• Publish: Publish, review, update and approve content, and even target specific information to colleagues based on roles and profiles
• Find and engage experts: Social profiles for every employee will track their influence and expertise automatically. In addition, employees will be able to collaborate directly with experts or groups through the Salesforce Chatter feed within Company Communities
• Share and collaborate on files: Employees will be able to access, post, share and get feedback on the latest files and knowledge articles to ensure that teams are accessing the most up-to-date information
• Access apps: Company Communities will provide a single place for employees to access all the apps they need to be productive, including Salesforce apps and third party apps

According to Salesforce, Company Communities is currently scheduled to be generally available in the second half of 2013. Pricing for Salesforce Company Communities will be announced at general availability

MyPOV

Earlier this week I spoke at CeBit Australia where I was a guest of Salesforce’s Australian team. While there Peter Coffee, Head of Platform Research at Salesforce interviewed me (video below) and asked me to give some honest critical feedback on what the company could do better. Company communities highlights where my criticisms lie.

It seems to me that as organizations face increasing pressure to innovate and remain agile, they’re looking for tools which wrap a common framework around all their systems of record. While externally facing social stream from customers and prospects are incredibly important, they’re only part of the picture. Indeed this is something that NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson, in a snipe at Salesforce during the recent SuiteWorld event pointed out when he discussed his view that Salesforce is more about prospect management than customer management and that without deep insight into actually transactions, organizations only have half of the picture.

Obviously the reality is more nuanced than that and Salesforce delivers far deeper insights than simply prospect data, but if we look at Company Communities, and Customer Communities as product offerings, they would be far more compelling if they had deep transactional information within them. Now of course the Salesforce response to that is that Chatter is a fabric and organizations can use Chatter as the unifying messaging bus for all their systems of record and, to a point, that is a fair claim. But I sense that Salesforce needs to broaden it’s perspective and product portfolio to dive deeper into the back office – whether that means specific Salesforce ERP or manufacturing offerings it’s too early to tell, but something needs to change in my view. As Salesforce themselves said in the release of Company Communities:

…legacy intranets have failed to deliver similar levels of access or engagement employees demand to complete business tasks anytime and anywhere—from approving time-off requests and accessing the latest travel policies to identifying the right expert within the company.. these intranets are not designed for today’s real-time business environment, where employees need instant access to company information and people to be successful anywhere, from any device.

That instant access to data that employees need covers both internal and external sources – Salesforce has built its amazing business focusing heavily on the latter of those two. I sense it’s time to start delivering a compelling back office message as well.

It’s an accepted fact that consumers are transacting a growing proportion of their online commerce via mobile devices but this has been slow to translate to enterprise-level applications. In part this is because customarily enterprise data is trapped in silos that are often difficult to connect to the outside world. In a world where data is increasingly the most valuable asset an organization holds, opening this data up and allowing business units to utilize it in new ways is critical. And, it goes without saying, many of these new ways of utilizing data will be on a mobile device.

So, what does this new Salesforce platform actually deliver? The new platform has two services:

• Salesforce Mobile SDK 2.0 - The open source project is designed to make it easy for any enterprise developer to securely connect enterprise data to any mobile app – native, hybrid or HTML5 – on any iOS or Android device. The SDK also enables HTML5-based apps to leverage device features like the camera and geolocation, and provides additional libraries for key enterprise requirements such as authentication and secure offline storage.
• Developer Mobile Packs - These open source “quick start” packs enable any web developer to build highly responsive HTML5 or hybrid mobile apps on any platform and access real-time Salesforce data. Mobile Packs leverage the massively scalable and trusted Salesforce Platform REST APIs through a choice of popular, lightweight JavaScript frameworks – AngularJS, Backbone.js and jQuery Mobile – to offer greater development flexibility and deliver amazing data-centric mobile experiences.

