO.com interview. He acknowledged the importance of cloud computing, but at the same time said that it's best suited to "simple transactions" and edge process within enterprises. Japan's largest employer would beg to differ with Vishal.
IBM's Willy Chiu talked about how IBM is approaching cloud computing from the ground up. They're partnering with universities to improve education on the topic and creating global innovation centers to explore use cases. I was impressed by the comprehensiveness and ambition of the approach. However, I was disappointed by the conclusion - companies can adopt cloud computing by purchasing a "Cloudburst" appliance, then having IBM build them a private cloud, and eventually by moving to IBM's public cloud. This sounds an awful lot like a "cloudwashing" of IBM's current offerings.
3) Too much discussion of clouds at the infrastructure rather than platform layers
The entire cloud conversation at Structure was very focused on infrastructure. As Daryl Plummer of Gartner has noted, Cloud computing is not about infrastructure. It's about a new delivery and consumption model for IT services that are elastic, metered and abstract away the SW stack. The conference was mostly focused on the lowest layer of the stack and didn't really talk about how the cloud enables transformation at the business process level. Greg Papadopoulos of Sun was one of the few people to talk about this, although he didn't dwell on it.
The thing that excites us most about cloud computing is its ability to help companies achieve the impossible. A great example of this is Starbucks' Pledge5 campaign. 21 days before the inauguration, Starbucks decided that they wanted to launch a national campaign (online, in stores and on Facebook) to drive community service across the nation. They needed to build a massively scalable infrastructure and application to do this. Before the cloud, this would've been hard to pull off even in time for the next inauguration. With Salesforce's Force.com platform, we were able to quickly build an application that performed flawlessly in supporting over 1M transactions across 10,000 store locations and millions of Facebook and Twitter fans.
The danger with just talking about infrastructure is that we miss the broader opportunity to engage the business and turn this into a conversation about achieving business outcomes faster and cheaper, rather than conversations about bits and bytes, which causes every business owner's eyes to glaze over. The cloud enables IT to change the conversation and it was unfortunate that this was rarely mentioned during the day.
4) Little mention of customers until Marc Benioff
The highlight of the day was Om Malik's interview with Marc Benioff. Marc brought not only brought his trademark humor to the event but brought a much-needed pragmatism and focus on what really matters. Customers. Marc was literally the first person all day to mention customers. He gave the room, which was largely composed of vendor marketing types, the best advice that we'll get - "Customers have been sold to by vendors for 30 years and they're tired of it. Customers want to talk to other customers and learn from them." Great advice and something we should take to heart.
In fact, we're turning that idea into action in the coming weeks when we'll start a new series of posts with our customers. If you're interested in being featured, leave us a comment below.
5) A few fun highlights of the day
Marc on Larry Ellison
Larry said something really zen on the earnings call - without on-demand, there's no on-premise and without on-premise, there's no on-demand.
Marc on Microsoft
I hear Microsoft is coming out with an Azune cloud.
and finally, Om's fly threads
Labels: IBM, Private Clouds, salesforce.com, SAP
Monday, June 15, 2009
What Force.com Free Edition & Force.com Sites Mean for the Enterprise
Balakrishna Narasimhan
The Challenge
We've written before about the benefits of moving your application portfolio to the cloud. The benefits can range from cost savings and a higher level of innovation to strategic advantage in the case of business-critical applications. With the worsening economic conditions, the maturation of companies like Salesforce and the growing drumbeat of successes at large enterprises, more and more CIOs at large enterprises want to evaluate cloud computing.
- Complexity of current IT portfolio: Any large IT organization has a plethora of custom and packaged applications, multiple databases, one or more types of middleware and lots of datacenters. Given such complex application and infrastructure portfolios, it's not clear where to start or what the right path forward is.
- Size and scope of the cloud ecosystem: The ecosystem of cloud applications, platforms and infrastructure has grown rapidly over the past few years. TripleTree research estimates that there are 2000+ SaaS applications, let alone all the platform, infrastructure and service providers.
- Confusing marketing messages and FUD: The growth and interest in cloud computing have led everyone from IBM to SAP throw their hats in the cloud ring. Each company has their own spin on cloud computing ranging from IBM's "private clouds" to Microsoft's "software + services". Since every vendor talks about cloud computing from their own perspective, it's hard to parse what it actually means to the customer.
We've worked with a number of large enterprises to build the business case for cloud computing, map their application and infrastructure portfolios, and help them chart their path to the cloud. Based on this experience, we've identified 3 things that every enterprise can do to get started on the path to the cloud.
1) Current State Assessment:
2) Opportunity Identification and Prototyping:
After developing a baseline understanding of cloud platforms and use cases, you can identify opportunities in your own portfolio. It's best to develop a long-list of opportunities (based on your pain points and priorities) and get started with a prototype. We've typically focused prototypes on areas that address an immediate pain point and are relatively self-contained. Examples range from an IT project portfolio management application (shown in the screenshots above), to a floor-level manufacturing capacity management application to a Gmail or Salesforce pilot.
Prototypes are critical to demonstrate the impact of cloud computing. We can talk about the benefits of cloud computing, but it's completely different to experience it in your organization. Whether it's the speed and ease of development on Force.com or the search experience in Gmail, experiencing the benefits first-hand creates significant excitement and drives momentum.
3) Roadmap and Impact
The final step is prioritizing the long-list of opportunities. We've typically done this by looking at the risk and reward associated with each opportunity and then sequencing the projects based on your appetite for risk and financial objectives. Turning the roadmap into reality will require a solid business case as well as a change plan for your organization. Prototypes go a long way toward demonstrating the benefits and can be used as real-life data points to support the business case. This makes the business case far more impactful than if it's based on academic assumptions.
