Tag Archive for 'salesforce'

Build the Marketplace and the Stallholders will come

Published by Ben Kepes on October 1, 2008 in Business, IT, PaaS, SaaS and The Cloud. 0 Comments
Image representing Zoho as depicted in CrunchBaseZoho is launching their application marketplace today. Like other similar offerings, the Zoho location is a place where customers can come and browse different applications, try them out and buy them (or get ‘em for free in some cases). Think of it as iTunes for apps.

The difference between Zoho’s offering and those of other players, is in keeping with the differences between Zoho and its competitors in other marketplaces – and it’s a difference which has garnered them attention a little disproportionate to their size. Instead of charging users for application from the marketplace – Zoho passes them on at whatever cost the developer wants (including free if necessary). Zoho is happy with the potential of some downstream revenue created from the fact that the applications are created on their own product, Zoho Creator, and if users go over a certain level their is a charge for use of that product (bear in mind that their pricing kicks in at a pretty high level – for 10 Apps shared with less than 5 users, Zoho Creator is free.). It’s kind of like Apple not charging for downloads from iTunes – secure in the knowledge that they make coin off of selling iPods!

So far the range of applications in the marketplace is a little limited (it only launched today after all) but the different categories give you a taste of what can be done, and what’s to come. Zoho’s rationale for creating the marketplace goes like this;

There are many applications out there that are not available off the shelf, but are needed in a particular use case or situation, but there is not enough market for vendors to offer such situated software as the need could be specific to a use case or an individual/business.
Zoho Marketplace is trying to address this particular need. This market is not big enough for vendors to make a living and not small enough to ignore. With Zoho Marketplace, we hope to connect developers directly with users to create and purchase such applications providing a platform in Zoho Creator.

It’s great to see an alternative to the salesforce and Google offerings and it’ll be interesting to see how the marketplace develops over time.

Check out the video below (a little cheesy admittedly but interesting nonetheless!) and the somewhat more serious one further down.

Disclaimer – Zoho is sponsor of one of my other gigs, and I help them out on a bit of stuff. Suffice it to say if their product sucked I wouldn’t use it or promote it!

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Salesforce want to be a force in knowledge management too…

Published by Ben Kepes on August 27, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT and SaaS. 1 Comment

instranet Salesforce started off with CRM – a product that seeks to manage a companies sales processes. Sales processes are just one form of knowledge management so it’s not hard to see the fit with Salesforce’s latest acquisition, InStranet.

Instranet sell a tool called Dimensions that has a whole lot of potential to make sense of the rapidly growing amount of information that is at hand in business.  Dimensions manages and sorts the knowledge base of a company so that when a customer makes an information request, Instranet can sort through the screed of information that is irrelevant to the query, but can serve up the information that is of relevance.

Dimensions allows a business to accumulate masses of data, secure in the knowledge that the information is readily accessible.

Salesforce are pushing Dimensions hard, saying;

The Right Answers

Finally: A Knowledge Base that Gives You Just the Answer You Need – and Nothing You Don’t

Traditional knowledge bases rely on matching keywords against every answer in the system. The result: many pages of possible matches that leave your agents and customers lost in a sea of irrelevant information.

InStranet’s patented Dimensions technology organizes your knowledge base in multiple ways to pinpoint only those answers that are relevant to a particular customer. Add the Dimensions technology to the rich customer history in Salesforce CRM and you get just the answer you need—and none of the "noise."

Happy Customers

Everything You Need for Happy Agents and Customers

Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support is the fastest-growing application among enterprise call centers and support teams worldwide. This award-winning product delivers a:

  • Call Center application that makes every agent successful
  • Customer Portal that makes self-service the preferred destination for your customers
  • Proven Knowledge Base used by 350,000 global call center agents and millions of self-service customers

Call Center

Deliver Success in Weeks, not Months – Even for Large B2C Call Centers

Our customers love that they can be up and running with Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support in weeks, not months. The new knowledge base is no different.

Salesforcetimes – ever keen to get a dig in at Microsoft, uses this as an example of the promise for Dimensions;

Head over to this travesty, and type in “office won’t open”.  If they were using InStranet combining all of Microsoft’s data about my copy of windows, what updates I’ve taken from Windows Update, perhaps asked for some machine specs, when was the last time I performed maintenance, as well as my Dell support history… well, it might find something of actual use for me, maybe even, the right answer!