Alongside the product announcement, Salesforce is announcing a program for consulting and implementation partners, perhaps as a acknowledgement that in the enterprise world, there is a distinct lack of understanding of the why/how and what of mobile app enablement. The new mobile accelerator program is a consulting partnership with company’s such as Appirio, Bluewold and Capgemini.

MyPOV

Eureka – Enterprises, whether they know it or not, have no option but to embrace agile methodologies, point solutions, and mobile applications. By bringing together consulting services along with holistic development tools, Salesforce is helping move traditional enterprises into the mobile world. That said I do have some questions – the company is strongly articulating the open source nature of the mobile packs – it hopes to build some community momentum around the initiative. While this is a logical move from Salesforce’s perspective, it is somewhat dissonant to see such a strong open source messaging around mobile development whose very value proposition lies embedded in proprietary data and core applications.

I don’t believe that Salesforce needed to put this open source spin on things. Enterprises, in my experience, realize that they need to start thinking mobile and are looking for partners who can help them bridge the gap from where they are today to a more mobile-enabled model. By tying together core data alongside mobile app development tools – Salesforce makes it something of a no-brainer for enterprises to begin their mobile journey.

Two examples of this are being announced today – one fairly humdrum ad one a tad more interesting. First the humdrum one – Cloud Sherpas is announcing it has acquired Innoveer solutions a well-known CRM consulting firm that has over 750 customers. This is interesting since Cloud Sherpas only very recently moved beyond its former pure-play Google Apps focus into Salesforce work – they did so with real pace however, offering advisory, implementation, integration and development services. This acquisition gives Cloud Sherpas a broader Salesforce presence in the US as well as the UK along with a large delivery team based out of India.

More interesting than this news however is the announcement that Cloud Sherpas is following on from its move in the Salesforce world and adding ITSM skills through the acquisition of Navigis, an advisory and consulting practice focusing on ServiceNow implementations. David Northing, CEO of Cloud Sherpas speaks to the company’s desire to become more of a provider of a suite of solutions to customers – speaking about the Navigis deal he said that:

Many of our customers have expressed an interest in cloud ITSM software, and acquiring Navigis – a strong operation that’s generating good profit and has doubled in size year over year – boosts our ability to support these companies. Between Google, Salesforce.com and ServiceNow, we’re establishing a ‘Sherpa stack’ of the top cloud solutions.

Navigis has been involved in IT Service Management since 1996. The company’s certified ServiceNow consultants provide implementations, customizations, administrative support and training to help ServiceNow customers automate their IT operations. Navigis clients include Fortune 500 customers.

What does this all mean?

No man is an island entire unto himself and increasingly no individual cloud solution is either. This aggregation of disparate but complementary solutions is a natural and necessary move as customers seek to take advantage of best of breed solutions, but with the support and help of one partner who can cover them all. Of course there is still the slight problem of the relative dearth of cash involved in these deals – I don’t have insight into Cloud Sherpas revenues or margin but I suspect that there isn’t much fat in these deals for them – what they are attempting to do (with success it would seem) is to mop up all the smaller players and build sufficient momentum to guarantee their existence going into the future.

No one knows what the services brokerage space will look like in the future – but it’s a reasonable bet to make that Cloud Sherpas will be there in some form.

Initially corporate IT built the applications the business needed but then third party vendors go into the game and started building apps. Over time these then consolidated into suite. This cycle keep recurring with continuous innovation and then consolidation – products consolidate into suites. The same cycle occurs in the cloud with SaaS products consolidating over time into cloud suites. All the while however IT departments continued to write applications, bolstered recently by the rise of PaaS. So given all of this complex IT structure, the need for a central identity service came along.

In Patterson’s view, neither Microsoft nor Google have really managed to build robust and future-looking identity management – Microsoft because it didn’t support SAML 2.0 and Google because it only supported SAML in one direction,that of log-in to Google itself. Patterson believes that this is a story about standards and that the critical ones with real traction in this space are SAML and OAUTH.