Cloud computing is a significant mindset and skill shift within IT and more broadly within your business. To ensure success, it's critical to develop a communication and change plan, as well as a training program for your staff. When this is done well, we've seen IT teams energized and excited about the possibilities. Unlike traditional models like outsourcing, cloud platforms help IT teams get closer to the business, so there's plenty to get excited about.
Getting Started
Force.com Free Edition and Force.com Sites make it easy for companies to get started building applications in the cloud. We're excited to offer "Day in the Cloud" workshops to help accelerate this process. These 1-2 day workshops help you accelerate the cloud portfolio mapping process and quickly realize the benefits of cloud computing - quantifiable ROI, rapid time-to-value and innovation that drives the business.
Please email us at cloud@appirio.com or contact us with any questions about getting stated with cloud computing. We look forward to hearing from you!
Labels: Cloud Computing, Force.com, salesforce.com
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Dave Orrico
 Read the Press Release On Dave Orrico and Jim Emerich Joining Appirio Leadership | Over the last 20+ years I have had the privilege of helping sell and deliver technology to many fantastic companies. When I first joined salesforce.com, I knew something was different. SaaS (which is quickly morphing into cloud computing) was something much more than just another technology change. It was a new model that forced a renewed focus on customer service and once again put the customer (not the vendor) at the center of value. Nearly six years have passed since then, in which I had the opportunity to interact with leaders at many of salesforce's most strategic accounts - Dell, ADP, Bank of America, Cisco, Citibank and many others. The business benefits we were delivering to these companies were remarkable when contrasted with the legacy alternatives, but I was even more struck by how the SaaS model made it so much easier to align a company around serving the customer. Because we earned the customer's business through subscriptions (vs. big up front licenses), I never had to fight uphill internally for my customer's best interest. |
The market is finally starting to see something that Marc (Benioff) has been saying for some time - that salesforce.com's success is about more than it being a great company. In fact, it's the fundamental advantages of cloud computing for both the vendor and the customer that have allowed it to prosper. Google Apps, Amazon Web Services, even Facebook are using those same core tenets to expand their services to the largest companies in the world.
We've reached the tipping point. It's becoming clear that most companies will eventually shift to this new model, and this is what made Appirio such an exciting opportunity for me. Here is a company focused from its inception on answering not "if people will make the switch to the cloud", but "how can we help them get there." While at salesforce.com, I admired Appirio's passion and commitment to cloud computing; and their focus on building trusted advisor relationships with both their partners and their customers.
I joined Appirio to help accelerate this transformation to the cloud and to create a new breed of company that could pragmatically answer customers' tough questions on how they can get there (benefits of the cloud). I truly believe we are at a transformational point in the evolution of IT; analogous to the change and benefits that the Internet brought to us as individuals. The Internet has had a profound impact on the the way we find things, shop, create and even interact. Cloud computing can have the same level of impact on business. I want Appirio to be your trusted advisor in your journey to the cloud, and help unshackle your entire business from the constraints of the past.
Labels: appirio, Cloud Computing, salesforce.com
Monday, February 02, 2009
In a world that is more interconnected than ever and that offers more information than people can actually consume, the commercial value of 'friendship' and word of mouth referrals is at an all time high. This is why LinkedIn has become such a boon to recruiters looking to fill open job positions. Why enterprises are investing in social software both inside and outside company walls. And why recent PEW research shows an increasing number of adults choosing to join Facebook, which is already up to 150 million users and growing every day.
Over the past two years, Facebook has become the medium for keeping large networks of people up-to-date on your life. Facebook is a different animal than LinkedIn, where user profiles are mainly updated only when someone is looking for a job change. On Facebook, contacts are kept up-to-date on your life by default - the events you're going to, what you're reading, your personal and professional interests and more. This, combined with a more open approach to interfacing with other applications, ultimately makes Facebook a better opportunity for companies looking to tap into the value of these networks to hire new employees, spread the word about new offers, build brands or solidify relationships.
HOWEVER, there must be a careful balance in tapping into the commercial value of a friendship. In the physical world, we are appreciative when a friend recommends a potential career connection, a valuable discount, or a product they think you might like. Yet we can feel repulsed when we know someone is using the guise of friendship just to try to get something out of us. Interacting with online social networks requires preserving the same level of trust and integrity.
That's why when Appirio created our Referral Management Solution, we had two key prerequisites: to maintain the trust inherent in these social networks and to provide relevant value to users (as well as companies). This is why we designed our solution to:
- Give the user full control over every decision to make a referral. The user decides whether to install the application and when to act on recommendations that the app surfaces in Facebook. This SlideShare presentation on the solution describes in more detail how this works.
- Encourage people to make referrals because they make sense, not simply for the reward. The application helps make recommendations that are most relevant to your friends. After all, it's the quality of the product, service or offering that will ultimately determine how often it's referred and who chooses to act on it.
For these types of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns to work, we also believe it's important for companies to have a way to manage and measure the effectiveness of their approach. Our new solution looks to address this issue by providing the ability to understand how your users talk about your product through recommendations, and offering native integration to back-end enterprise systems so companies can quantitatively measure the effectiveness of these campaigns.
We hope Appirio's Referral Management Solution can help people find jobs, learn about products and services their friends love, and allow companies to listen better to their customers, partners and employees. After all, those attributes are as timeless as the value of friendship itself.