It’ll be fascinating to see how Salesforce integrates Instranet/Dimensions into their existing offerings.

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In-depth with Benioff

Published by Ben Kepes on August 8, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, PaaS, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0. 1 Comment

A hat tip to Daniel for pointing out that Sarah Lacy got to interview Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff – you ca tell that Sarah was please as punch to have got Benioff, she even dragged out her ladylike dress, the pearls and had her hair done for the day!

It’s a pretty good interview, even if Lacy lets Benioff get away with saying some pretty audacious things – things like "everyone has moved to the SaaS model". While I agree that in time most people will move to SaaS, it’s a little presumptuous to say that they already have. Benioff admits that the SFDC PaaS offering is fairly similar to the other PaaS offerings- interesting he didn’t try and talk up their own point of difference to claim superiority.

Interesting to hear of businesses using the Force PaaS service while not actually using SFDC’s original CRM offering – I wonder if there are some internal tensions within Salesforce between the traditional CRM staffers and the platform people.

Benioff sidesteps the obvious questions about his own plans viz a vis his shareholding in SFDC, he also talks openly about the number one enemy – Microsoft. He also pulls few punches when talking about SAP’s abysmal entry into SaaS.

It’s well worth a watch – check it out here.

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Salesforce and Google integrate some more

Published by Daniel Fowlie on June 24, 2008 in PaaS and SaaS. 0 Comments

Since the beginning of the year Salesforce’s Tour de Force event has been touring the world. The Tour de Force events are all about the Force.com platform as a service, leaving Salesforce’s CRM offering for discussion at the Dreamforce conference. Today’s stop on the tour was the home town stop of Silicon Valley so had a bit more importance to it. The Tour de Force is coming to Australia later in the year but dates haven’t been announced yet.

The keynote from CEO Mark Benioff was live blogged here by the new TechCrunchIT blog and is available to watch here.

The key announcement today was the Force.com Toolkit for Google Data API’s. Earlier in the year we saw the first steps of integration between Google and Salesforce with access to Google Docs from within Salesforce. This was supported by some 3rd party addons to help with user provisioning between both services and adding buttons within Salesforce to associate Google Docs with a particular account or contact or open Gmail when viewing a contact. At the time there were also new code examples on the Force.com wiki of using Google’s Data APIs.

So what makes today’s announcement different? The previous Google Data integration was using Google’s javascript API’s. Javascript operates client side and the browser was the middle man between Salesforce and Google data. Today’s announcement takes away the middle man and enables server to server communication between Salesforce and Google’s servers. This is being implemented by new methods in Salesforce’s server side Apex programming language.

The initial Google API’s available are:

  • Google Documents API
  • Google Calendar API
  • Google Spreadsheet API
  • Blogger API
  • Contacts API
  • Google Data Authentication

The Toolkit will expand to incorporate more of Google’s offerings and has been issued under the open source BSD license.

So what to make of this? From a technical point of view it’s cool, but we have had SOAP and REST integration between websites for a while. From an alliance point of view it’s about establishing a combined threat against Microsoft. Salesforce is a becoming a big player with market cap today of 8.75B (having just overtaken Sun Microsystems 8.71B). It’s a longer term move that won’t bring about immediate results. Salesforce serves big companies while Google’s enterprise offerings currently are more suited to small companies. This alliance is about working towards a convergence that might not be realised for another 2-3 years but would you want to be Microsoft when it is?

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Benioff on the future…

Published by Ben Kepes on June 21, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, IT, PaaS, SaaS and Strategy. 2 Comments

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.

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Is there a SaaS 1.0 and a SaaS 2.0?

Published by Ben Kepes on April 29, 2008 in Design, Efficiency, IT, PaaS, SaaS and Strategy. 3 Comments

With all the attention of late that PaaS providers are getting, it seems a good time to reflect on the stark contrast between two types of SaaS provider: those who do their own infrastructure, and those who farm it out.