Anyway – all of this as background was interesting – especially given the presentations by Ian Glazer, identity analyst at Gartner and Kim Cameron from Microsoft.

In particular Glazer had an interesting take (for someone who makes his living talking identity). His talk was entitled “Killing Identity Management to Save It” and it was interesting to reflect on the talk given my strong feeling that the enterprise of the future is much more fluid than enterprises today. This fluidity – both in terms of what constitutes an enterprise user, and also in terms of the portfolio of services enterprises use raises some massive challenges to those grappling with the task of identity management.

Which made for a very interesting conversation on the drive to Boulder for dinner one night during the event – when the discussion of Salesforce’s recently announced identity offering was opined upon. For those who don’t recall, the somewhat nebulous announcement by Salesforce said that the:

New Salesforce Identity will deliver “Facebook-like identity for the enterprise,” a single, social, trusted identity service to access and centrally manage every cloud app.

There are two issues the announcement, and the discussions at defrag, bought up.

Is the Future of Identity On-Premise or in the Cloud?

Identity Management – arguably the crown jewels of the enterprise. Many seasoned IT folks would scoff at the idea of that being farmed out to the cloud. But just look at the way enterprises work – the fact is the vast majority of enterprise users are using both internal and external services. Social identities, cloud services, mobile devices and the rise of APIs mean that the formerly rigid boundaries between the enterprise and the outside world are becoming ever more porous. Add to this the fact that so many enterprise end users aren’t actually employees and you have a service ripe for disruption.

How can an identity service which is general sited on-premise, cope well in such a diverse world? As Glazer said in his report 2013 Planning Guide: Identity and Privacy:

Identity being built into business services rather than a separate entity is the natural maturation of identity. The enterprise can’t own and can’t dictate all the ways identity is coming into and going out of its network.

What does Salesforce identity Mean for Cloud Identity Providers?

Bear in mind that we still don’t know what the final Salesforce identity product will look like. True it’s an amalgamation of some individual pieces they already has but the total package, how it’s sold and how it’s messaged, is unknown. I’m going out on a limb by assuming that Salesforce will do the right thing, and that their identity as a service offering will be sold as a standalone product so that enterprises wishing to use it as their central identity hub will be able to do so, regardless of whether or not they are users of other Salesforce products. It’s a reasonably bet since a) Salesforce has already signaled that identity will span all their products, not just the classic lines but also things like Force.com and Heroku and b) S3elling the product this way would give Salesforce the opportunity to take up a role as the central hub and gatekeeper of personal identity in this new cloudy world.

Ian Glazer, Gartner analyst on identity covered the move in a blog post after the announcement when he said that:

federation and user provisioning aren’t futuristic or anything special to crow about. But the crucial thing to note is that salesforce.com isn’t thinking about identity in isolation, and isn’t deploying identity in isolation. Salesforce.com isn’t offering identity by itself but instead offering identity within the context of PaaS, delivered, managed, and licensed as such

Identity goes from being a boring, but admittedly important, side function of corporate it to becoming a thread woven through all of the business applications an enterprise use – SaaS, PaaS and (one assumes) IaaS, a kind of move that is analogous to what Salesforce is trying to achieve with Chatter – weave a social fabric throughout an organizations assets. As Glazer said, “Identity just happens! This is the future of identity services. Identity gets delivered in the context of something the business and IT as a whole cares about”.

So what does it mean for the smaller federations and SSO providers? Well it’s hard to imagine a scenario where corporate IT would argue that the provision of identity services in the cloud should occur from a third party, and not from a large vendor. One assumes that the likes of Okta predicated their foundation on a scenario of acquisition by a company like Salesforce. By introducing their own service, it’s hard to see anything else that a quick and sever cutting-off of oxygen to these competitors.

It’s not over, as they say, till the fat lady sings and we’re yet to see how Salesforce executes upon the opportunity. But it certainly looks like an existential play in the world of cloud (and beyond) identity management.