Labels: appirio, facebook, LinkedIn, salesforce.com
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Gartner Says SaaS is Taking Off!
The Stats - Accelerating Adoption
According to Gartner, 90%+ of enterprises expect to maintain or increase their investments in SaaS. Even more interesting, ~40% of the organizations that Gartner surveyed are changing their IT environments completely from on-premise to cloud-based solutions. This end-user trend is reflected in the tepid financial performance of the SAPs and Intuits of the world while Salesforce, Concur, Taleo and others continue to grow at 40%+ (Ray Wang has an excellent analysis of this here).
The Business Drivers - Lower TCO while Increasing Flexibility and Innovation
We believe strongly that 2008 represented an inflection point in the adoption of cloud computing in large enterprises. This trend has only accelerated with the current financial conditions. As Nick Carr has observed, on-premise architectures are inherently wasteful (80% of server capacity, 65% of storage capacity are unused) and represent a fantastic opportunity for savings. However, the benefits of SaaS and cloud computing go far beyond savings alone. The "black magic" of SaaS is that companies can reduce TCO while increasing flexibility and innovation.
At Appirio, we experience this every day. We have a completely server-less internal architecture which has enabled us keep our IT costs at <2% of our revenues while scaling smoothly from 20 employees a year ago to nearly a hundred employees today. In addition, we have access to new innovations instantly. For example, a few weeks ago, Google rolled out video messaging in Gmail. Since we use Google apps within our domain, we had access to significantly enhanced functionality from one day to the next with no added cost or administrative overhead. Almost unimaginable in the traditional software world!
Our Prediction - Large Enterprises will Migrate Much More than Mail and CRM to the Cloud
SaaS is past the trial phase in many enterprises. Gartner notes that 40% of enterprises have 3+ years of experience with SaaS platforms. Companies have now experienced for themselves the benefits of SaaS within specific areas like CRM or messaging. We're seeing within our client base that companies are ready for a more holistic cloud computing strategy. We're increasingly working with large enterprises to quickly map their portfolios and develop roadmaps for large-scale migration to the cloud. Happy to see that Gartner agrees that this trend will accelerate in 2009!
Labels: appirio, cio, Cloud Computing, CloudComputing, Innovation, SaaS, salesforce.com, Software as a Service
Monday, December 08, 2008
Force.com for Google App Engine: Apps "Native" to a Cloud Community
2. Force.com checkout is a natural extension of Salesforce's strategy to encourage "Native" Apps. Salesforce rightly argues that there’s something unique about applications that run entirely on Force.com. Force.com is a powerful, trusted platform, and there’s a confidence that customers can have in applications that rely on that technology. That’s why Appirio has built dozens of custom applications for our customers entirely on Force.com, offers several 100% native apps, and strives to have all of our products that interact with Salesforce run native functionality.
Here's the power of the Salesforce platform strategy: Salesforce customers can now have the best of both worlds. Salesforce is combining the strengths of multiple, complementary, on-demand platforms, delivered through applications that customers can trust.
- Force.com excels at modeling business processes, workflow and UI
- Google excels at scalable, consumer-focused applications that extend its strengths in communication, collaboration, search, and advertising
- Amazon excels at highly scalable low-level computing power and storage
- Facebook excels at viral applications that leverage a user’s social graph and its community of 120M+ participants
Labels: Amazon Web Services, AppExchange, Cloud Computing, facebook, Force.com, Google, Google Apps, Microsoft Azure, On Demand, PaaS, SaaS, salesforce.com
Monday, November 03, 2008
Narinder Singh
In today's keynote and as reported recently, salesforce.com released the capability to create and run web based apps available to those outside of your company. There were a ton of cool demonstrations shown today and we built many of them (Harrah's, Facebook). We'll highlight those in our Dreamforce Central Blog, but we want to focus on a more subtle point - the rate of innovation and the pace at which it impacts customers.
1. The high rate of innovation of salesforce.com (and other cloud providers) - Two years ago it was Apex code, that allowed real business logic; last year it was Visual Force, that allowed full control over the user experience; this year they announce salesforce sites; allowing you take your apps and expose part or all of them to web users. No enterprise software vendor has come close to matching this pace over the same period of time.
2. The rate at which innovations actually impact customers - In typical on-premise software, even cool new things will require a generation to get into the hands of customers. Already 11 million of Apex Code and more than 50,000 Visual Force pages have been written by salesforce.com customers. We have used both with more than 50 enterprise customers in mission critical apps.
The fact that these two factors can occur while reducing overall IT costs at first glance seems like black magic. But this is in fact the ultimate testament to how different cloud computing is from old world and how far Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and others have to come. You can get started with trying out salesforce and getting started with a trial of all of this in 60 seconds.
How long will it take the others to match that? We have always been fans of cloud computing, but even I sit back stunned at how far the gap is between the old world and the new
Labels: Amazon Web Services, facebook, Force.com, harrah's, salesforce.com
Friday, October 31, 2008
The Time for Choice Approaches
Narinder Singh
Next week will be an important one in deciding our collective future. The impact of our choices next week on businesses will be fundamental. The Economist described that "the current economic malaise will increase the pressure on companies to become more efficient. More has to be done with less...it will also profoundly change the way people work".
The election? No-- Dreamforce, of course! The run up of announcements from Amazon, Rackspace, and now Microsoft; as well as the recent explosion of press and analyst coverage (including a 14 page article in the print version of the Economist ) have more than whet the appetite for the main event. Dreamforce, a celebration of success of the on-demand model and a foreshadowing of the future of SaaS, PaaS, Cloud Computing, is arguably the premier industry event (and the Foo Fighters are playing).