Everyone knows that salesforce.com is the grandaddy of SaaS vendors, and it has gone down the only path that was open to it when it was conceived, that of creating and hosting its own infrastructure. As the somewhat acidic FSJ commented;

Benioff, ironically, has built his business around a bloated, overly expensive, outdated business model, a model that comes straight out of the late Nineties — he’s running his own data center, and he’s using Sun servers and Oracle software. It’s like “Back to the Future.” Meanwhile the rest of the world has leapt ahead onto Intel architecture and Linux. For Benioff to survive into the era of the cloud he’ll have to rip up his entire architecture and rebuild it. Yeah. It’s like that. He’s stuck. And he knows it. He’s not doing cloud computing. He’s doing what we all already recognize was a precursor to the cloud.

Already the CEO of SaaS vendor Sonian Networks uses the term “Legacy SaaS” to refer to those player of old who actual do their own hosting and serving.

I think it’s too early to entirely discount the self-hosting strategy, but it does seem, with ubiquitous, scalable and economically priced PaaS solutions now available from a number of vendors, that proprietary infrastructure will go the way of greenscreens.

A post over on ZDNet that included this estimated price for hosting a CRM type app on BungeeConnect;

At $3.60 per month it would seem something of a no-brainer to avoid the hassle, scaling issues and non-core business removal of focus that self provided infrastructure would cause.

So, over to the readers to vote;

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Zoho creating a Salesforce doppelganger… or more…

Published by Ben Kepes on April 17, 2008 in Governance, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 0 Comments

News this morning that Zoho CRM is launching an enterprise edition.

I’ve always had a little bit of scepticism about enterprise editions – knowing what I know about enterprise it seems that the only different between SMB and enterprise editions is that the latter need to be slower, more needlessly complex, double up lots of functionality and put in place some filters to disconnect the technology from its actual users. Yeah I’m kind of dubious about enterprise! That rant aside let’s look at the offering…

First the new functionality;

  • Role-based Security Administration
  • More product Customisation & Data Administration
  • Multi-language Support
  • SSL Support for Professional & Enterprise Versions
  • Integration with Zoho Sheet
  • Improved Business Functionality including the ability to;
    • Automatically update Stock information once the Purchase Order is approved
    • Find and Merge the duplicate records in Vendors module
    • Convert Quote to Sales Order or Invoice in a single click
    • Convert Sales Order to Invoice in a single click
    • Add account information automatically while creating quotes/orders/invoices from the potentials
  • Wiki-based Context-sensitive Help

Here is a schematic of the way the role-based security and authentication works;

All this is levelling the playing field with SFDC, but as Zoli points out, Zoho already has a breadth of functionality that is already wider than Salesforce’s, resulting in an (almost) ERP offering.

An interesting look sat the ZohoCRM vs SFDC comparison can be seen in this chart the most telling comparison for those who don’t want to trawl through detail is the following, giving the details for a 5 person organisation.

As another interesting aside to the announcement this week about the SFDC/Google apps integration, Zoho has plans to integrate its writing, mail and other  business apps in its CRM offering – thereby kneecapping the SFDC/Google offering (at least into SMB anyway).

So…. what does it all mean? Well I can’t but wonder what the game plan is for Zoho. As released a couple of days ago, Zoho has already rebuffed a takeover discussion with Salesforce, their rationale was that the cultural fit just wasn’t there (which is probably right). So what is the plan – while this offering moves more towards enterprise, it’s hard to imagine enterprise feeling comfortable jumping onboard en masse with a relatively small, relatively unknown such as Zoho. The SMB space is hard to monetize (and when you give stuff away free at the start it’s pretty hard to revert to a monetized model).

So I don’t see where all this is heading – Zoho is fantastic, the breadth of their offerings, their speed of development and their reaction to what else is going on in the space – its the business stratgy that has me wondering.

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More on SFDC/Google apps

Published by Ben Kepes on April 15, 2008 in Collaboration, Design, IT, PaaS, SaaS and Web x.0. 1 Comment

I’ve just been alerted to the following video;

It looks compelling, and Phil Wainewright goes hyperbolic to the extreme when he says;

When it takes just a mouse click to open Gmail and have the message saved with the prospect record, it won’t take long before Gmail becomes the default email system for most Salesforce users

Yeah like maybe if SFDC was the one system that enterprise used, everyone within an organisation was always locked within a SFDC environment, and enterprise had faith in on-demand office productivity apps…

But it isn’t, they aren’t and it doesn’t.

Get real guys – SFDC/Google apps, at this point in time isn’t ground breaking.