• BoxEmbed, an HTML5 framework that allows a kind of “Box inside” frame within other applications was launched (more on that here). An initial 10 partners joined the program with more to come
• BoxEdit was announced, a plugin that allows users to edit content directly without having to go through the roundtrip download-edit-upload process for files
• A partnership with SAP to integrate Afaria a mobile device management product, with Box
• More integration – including GoodData for administrator-level analysis of Box usage – more integrations on the way
• A partnership with ProoPoint for data loss prevention (DLP) services integrated with Box
• An improved search to make sense of the copious amounts of content modern workers face
• The previously announced rollout of twofactor authentication and more granular security scope

Box CEO Aaron Levie was quick to talk about the post-PC era and the massive growth of connected individuals who access their data either exclusively or partially via mobile phones and tablets. In Levie’s view, this fundamentally changes the software paradigm for enterprises and means that the hegemony of the integrated full-stack suite is no longer a sure thing.

At BoxWorks we heard from Mark Tonnesen of Electronic Arts – he told of EA’s gradual move to the cloud and their perspective that content collaboration is an appropriate first step. Tonnesen told of the tipping point that came for EA when internal business units became the champions for the more widespread rollout of Box throughout the organization. In some ways the pressures that forces EA to look at tools like Box are the very ones that Box is banking on to provide growth going forwards – EA needed to increase its ecosystem because they simply could not build every game for every demographic in every region. rather a wide ecosystem allows them to scale – and according to Tonnesen, cloud enables the ecosystem to thrive.

MyPOV

Box is remarkable in the fact that a company started by a couple of young college dropouts, focused on a consumer file-sharing tool has managed to pivot successful into an enterprise powerhouse. ne can’t understate the brilliance and copybook execution that Levie and co-founder Dylan Smith bring to the company. But clearly they have some brilliant advisers around them also. This is demonstrated by the fact that the Box executive team is a fascinating selection of individuals – half of whom have come from webscale consumer companies and the rest from more traditional enterprise software companies. This creates a product that has the sometimes conflicted attributes of having an empathy for users along with the requirements that large enterprise IT demands.

Box is doing a stellar job of building an impressive ecosystem around itself – the fact that it has got such varied players as NetSuite, Jive, Zendesk and SugarCRM to talk a consistent story of content collaboration within their own applications, but provided by box, speaks not only to the forcefulness of their vision but also to the real fear that the best of breed vendors feel about the elephant in the room, Salesforce. This really struck home when speaking to Box customers during the event who, while being real evangelists for the product and the company, admitted that had a fully functional content collaboration application existed in the Salesforce stable when they were doing their due diligence, their decision would more likely have favored the behemoth of the cloud industry. Box realized that and is moving fast to shore up its response to that threat – two key people who will deliver on that need are Chris Yeh, VP of Platform and Sam Schillace, VP of Engineering. Sam in particular is a coup for Box, Levie describes his hiring as a sever year project – not surprising since Schillace created Writely, the product which eventually became Google Docs.

Box has some breathing room, Salesforce pre-announced ChatterBox and it’s only due for release in 2013. The likelihood, given history, is that ChatterBox will be a fairly lightweight product initially. The question is whether a lightweight product from a full stack vendor outweighs a deeply functional offering from an ecosystem player. Time will tell on that one. At the same time there are other players, in particular Huddle who have credible, robust and compelling products to offer. Those other vendors however will find it hard, Box has roughly 10 times the funding of Huddle and this make it very difficult or Huddle to gain attention in the space – I’m picking a short to mid term trade sale of Huddle. Box meanwhile has far bigger sites – it truly wants to be one of the top-table vendors of this next cloud age.

There are no certainties in this industry – but Box has the ecosystem, the smarts, the funding and the leadership to deliver on its promise – it would be a ballsy man that betted heavily against that.