They say that the necessity is the mother of invention. So with an economy in turmoil and technology more important to businesses than ever, the prerequisites have been met. There is growing sense across leaders in the industry that traditional enterprise software is the new mainframe - a legacy that must be overcome or minimally partitioned off. In Microsoft's own announcements, Ray Ozzie passionately described, "Its (cloud computing) a transformation of our strategy." He then went on to acknowledge that the fire of innovation was driven by others: "I'd like to tip my hat to Jeff Bezos and Amazon. Across the industry, all of us will stand on their shoulders."
Whether they can become true agents of change, or if Microsoft Azure will suffer the same fate as SAP and Oracle's lackluster cloud computing strategies remains to be seen. Regardless of which outcome you predict (we think Chevron or BP just as likely to lead the green revolution) the fact is that even Microsoft is admitting the game has completely changed.
So now we come to Dreamforce - it's like the season premier for a new age in the industry (think Lost meets 24 plus American Idol) . Salesforce.com has been the pioneer in this space for the last nine years. What will they do next? We'll just say that it will be a combination of high impact innovations - the importance of which will be most appreciated by those already on the journey to the cloud. We also expect a few ripples in time to provide a glimpse of the future. Its fitting that Malcom Gladwell, the author of "Tipping Point" is one of the keynote speakers. Because we are experiencing one right now.
For those who will be there, and those that can't, we have the guide to helping you get the most out of these important moments in the history of enterprise computing - Appirio's own Dreamforce Central. Get the insiders view of whats happening on the ground at the conference - live blogs and insider commentary, twitters , instant pictures from the floor , a crazy server art exhibit , the private event for industry luminaries and much more. Whether you are in San Francisco and want the "backstage pass" or you're remote and looking to get more than just the announcements, this will be your Hitchhikers Guide to Dreamforce .
If you are coming, come see us in one of 20+ sessions Appirio and our customers are presenting in and come by our booth (#487). Mention that the blog brought you there and get ready for your own special gift....
---What's the image above all about? Find out now!---
Labels: Amazon Web Services, appirio, Dreamforce, Force.com, salesforce.com
Saturday, September 06, 2008
The "Grand Old Party" Gets the New Way of Computing
Labels: Force.com, Google Apps, salesforce.com, Software as a Service
Monday, June 23, 2008
Google and salesforce.com - Like Peanut Butter and Jelly
Jason Ouellette
Today, salesforce.com and Google announced a new toolkit to link Force.com applications to Google Apps. Now, Appirio already has five commercial applications that connect Google Apps and Salesforce.com. That's more than any other vendor, and three of our apps - Calendar Sync, CRM Dashboards, and Doc Search - rank in the top ten of all AppExchange downloads.
In the "old world" of on-premise software, this new toolkit might be viewed as a threat to Appirio's product portfolio. If any developer can now easily link up Salesforce.com and Google Apps, who needs Appirio's products?
In truth, though, we think it's great. Appirio was involved in early usage and validation of the new toolkit. We embedded it into a cool new Visualforce demo that will be shown in the keynote address of today's Tour De Force event in Santa Clara, and augmented our current product offerings with it. Our viewpoint is that basic connectivity does not, by itself, hold intrinsic value, but it's an essential ingredient in creating value.
My former employer, webMethods, made hundreds of millions of dollars essentially by connecting SAP and other ERP systems to one another, sitting on top of the basic connectivity provided by the vendors. By providing this toolkit, salesforce.com and Google will make it easier for innovators to build new and powerful business scenarios that weren't possible before.
With just a few lines of code - six, to be precise - we were able to bring Google calendar data onto a custom Visualforce page (view demo).
We're seeing lots of steps towards integrating the cloud. Salesforce orgs can now connect to one another, via S2S, announced earlier this year. Appirio connected salesforce.com with Amazon S3 via our Appirio Cloud Storage product. In the on-premise world, ubiquitous connectivity really wasn't possible. But in the SaaS world, on the Internet, information can be connected in a scalable way, allowing even small ISVs to create commercial-grade innovative solutions. We hope other vendors' SaaS platforms, either directly or through partners like Appirio, will bake in basic connectivity to one another. This lets us focus on solving problems that have vexed developers in the enterprise for years.
The rapidly increasing web of links among major SaaS vendors is starting to create a business-specific version of the "World Wide Computer" Nick Carr talks about in The Big Switch. If all of your business applications, living in the cloud, could freely collaborate, their collective intelligence would begin to outstrip what any single system could deliver.
Labels: API, GData, Google, Google Apps, salesforce.com
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Connecting the Cloud, One Contact at a Time
Ryan Nichols
Most businesses ultimately depend on personal connections. Business people would be lost if they couldn’t connect everyday with the contacts in their address book. And businesses wouldn’t function without the rich web of connections among their employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. But your company’s contact database is almost certainly incomplete. Despite periodic reminders from management to “scan those business cards” and “import those contacts,” most people can't find the time to maintain this information unless they are forced to, regardless of the benefits to the company. Your personal address book is also incomplete. Sure, you may have a rich virtual rolodex of names, mobile phones, and email addresses, but you can't see how this person is related to your business right now.
- Imagine you’re writing a casual email to reconnect with a former colleague—who happens to be in the midst of making a big purchase with another department in your company. What if you had this sort of business context at your fingertips whenever you communicated?
- Now imagine that your company’s sales reps knew about this connection as they were putting together their proposal. You would have been happy to make an introduction—if they’d only known to ask.