However…… a very reputable source (who by the way has been using MS Outlook and MS Sharepoint within a Salesforce environment for well over a year already), tells me that Salesforce are spending huge amounts of money to seamlessly provide a Microsoft integration to the same (or better) extent that the SFDC/Google one does).

Now that would start to be game changing…. And would fit nicely into the software+services play that Redmond keeps waxing poetic about. It would fit nicely with where enterprise is currently at and it would dovetail with SFDC’s target and current market.

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Salesforce and Google Apps

Published by Ben Kepes on April 15, 2008 in Design, IT, PaaS, SaaS, Strategy and Web x.0. 1 Comment

The blogosphere is ablaze this morning on the formal announcement that Salesforce will be bundling (is it still called bundling when it’s SaaS!?) Google apps along with it’s CRM offering. There’s a bunch of analysis out there;

Phil Waineright says;

This is a huge validation for Office 2.0

Basically saying that Google benefits from SFDC’s patronage. But as we’ll see later, SFDC’s cred today isn’t neccessarily a good thing for the continuation of Office 2.0

This will spread faster than people expect or realize

Ease of use will create viral uptake – all those happy SFDC users will all of a sudden embrace Google apps – and there’s very little chance of that IMHO

This is a showcase for on-demand integration.

A poster child of aggregating SaaS – can’t argue too much there – nice use of APIs and all that

Salesforce for Google Apps is a PaaS offering.

Think enterprise level collaboration environments – Sort of… true integrating Google Apps will lend itself to more document collaboration and business process tracking. But to my mind, a god PaaS offering is more neutral than this – now if SFDC offered Google apps, Zoho and Buzzword, that’d be different

Over on Zoho blog however they’re saying that;

Very Expensive + Affordable = Still Very Expensive

SFDC is an expensive offering, teaming it with a free one is strange. SFDC is also a marketing driven bloated business model that doesn’t blend nicely with Google’s viral one. Some might say it’s a way for SFDC to get a little more hip but I’m not sure Benioff sees it that way.

So… what do I think? I have to say I’m in the camp of the detractors. Sure I love SaaS and dig aggregation, but this aggregation doesn’t make sense to me. Let’s see why:

  1. Google docs is a reasonably lightweight, primarily consumer focused offering while SFDC is a heavier true business grade one – I don’t see a huge intersect between traditional Google apps users and traditional SFDC ones – so the upside for either company is negligible
  2. Sure the ability to create docs from within SFDC is nice, but if you’re creating those docs within an app that hasn’t achieved acceptance within your organisation, it’s just a feature you’ll turn off by default
  3. If you want light(ish)weight SaaS apps along with CRM, you’ll go straight for Zoho which already has both (and very interesting to note that SFDC tried to buy Zoho or shut down their CRM offering
  4. If you want enterprise grade you’ll (and yes I hate to say it) use sharepoint/MS office and work around integrating that with your CRM

Over on Smoothspan Bob is correct when he says that;

However, the history of CRM is not 100% encouraging…..  Many salespeople view it as a necessary evil while their management uses it mostly as a forecasting tool (how much will we sell this quarter) which it does a very poor job of.  This latter creates a huge misalignment between management and the users of the CRM/SFA (Sales Force Automation) tool.  Understandably, there is a lot of pressure to close deals.  Equally understandably, salespeople may not want management to have a total surveillance view of every bit of data associated with the deal.  Most of the time what’s in Salesforce and other CRM system is a pretty carefully prepared presentation of what the salesperson wants management to see as the current status of the sale.

So the potential is there, but the true nature of CRM system may mitigate how much of the potential is realized.

Fake Steve Jobs makes an interesting point (as an aside has anyone noticed that FSJ is much less tongue in cheek and more “real world” these days) when he says that;

Benioff himself is getting disrupted by little guys like SugarCRM. You know why? Because Benioff, ironically, has built his business around a bloated, overly expensive, outdated business model, a model that comes straight out of the late Nineties — he’s running his own data center, and he’s using Sun servers and Oracle software….. Meanwhile the rest of the world has leapt ahead onto Intel architecture and Linux. For Benioff to survive into the era of the cloud he’ll have to rip up his entire architecture and rebuild it. Yeah. It’s like that. He’s stuck. And he knows it. He’s not doing cloud computing. He’s doing what we all already recognize was a precursor to the cloud.

So SFDC and Google is akin to Microsoft and Yahoo marrying – and that’d never happen…. would it?

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