MyPOV

I’ve said for a long time, what we’re seeing from Workday is very much the tip of the iceberg. This is a company with the pedigree, the runway and the credibility to deliver a broad set of enterprise-level functionalities across finance and HR that could well see it become one of the most important enterprise IT vendors in future. I do question there “best buddy” status with Salesforce and I foresee a day when that relationship become more strained. Workday is being careful to de-emphasize the social enterprise messaging, and is also not talking about a broad development platform. Rather it couches its vision of these two areas in terms of collaboration and customization respectively. For the next few years that is a viable message but I strongly believe that there is some significant strategy and development work taking place behind the scenes that will allow Workday to breakout with its own truly social function set and also a development platform that moves far beyond customizations.

Workday is being very smart to focus on adoption rather than implementation of its product. it’s a theme my ever-prescient friend Mike Krigsman wrote about in a whitepaper he published alongside Appirio. Krigsman talks about lack of adoption being one of the key indicators of impending IT failure. From the vendor side adoption is vitally important, and even more so in a less locked-in subscription based world, for adoption is the key factor that helps broaden the footprint an IT vendor has within an organization. In light of this, workday’s “Virtual Consultant”, a kind of automated configuration tool, is a very key strategy for the company to increase their “land and expand” approach to adoption.

Part of the tool is some benchmarking functionality that allows customers to be benchmarked across their peers (at least in terms of the configuration). Zoli Erdos has been writing about this “hidden business model in SaaS” or years, the fact that vendors can anonymize and aggregate data in order to send customers highly contextual benchmarking information. While this benchmarking function is only being talked about as part of a configuration automation tool, you can bet Workday is thinking of it far deeper than that.

Finally Workday demoed it “Worktags” functionality worktags are a way to deliver super-flexible reporting across different divisions or business units. A way I look at it is that it introduces a degree of “unstructure” to highly structured (and hence generally siloed) data. It’s a topic that many people have been thinking about and, at least in the SMB space, has led some to say that the best approach to financial data is to completely do away with charts of accounts and traditional hierarchical structures. The concept of worktags is interesting is that it should be able to deliver a solution that has the best parts of rigid structure (clarity, control, audit) with the benefits of more loose approaches to data (insights, analysis).

As I said at the start – the stuff we’re seeing from Workday is the tip of the iceberg – the next few years (and beyond) are going to be an incredibly interesting time for the company – btoh in terms of technology and business.

Advancing Financial Management Globally and Vertically
Workday continues to advance its Financial Management application in the cloud to bring more global capabilities to large, multinational organizations, together with advanced industry-specific functionality. In this update, new global capabilities include enhanced global tax support, more international payment formats, and more powerful real-time reporting across divisions and business units for multi-national organizations. Workday 18 also includes powerful industry-specific functionality for education and government, including Grants Management and fund accounting, driving reporting and compliance. Finally, Workday combines financial and workforce measures enabling project scenario planning so organizations can efficiently model the right resources for the right work.

Advancements to Workday Financial Management include:

• Enhanced global tax and payment support gives customers the ability to support partial tax recoverability and tax regimes with mixed recoverable and non-recoverable tax rates, while enriched international payment formats provide greater and more efficient reach to different regions.
• Expanded reporting using Worktags on dimensions such as Division or Business Unit provides even more flexible real-time reporting for multi-national organizations.
• Project scenario planning leverages Workday’s unified HCM and Financial Management applications, so that managers can allocate resources seamlessly across projects with details that include cost, worker availability, skills, and experience.
• Grants Management and fund accounting for education and government organizations deliver clear visibility into grant activity, improved compliance with grantor reporting requirements and enable the monitoring of the use of funds to help ensure they are segregated appropriately.