As with our other offerings, we’re starting with simple synchronization—you choose which of your contacts you want to share, and how you want them synchronized between your Google and Salesforce address books. This is a valuable start. Today, your Google email account automatically stores the email address of everyone you’ve ever written to, but knows nothing about their companis or roles. Your Salesforce.com contacts are detailed, but you’re missing hundreds of critical business connections. Synchronizing the two solves a real pain point that we hear from our customers today.
Contacts in Context
Sync is just the beginning. Appirio's vision is to bring the business context from all of a company’s on-demand enterprise applications into the productivity tools and social networks that individuals use as they work. We want "Solutions for Business" + "Solutions for People" to finally create "Solutions for Business People."
Contacts is the center of that vision, and sync between Google Apps and Salesforce is a great place to start. Enjoy the offering!
Labels: AppExchange, appirio, Google, Google Apps, on-demand, SaaS, SaaS integration, Salesforce for Google Apps, salesforce.com
Friday, April 18, 2008
Touring the Country with salesforce.com and Google
Narinder Singh
What an exciting week between Google and Salesforce! Let's recap with our perspective on Monday’s announcement event, and Wednesday’s Tour de Force marketing stop in New York City. A few overall observations:
- Expanding awareness: It’s clear that the market is starting to understand the power of platform as a service. Between Marc Benioff’s continuing evangelism of Force.com, Google’s campfire event in Mountain View to launch their AppEngine, and all the discussion this week about bringing Salesforce and Google together, companies are starting to think more broadly about how to combine the capabilities of Salesforce and Google. In our conversations with customers this week, there was more excitement than ever about the types of applications that are now possible.
- Expanding vision: The broader idea that’s starting to emerge from all these conversations is a vision for a new generation of applications that are now possible in the space between structured business applications like CRM, and completely unstructured business activity like email. This is a theme Google CEO Eric Schmidt touched on Monday that we’ll be returning to on this blog frequently.
- Role of partners: The importance the partners of Salesforce and Google to help customers make the most of these capabilities is becoming increasingly clear. A proof point is the role played by that partners in Monday’s Google announcement, and in the Tour de Force events. Salesforce and Google relied on their partner ecosystem to provide so much of the functionality powering Salesforce for Google Apps. This is a tremendous vote of confidence.
Much of the positioning around the announcement has been as a "Dream Come True." We agree! And we look forward to working with our customers and partners to make all this a reality in your enterprise. Until then, enjoy the sweets from Monday's announcement (below).
Labels: force, Google, Salesforce for Google Apps, salesforce.com, Tour De Force
Monday, April 07, 2008
What Do You Get When You Cross Salesforce.com and Amazon S3?
Narinder Singh
You get Appirio Cloud Storage for Salesforce.com, a new SaaS offering from Appirio that taps Amazon S3 to extend the storage capabilities of Salesforce.com. (We toyed with calling it SalAmaForce3 but didn't really see that flying.)
Appirio Cloud Storage [press release] lets Salesforce.com users store more documents and larger size files - such as customer support logs, software patches or video presentations - directly through the Salesforce.com interface, at a fraction of the price of existing storage solutions. The new SaaS offering creates a secure integration with the Amazon.com utility storage service and provides the ability to store documents up to 1GB in size (200x current limits).
Feedback from our beta users shows that is has the potential to reduce existing Salesforce.com storage costs by over 80 percent while enabling them to get more mileage out of their on-demand applications. The service, available in three levels of monthly web-based pricing, can be purchased today on AppExchange or on www.appirio.com.
Connecting the Clouds: A Sign of More to Come
We're excited not only about the service itself, but also what it represents. It shows where the industry as a whole can head - as the platforms mature, there is a substantial opportunity for ISVs to tie together the different clouds and provide offerings that extend and fill in the platforms themselves. In traditional enterprise application integration (EAI), packaged integrations were difficult to commercialize. The permutation of versions and customizations created and "n times n" problem, making it too expensive to create something "packaged" that appealed to more than a very small number of customers. But in the cloud, because SaaS providers commit to stable interfaces - Salesforce has maintained backwards compatability for more than a dozen revisions of its API - "integrating the cloud" can become a new class of solution.
Today's platforms will continue to evolve, and innovative companies will find new ways to bring them together. Appirio Cloud Storage is only one of the many products that Appirio will be offering in this camp over the coming year. Stay tuned!
Photo credit: MaxChu on Flickr
Labels: Amazon S3, appirio, Elastic Cloud Computing, Force.com, on-demand storage, SaaS integration, salesforce.com
Thursday, March 20, 2008
What Do Open Source and On-Demand Have in Common?
Chris Barbin
What Do Open Source and On-Demand Have in Common?
They both keep Steve Ballmer awake at night? Nope, too easy. They both changed the game in enterprise software? True. But the most interesting answer is "community" - they are both driven, and advanced by, the power of the community that surrounds them.
This power was one of the topics raised at this year's Dow Jones Web Ventures conference held earlier this week, where Appirio joined Vauhini Vara of the Wall Street Journal and Salesforce.com president Steve Cakebread onstage.
(Interesting side note: Steve Cakebread is not only president and Chief Strategy Officer at Salesforce.com, but also a Salesforce.com user, and the system administrator at his family's well known wine business - Cakebread Cellars. It's a testament to the simplicity of Salesforce.com that the same platform can serve both a 60,000 person company like Japan Post, as well as a 50-person SMB shop like Cakebread Cellars.)
