Robert Scoble interviewed salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff in a broad ranging discussion about the future of applications and platforms. It’s an interesting and insightful interview. Key takeouts and themes were;
It’s not about the browser, it’s about the network. With a move to mobile and other non PC devices, platforms that can serve device agnostic data will win
SFDC is now over $1bill revenue and most recent quarter showed 50% growth
Benioff lambasts the incumbent ISVs in particular, saying many times that they block innovation
This Monday a major announcement will be made regarding a Google/salesforce partnership in terms of platform sharing
In an interesting exchange, Scoble asks Benioff how one changes the thinking of people mired in Windows 2000 and the Word/Excel/Powerpoint world. Benioff uses the example of when he started at Oracle 20 years ago and CIOs were reluctant to use Oracle, wedded as the were to the DEC incumbent offerings Benioff gave this excellent quote;
In this industry we tend to overestimate what we can achieve in a year but underestimate what we can achieve in a decade
A great interview and an insight into the thinking of one of the earliest SaaS disrupters. Check out the full video here.
Last week at Dreamforce Europe 08 Coda Group launched Coda2Go - an SaaS accounting application that runs on the Force.com platform.
In their press release they note:
Powerful international on-demand accounting application from one of Europe’s leading financial systems providers
Biggest ever development project on Force.com Platform-as-a-Service
First accounting application designed from inception to integrate with Salesforce CRM applications
It’s certainly the biggest Force.com app I’ve seen, most of which to date have been feature add-ons for Salesforce.com rather than full blown applications in their own right.
Release 1 of Coda2Go is called Opportunity to Cash and continues Salesforce’s process which ends at converted opportunities and carries on through credit management, invoicing, accounts receivable, ageing and collections, and cash allocation.
One of the advantages which I haven’t seen mentioned is the ability to extend the app and potentially integrate with other Force.com apps you use. But the biggest drawback seems to be the price. Initial pricing is a whopping $125 per user per month. Their target market however is customers who are already willing to pay a healthy price for Salesforce.com itself.
At the moment I’ll put Coda2Go in the keep an eye on category but I’m sticking with Xero for now.
I love this - at the Salesforce.com mega conference in London, Marc Beniof stated that;
We think Web 3.0 is now upon us. It’s the era of platforms….New platforms are coming right out of the cloud. It’s time to make a choice. You can continue to build your applications in the software model or you can move your applications to the new model of cloud computing. There is a new way to build your applications.
Now I’m firmly in the camp that says it’s inconsequential (and a waste of time) spending time defining exactly what web 1.0 2.0 and 3.0 really are, but it’s interesting that Beniof believes PaaS to be quite so game changing. I have to say that salesforce’s own PaaS offering would be significantly more game changing if it was more economically proced but there yu have it.
An interesting development, and one covered more by Phil over here, is the opening up of the platforms. As Phil says;
One of the most striking aspects of Benioff’s new message is that it’s no longer about trying to get everyone using Salesforce.com’s platform. Showing a slide with logos from 21 different PaaS providers, he acknowledges the emerging diversity of the PaaS landscape: “The hallmark of all these platforms of a service is that different ones serve different markets and different developers.” Facebook serves the consumer, Amazon targets LAMP stack developers, Google App Engine is for Python developers, while Force.com serves the enterprise market, he explains.
This is a marked change from the old paradigm exemplified by Microsoft, whose success has been predicated on grabbing a near-monopoly with its Windows desktop platform. In stark contrast, as Benioff goes on to point out, on the Web it’s easy to combine platforms, for example mashing up Facebook and Force.com functionality. “Unlike the old platforms where you had to choose which one to get locked into, you have a lot more flexibiity and a lot more freedom,” he says.
A new McKinsey report just released documents the paradigm shift evident in corporate IT. The survey canvassed 850 corporate software buyers and shows just how much attention on-demand is gaining in their minds.
Key takeaways;
SaaS is rapidly becoming mainstream
75% are favourably disposed to utilising SaaS for development and deployment
around 20% of this years software budget to be spent on SaaS (higher % for smaller businesses and lower for larger as expected)
McKinsey says the move to web apps creates an ascendency of platforms and splits these platforms into three distinct categories;
development platforms (bungee labs, coghead etc etc)
delivery platforms (EC2, S3 etc)
app led platforms (force.com, intuit’s new offering)
Truth is that the survey doesn’t tell us anything new, corporate IT however is reluctant to jump into something without existing support and traction, this survey will ease their fears about SaaS/PaaS and most likely accelerate the trend.
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