Keeping the Workforce Engaged with More Collaboration and Mobile Features
New mobile devices and collaboration technologies continue to redefine the workplace and give organizations new opportunities to connect and engage their workforces to drive productivity, efficiency, and results. Workday brings the best of both worlds into Workday 18. New features include:

• A new professional profile that unites talent and professional information into a single unified view, so employees can manage their own information such as education and experience and import it directly from their LinkedIn profile.
• Team profile for iPad® lets managers see key team information and composition, including a team calendar, team members, compensation, and performance summaries, all from a tablet.
• Building on the Time Tracking functionality introduced in Workday 17, workers can also now check in and out from any mobile device or web-browser with ease.

New Tools to Maximize Performance Management
Human resources teams, managers, and executives now have the most powerful tools at their fingertips to maximize pay for performance, prepare talent for the future, and act proactively on worker trends. With performance and talent calibration, it’s easy for a group of managers to collaborate and ensure consistency on the performance and talent ratings of their teams.

In addition, worker trending analytics can enable monitoring of key workforce metrics over time in areas such as headcount, worker activity data, and attrition and turnover, enabling proactive workforce management.

Increasing Platform Flexibility
Workday delivers on its promise to drive enterprise-class configurability and flexibility in the cloud with new custom field management that makes it simple to easily tailor Workday to unique business requirements. Configurations automatically carry forward with each update and give customers the power to easily adapt Workday to their specific businesses needs.

First a recap – Box sees their role as one of enabling the Discover, Connection and Engagement around content. In a pre briefing yesterday, Levie explained how the post PC era sees a massive increase in people connecting via phones and other mobile devices – to back up this claim about the move to mobile, over 140000 businesses, 14 million users and 92% of the Fortune 500, over 50% of the traffic that Box sees comes from mobile devices.

The Box thesis is that, in this newly decentralized and heterogeneous world, content is the central core of an organization and that all else revolves around that content. The announcements all aim to enable that to occur. Of course all this requires both an ecosystem and visibility in the marketplace, a point alluded to in the briefing, Ray Wang from Constellation research Group when he asked how Box can align itself with industry players to create some momentum and visibility to compete with traditional players.

Enter Box Embed – Box Embed is a new HTML5-based embeddable framework that puts the Box content and collaboration capabilities within third party applications – at launch, Box Embed is being adopted by ten different SaaS players; Concur, Cornerstone OnDemand, DocuSign, Eloqua, FuzeBox, Jive, NetSuite, Oracle, SugarCRM and Zendesk. Partners simply provide an iFrame within which the Box content is displayed – Box Embed allows around 95% of Box functionality within the partner application. Box Embed sees Box try and position content as the central core of differing enterprise applications. Using the framework, within the third party applications users can preview, comment, task and search across the content stream.

Store once, but access anywhere is an attractive idea – by allowing (for example) NetSuite to focus completely on building out the strongest financial application, the theory goes that the solution delivered is better than if NetSuite were to also look to build a content collaboration tool as well – in theory customers should be able to get a better financial system AND a better content system – it’s the very reason for best of breed as opposed to getting everything from one vendor. And in articulating that value proposition Box is taking swift kick at Salesforce (not to mention Oracle, SAP and other more “legacy” vendors). Levie made a thinly veiled comment on the risks of having content with one of these broader players when he warned that content is becoming siloed and that users are best served by independent solutions for their content. He raised concerns over a product like ChatterBox that is centrally focused on Salesforce products, and suggested this was a risk for organizations using solutions other than those from Salesforce.

This concern has validity – while Salesforce used similar messaging about ChatterBox, suggesting it was the honest, neutral and independent broker – there is quiet concern that ChatterBox will be more of a walled garden and will do some more to try and keep organizations within a tightly walled silo. It was interesting to talk about the announcement of ChatterBox with two Box customers in the briefing session – I asked both whether the advent of a combined social and content product from one company would lessen the appeal of a “best of breed” approach. Both tended to lean on the fact that, when their buying decisions were made, no credible content management solution existed from a player with a deep social presence. One of them indicated that “if they [Salesforce] had decent functionality two or three years ago they would have beaten Box to the punch”.