We joined Steve and Vauhini onstage to discuss how we're using the Force.com platform to create custom SaaS applications for enterprises like Dolby Laboratories and CRC Healthcare. The questions during Q&A focused mostly on core topics - about a potential recession, whether hybrid vendors like Oracle and Microsoft will succeed in on-demand, why Salesforce is betting on the platform play versus offering more applications, etc.
One of the most interesting questions - the one prompting this blog - came from an audience member who asked, "How does Salesforce take user feedback into consideration when developing their platform?"
Steve said that Salesforce.com is giving the community - users, partners, customers, prospects, developers - a public forum where they can share their ideas and suggestions and implementing a process to take action. Salesforce has created an on-demand product called Ideas to create this forum that turns ideas into action. It ranks the most requested suggestions, which they then incorporate into their own product development. They also use it to encourages their partner community, including vendors like Appirio, to address the other ideas that don't make it into their own development cycle. Salesforce Ideas is now being implemented at other companies, like Dell and Starbucks.
This illustrates a fundamental shift in how product development, IT and enterprise software organizations operate now. Taking a page from the open source model, smart companies like Salesforce.com, Amazon and Dell are tapping into the community to drive innovation internally. The Internet has given them the means of collaboration. Each of these companies focuses on transparency, openness and getting rid of the "not invented here" syndrome.
We like to say here at Appirio that you have two ears and one mouth for a reason - you have to listen to your customers if you're going to win and keep them. It's nice to see that we're in agreement with the leaders in our industry.
Labels: IDeaS, on-demand, open source, SaaS, salesforce.com, Software as a Service, VC
Monday, March 03, 2008
Insights and Observations from the Pacific Crest On-Demand Conference
Narinder Singh
Last Thursday we had the pleasure of participating in the 3rd Annual Pacific Crest On-Demand Conference, the kickoff to Pacific Crest's Emerging Technology Summit. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff invited us on stage during his keynote to illustrate how partners can harness the power of the Force.com platform, Visualforce and the AppExchange.
The participating companies covered the spectrum from large on-premise software companies such as EMC and SAP, who were describing their expansion into the newest "hot" market, to companies such as NetSuite, Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors that have built their business from the ground up with Software as a Service.
Interestingly, a number of companies there are in the process of trying to radically shift their business model from on-premise to on-demand, and they talked about the challenges. Most of these companies were small and nimble, which enabled them to make the transition cold-turkey. All were very clear that it wasn't an easy switch to make.
Can Companies Have Their SaaS Cake and Eat It Too?
Can companies successfully split their focus between traditional software and on-demand services?
This is a question we've been raising, skeptically, for quite some time in our blog. Our original Services 2.0 position paper in April 2007 described how the disruptive effects of SaaS will impact the economic models of on-premise software vendors. After a year of additional information and insight, it's even more apparent that treating SaaS as just another channel or product feature is a recipe for failure.
Spending a day with companies that have, or are attempting to make the switch from on-premise to SaaS reinforced the major challenges. IDeaS CEO Ed Booth gave a great presentation highlighting the challenges and upside of moving to an on-demand model. Concur Technologies has often been referenced as the best example of a company that successfully made the transition. Some issues raised by them and others included:
- One-time revenue hit: How do you manage through the decline in revenue growth when you move from an up-front license model to a monthly subscription model? With Wall Street and shareholders as panicky as they are today, this is a very difficult proposition for large public companies. Upfront licensing, even with longer term contracts, can drop by as much as 75%. As the Patricia Seybold Group has noted, As a company moves from perpetual licensing - where customers pay a relatively large, one-time licensing fee - to SaaS - where customers pay a relatively small, monthly license fee - financial performance slips in the short-term."
- Internal channel conflict: How do you manage the channel conflict that happens with your own partners, and even your own sales force, when offering both traditional license and on-demand software? Companies like EMC, with established business units focused on driving demand for SaaS or cloud computing, will have a serious challenge with this. The most reliable solution is to completely separate the businesses - which eliminates any synergy of having both models in the same company.
- Shifting to a "month by month" culture: How do you change the way you sell to and support customers when you have to earn their business every month instead instead of every few years when the next big version comes along? This is a huge cultural change for sales and support teams to make. SaaS companies require the culture of the web - where sites like eBay, Amazon, Google and others constantly monitor, serve and improve their customer's experience.
- Speeding up R&D: How do you adapt your product development processes to deliver an on-demand service? Successful on-demand vendors get the benefit of releasing new features quarterly, not every two or three years. When features are released, they are expected to work with other systems indefinitely. Salesforce.com still supports each of its 12 versions of its API. How many on-premise vendors can claim anything even close?
EMC, SAP, Microsoft and Oracle make it clear to customers and stockholders that their foray into SaaS or cloud computing is not a departure from their software strategies, but an expansion of it. They say things like "SaaS is just another delivery model," or "we're giving customers a choice." Yet they keep increasing the on-premise maintenance fees. SAP just increased its maintenance rate from 17% to 22% per year - an increase of 30%! This leads to one of two possible conclusions:
- The cost of supporting a growing legacy of capabilities keeps increasing, which eliminates the benefits of on-premise scale. Compare this to any internet company, where increased scale lowers cost and results in expanded services for customers.
- They are taking advantage of customers' inability to easily switch off of their on-premise software.
Traditional software companies - especially large ones - will certainly have to straddle the fence for a while. Yet the doubletalk and denial will not help in the transition. First, they must acknowledge the need to make a transition. Second, in many cases, dramatic actions, like separating SaaS products into completely independent business units or taking companies private to allow for transition, will be needed to make the change. It's likely that legacy companies will not switch until customers stop tolerating increasing TCO and diminishing innovation from their on-premise systems.
