Thursday, July 03, 2008
Who is “fit” to provide enterprise apps?
Narinder Singh
The SaaS blogosphere has been abuzz these last couple of days discussing Sergey Solyanik’s assessment that Google’s culture is “not fit” for enterprise apps. We’ll say up front that Appirio runs our internal communication and collaboration using Google Apps, and have helped customers big and small do the same. We have been highly impressed with the quality, reliability, and rate of innovation in these tools, admire and respect the culture that created them, and have no hesitation calling them “enterprise ready.”
But we think that with all this talk about Google’s corporate culture, people are missing the real point—the culture of today’s traditional on-premise technology vendors is no longer “enterprise ready.”
Let me explain-- we believe that there is a cultural mismatch between the needs of today’s businesses and the cultures of traditional on-premise technology providers:
Today’s business needs agility, the culture of enterprise technology is anything but. As the global pace of change accelerates, business leaders need their IT staff and SI/ISV partners to be saying a lot more “yes” and a lot less “no.” It is no longer acceptable for an IT partner to make vague promises about a release 3 years out. When a CIO asked Hasso Plattner at the Churchill Club’s SaaS debate when he should move to SAP’s SaaS solutions, he was told to check back in “5 years, at least.” Is that what it means to have an “enterprise ready” culture?
Today’s business needs openness, the culture of enterprise technology is anything but. Traditional enterprise vendors have in their very DNA the idea that openness is dangerous to their business models. Businesses in all industries have accepted the notion of core vs. context—you focus on what you are good at and rely on seamless connections with a network of partners to provide the rest of your solution. Ironically, traditional enterprise software is one of the last industries to embrace this change. One of Hasso Plattner’s key lessons from SAP’s ill-fated experiment with SaaS is that “what is inside the system has to have a coverage level which is close to 100 percent,” he says. Openness will be there in name only—the intention is that everything you need is inside the system. Such a system has never existed, and never will. Is this what it means to have an “enterprise ready” culture?
So what does it mean to have an “enterprise-ready” culture? Of course, every traditional enterprise vendor wants to be agile and open, and many have made admirable strides in that direction, including SAP through its Developer Community and eSOA initiatives. And there is much more required to deliver enterprise solutions than agility and openness. There are the table stakes of reliability, security, and having a solution that meets a real business need. But today’s business requires IT partners with a culture that can do both-- be deeply rooted in agility and openness while delivering reliability, security, and business value. We think that Google and salesforce.com, the leaders in on-demand, have achieved this goal: Salesforce offers both trust.salesforce.com AND ideas.salesforce.com. Google offers highly innovative applications that scale like no traditional enterprise application will ever be able to.
But whether or not you agree with us that Google’s corporate culture is “enterprise ready," the real point is that its traditional on-premise competitors are most certainly not.
Labels: BusinessModels, Google, salesforce, SAP, Software, Software as a Service
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Google and salesforce.com : Solutions for business, meet solutions for businesspeople
Ryan Nichols
Salesforce, meet Google Apps… this is an introduction we’re happy to make and an occasion we are excited to be a part of. As the first partner of both Google Enterprise and salesforce.com, Appirio is excited to see these two leaders in on-demand solutions come together to change the way that business is done.
Salesforce has revolutionized software for business. Their on-demand solutions for business have changed what it means to develop, deploy, customize, and use a business solution. Google has revolutionized software for business people. Their on-demand solutions for business people have un-chained us from our desktop productivity applications and changed the way that business people interact with information and with each other.
The technology of their joint offering is exciting enough: Use Gmail and Gtalk directly from Salesforce. Find and add Google Docs as you work in Salesforce. Synchronize your Google Calendar and your Salesforce Calendar. Create Google Gadgets from your CRM data. We’ve been working closely with our partners at salesforce.com and Google to make much of this possible.
But what gets us excited is how we plan on using this technology to impact the business of our customers. Bringing Salesforce and Google Apps together solves one of the biggest pain points companies have today—the gap between the tools that businesses need to run and the tools that people use to work.
Businesses suffer when the tools that support these two types of activities aren’t connected. First, of course, is the cost in productivity and efficiency—everyone has experienced how much time is wasted copying, pasting, importing, exporting, and plain old retyping to bridge these different tool sets.
But the real cost is misalignment. When the communication and collaboration of business people occurs without the context of business information, or when a business process occurs without the context of communication and collaboration, the outcome is certain: poor decisions, poorly executed.
Traditional enterprise software companies have failed to bridge this gap. The excitement around each new announcement between a traditional provider of solutions for business (e.g., SAP) and a traditional provider of solutions for business people (e.g., Microsoft) quickly fades to disappointment and failed expectations. This failure is inevitable because on-premise software is too inflexible to bridge this gap. The simple fact that enterprises would have to spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade to recent versions of SAP and Microsoft before thinking about joint solutions dooms the effort.
On-Demand changes all of this...again.
Today’s announcement and the future
On-demand solutions offer the potential to finally the bridge the gap between the tools that businesses need to run and the tools that people use to get things done. That’s what makes today’s announcement so exciting. Building on the platform salesforce and Google are providing, Appirio is delivering four new products that allow Salesforce and Google users to easily synchronize calendars, collaborate on marketing campaigns, find and embed documents, and create and share customized CRM dashboards. In addition, we have expanded our services for Google and salesforce customers to leverage these new offerings.
At Appirio, we’re already using Google and Salesforce together to change how our customers do business:
- Helping account teams collaborate in the context of their customer information in Google Documents and Sites
- Helping marketing teams coordinate their campaign timelines using Google Calendar
- Helping service and support teams leverage a knowledge base of their collective experience, captured in Google Documents and Sites
Over the past several months, we have helped numerous customers, including salesforce.com, benefit from Google Apps. Creating products and services to bring Google and Salesforce together in the enterprise provides Appirio a unique perspective. We believe that on-demand offers a way for providers like salesforce.com, Google, and Appirio to create compelling solutions for customers that cannot be matched by the rigidity of the on-premise approach. While this future may take time to reach all parts of the market, we believe it is inevitable and every enterprise needs to find a path to that future. We look forward to doing our part to help....
Labels: Google Apps, SaaS, salesforce, Salesforce for Google Apps
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 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 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 prototype created with Visual Force
Labels: appirio, salesforce, salesforce.com
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