Labels: AppExchange, Concur Technologies, EMC, Force.com, IDeaS, on-demand, Pacific Crest, SaaS, salesforce.com, SAP, software-as-a-service
Monday, February 25, 2008
Adobe and Salesforce - A Fine Blend of Art and Science
Chris Barbin
Application development is a unique combination of art and science. Today’s announcement from Salesforce.com and Adobe introducing the free Adobe Developer Toolkit for Force.com is a good example - combining Adobe’s deep understanding of design with Salesforce's powerful platform-as-as-service model so developers can build innovative and visually appealing on-demand applications.
The Adobe Developer Toolkit is a new set of tools and services that streamline the process of creating customized rich user interfaces for delivery via the web. It allows developers to create on-demand applications that work without an Internet connection. The toolkit connects Adobe’s Flex and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), two of the leading rich internet application (RIA) environments, with Salesforce's Force.com platform. This gives Flex developers access to the Force.com web services APIs, so they can make data in a Force.com database available offline.
CIOs and development organizations need to deliver users a wider set of on-demand applications that require very rich client interfaces and/or offline functionality. These have traditionally been two of the biggest challenges for developers of on-demand applications.
Appirio has been an early adopter of various front end on-demand development paradigms, including Adobe Flex and Visual Force. We use these technologies in a number of ways, for example:
- To create user interfaces for call centers - where a high volume of calls means that saving a few clicks can add up to thousands of hours a year
- To develop interfaces for the iPhone - where the user expects a very specific interaction style that works the same as other applications
- To design custom applications for a very specific purpose - like the cinema management application we have written about previously
- Even to create applications for our own internal use (yes, we eat our own dog food here) such as our Professional Services Automation (PSA) application
The Appirio Professional Services Automation (PSA) application enables professional services organizations to track, manage and reconcile a large collection of projects. Appirio originally developed the PSA application to visualize and manage our various projects, resources, timelines, skills and assignments, and at the time there was not a native Force.com application available on AppExchange that offered these capabilities. While you could use Force.com to manage the respective data, workflows and reports, Flex was what enabled us to create a single visual interface that could both increase individual user productivity and provide clear visibility into the status of projects.
This Flex-based scheduling tool brings our PSA, which is built entirely on the Force.com platform, close to functional par with pure-play on-demand PSA vendors at a fraction of the price. This neat little component (shown below) lets managers drag-and-drop projects, lay out an entire consulting team's assignments on a single color-coded grid, and double-click to drill down for more details. This makes consulting managers more productive - and smarter. If the result is just an increase of a few percentage points in utilization, the financial payback will be dramatic.
Here are a few screenshots of the Appirio PSA application and our Salesforce interface on the iPhone. For those interested in participating in the current beta program for our PSA application, please contact us at beta@appirio.com.
Screenshot #1: This is a high-level view of our PSA application, which lays out the entire consulting team's assignments on a single color-coded grid.
Screenshot #2: This view of the PSA application shows how individuals and managers can double-click to drill down for more detail.
Screenshot #3: Example of a Visual Force application on the iPhone showing the apartment floor plan for a real estate agent.
Labels: Adobe Flex, appirio, Force.com, iPhone, on-demand, Professional Services Automation, SaaS, salesforce.com
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Where in the World is Appirio?
While I would like to claim that the reason this blog hasn’t been updated since September is because the entire company has been out of the office solving world hunger, that isn’t exactly true.
However, we have been busy. Over the last few months we’ve been working with our customers on many exciting initiatives to accelerate on-demand in the enterprise by capitalizing on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms that have now emerged from the likes of Salesforce.com, Google and Amazon.com. While these projects may be less awe-inspiring than actually addressing the issue of world hunger, they reflect that on-demand has become an option for both enterprise applications and general application "infrastructure."
Dolby Laboratories Taps SaaS to Arm Customer Service Reps and Enter a New Market
The proof of concept highlights the power of development-as-a-service, as well as the potential of SaaS platforms like Force.com. Appirio and Dolby Laboratories brought together the flexibility and lower overhead of on-demand software with the value of leveraging existing IT investments to show how to lower costs and adapt systems more quickly and easily.
The entire proof of concept took less than a week to design, develop, create and test. Using legacy on-premise platforms, it would have easily taken that long to get the hardware / software / network / security setup so we could begin – not to mention the effort to configure the database, create the logic and workflows, integrate it with external internet service and actually design and build out the user experience.
This is just one example of the interesting and innovative things we’ve been working on during these months of silence. In future pieces we’ll describe how to take advantage of on-demand applications and align them with emerging SaaS platforms to create an overall SaaS strategy for the enterprise.
Image from the Dolby Laboratories prototype created with Visual Force
Labels: appirio, salesforce, salesforce.com
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Understanding the Difference between On-Premise and On-Demand Software
It’s difficult to touch, feel or smell enterprise software. It in a package, but definitely not one that has a bar code and a price on it. When we ask "what does it do," we’re asked in return "what do we need it to do?" Sometimes, the same question applies when one asks "how much does it cost." This sales approach, combined with zero marginal cost for the provider, results in the software industry being fraught with idiosyncrasies. In such an industry, one of the tools all of us use to understand the ethereal notion of enterprise software is the analogy. While analogies can never prove a point, they help frame our view and make software more concrete in our minds.
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Below we have taken a look at some of our favorite (hopefully humorous) analogies for On-Demand and On-Premise software. Yet there is a more serious point - your approach to solving business problems with technology is often about how you frame the question.
The past several years on-demand software has empowered line of business owners to sucessfully deploy siloed applications. Yet for CIOs, today the question is not how you wrestle back control, but how to embrace on-demand, allow lines of business to pursue their efforts, and manage the overall adoption of the technology in the business.
With that, we hope you enjoy some of our favorite entertaining analogies that frame the difference between on-demand and on-premise. In addition, we welcome you to add to our list.
Enterprises choosing on-premise software are like teenagers getting married. It’s not what you thought it was going to be, there are all sorts of unexpected costs and divorce (think "upgrades" or "migrations") are both painful and inevitable. That’s why teenagers should focus on dating (on-demand)?
People try to compare on-Premise and on-demand to buying vs. leasing a car - as if either preference were equally valid. This analogy would be true if, when buying a car, you needed to take a special class that cost twice the price of the car, and every 3-4 years the car's engine would require rebuilding while in motion; while when leasing a car, gas and insurance were included.
But isn’t it true that at some scale, its just more cost effective to buy software and manage it yourself? Sure, I think that was right under the headline of Wal-mart buying old nuclear reactors to provide power to their stores.
Long term contracts, uncertain performance and costly upgrades? Hmmmm, you're talking about either on-premise software, or the New York Knicks.
Security, quality control, our large size, the need to customize things for our unique needs and the cost of buying things each month… those are the top reasons for using on-premise software... or deciding to buy seeds and grow all our own food.
Labels: on-demand, SaaS, salesforce.com, Software
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
IT Management & Governance In an On-Demand Model
The IT landscape for Salesforce.com customers is quickly growing complex. With over 400 applications on the AppExchange today – with projections of 1,000 by late 2007 – and the upcoming Winter '07 release and the Apex programming language, sound IT management and governance practices are essential. In the past, a single application such as SFA or Service & Support was manageable for a line-of-business leader or an aspiring IT professional. They could gather requirements, build a business case, sell internally and then implement. With the increasingly complex platform now offered by Salesforce.com, where customers have access to applications, extensions, API’s, partners and the platform itself, determining the tradeoffs among building, buying, and partnering requires a thoughtful and collaborative approach among the business, IT, and the Salesforce.com community.
Some Appirio customers have recently completed extensive application and server rationalization exercises as part of the launch of an on-demand strategy. Inventory analysis is a great first step towards on-demand portfolio management, and uncovers a number of obvious opportunities to migrate on-premise applications to the on-demand model. Many traditional project and portfolio management principles apply, but in the on-demand world there are four key strategies for CIO’s to apply:
- Centralize the Approval Process. All new IT project requests should flow through a single, cross-functional, company-wide approval process with common selection criteria. In the past, on-demand software vendors have thrived by working around traditional IT, which creates redundant projects, additional costs, and inefficient use of resources. Under this decentralized model, many departments (often including IT) are finding, promoting, and implementing siloed on-demand applications that solve a specific problem for that particular department, but perpetuate vendor bloat, cost creep and integration headaches. Further, many existing Salesforce.com customers and their IT departments may not be aware of the capabilities and benefits of the AppExchange platform. To take advantage of the benefits of a true on-demand platform, CIOs must have the business, IT, Salesforce.com teams in sync. The CIO should be aware of all projects currently in queue, and knowledgeable of the end-to-end platform capabilities. This linkage is essential to driving adoption, integrating the user experience, ensuring corporate buy-in, and keeping costs down.
- Apply Early Adopter Factors. Let’s face it, we are in “early adopter” territory: standardizing an on-demand platform for a company with thousands of users, hundreds of legacy applications, complex business models and an “on-premise” mentality.. Along with the benefits of the on-demand model, there are inherent risks, with few end-to-end enterprise class success stories today. The development methodologies and assets are far from mature, and for every ten integration challenges, there are twenty solutions presented. Based on the evolving nature of on-demand platforms and applications, CIOs are well advised to estimate timelines somewhat longer than rollouts of a single application, and to anticipate increased costs associated with training, development, integration and data cleansing and migration.
- Keep Up with the Upgrade Roadmap and Partner Ecosystem. Remember that when you use on-demand vendors, your software is automatically upgraded with each new release. New partners and applications appear on the AppExchange every day. In short order, enterprise customers can expect features that they were planning on building to show up in new releases, and will notice applications that they were expecting to buy to show up on the AppExchange or other marketplaces. CIOs making the platform decision should demand early visibility not only into traditional product roadmaps, but also ISV and SI applications. Specifically, power users and CIOs should find out which applications are actually being used - particularly in large deployments of more than 1,000 seats - and how they are scaling in terms of volume, security, integration, and usability. This information, and the ability to talk directly with other companies making similar investments, will have a direct impact on a CIO’s make, buy, or partner decisions.
- Salesforce.com is Not Just for Sales. Education, awareness, and sponsorship are critical. While it seems obvious to those of us who ”get” on-demand vendors like Salesforce.com, most executives, functional leaders, and even salespeople, do not understand the future direction and capabilities of the AppExchange platform. The notion of building an application development platform using an on-demand model is new for most people, and it takes awhile to fully appreciate the profoundness of this change for typical IT operations. To really drive platform adoption across the enterprise, the executive team needs to consistently educate and drive awareness thru sponsorship and active, visible pilots that demonstrate value to end users and the business.
Labels: AppExchange, appirio, cio, on-demand, SaaS, salesforce, salesforce.com