Suggesting that the road ahead for Box won’t be quite as smooth as it has been to date. The customer did moderate their statement somewhat by explaining that their company has deeply bet on a best of breed approach and that, in his opinion, the cost of integrating best of breed solutions is worth the effort to get the better specific functionality that best of breed solutions tend to give in comparison to suite solutions.

In a discussion with Chris Yeh, head of Platform at Box, I asked about an emerging trend where end users will interact with Box content while having no exposure to the Box user interface itself – Yeh concurred, roughly a third of all Box API calls that occur come from third parties – and this quantity is growing. Yeh foresees a day when more people interact with Box content outside of the application itself than in it. This raises some interesting opportunities around white labeling of the Box product (and, perhaps, a now departed opportunity of Salesforce partnering nicely with Box to create a solution). It is my belief that these sort of discussions around white labeling have occurred in the past and continue to do so – the real challenges aren’t technical – they’re in ensuring the commercial arrangements are solid for all parties.

All very interesting stuff… Anyway, in terms of pricing and availability, both NetSuite and SugarCRM will be launching Box Embed this week and the other partners later in the quarter. Box Embed will be available at no cost to users of both Box and the corresponding third party application.

This year however I stood amazed during the developer keynote as Salesforce’s new developer evangelist, Adam Seligman, spoke to a room that was more packed than almost all the other keynotes I attended – it got to the point where ushers sealed the doors because there were so many people standing in the aisles it was becoming a fire-hazard. As Seligman and his colleagues showed some live demos of coding using the new functions contained in the Salesforce Platform such as Touch, Canvas and AppExchange Checkout the woops and cheers from the audience were something akin to an Open Source event, not an enclave of the usually staid enterprise IT folks.

James Governor, the colorful analyst with RedMonk, introduced the world to the notion that developers are the new kingmakers. In Governor’s opinion, this is so because of the:

increasing influence they wield on business innovation, from the bottom up. Of course some are quite skeptical of the idea that developers are influential, often because they see the IT world through the lens of the product purchaser

This concept is accepted, and proven, in the consumer world. Marc Andreesen, the idolized former entrepreneur and now VC with the Midas investor touch famously opined that software is eating the world and that, by extension, those who spend their days hunched over keyboards creating that software are the real wielders of influence in the world. But while this is accepted in the consumer space (witness the meteoric rise to prominence of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram), it’s not been the case, or at least the expectation, from within the enterprise.

During DreamForce I sat in on a developer session run by my friends Abhinav Keswani and Bry Ashman from Trineo, a small development shop in New Zealand. Their presentation was a case study about SpotU, a product that delivers highly personalized and contextualized additional offers on the emailed itineraries sent to customers who book air travel. In order to deliver these offers, the application that Trineo created needs to process 12 or so million different data requests every week. It then needs to deliver the specific ad in to the itinerary delivered in PDF and HTML form. It sounds like a pretty simple concept, but underlying it is a complex and time critical application – Trineo leveraged the Salesforce Heroku platform to allow them to focus on application functionality and leave the plumbing of application delivery to others.

This SpotU case study is simply the story of one of the millions of applications built on the force.com and Heroku platforms. By extension it’s also a story that shows the value of the other democratizing development platforms out there from other vendors – but it is in the context of the suit and tie traditional audience of Salesforce that this so strongly stands out. Seligman is rightly proud of the fact that the broader Salesforce community numbers some 800000 developers with numbers growing rapidly. These numbers are growing while the total number of professional developers worldwide remains largely static – so what’s happening here? Well, more accessible, easier to use, and tightly integrated application platforms are proving incredibly democratizing to the development process – like never before employees of organizations with little or no development experience are able to create applications to scratch a particular functional itch they have. It was these ‘citizen developers” who made up a significant proportion of the thousands of people sitting in the developer keynote at DreamForce.

It is telling that, in contrast to last year where there was a fair degree of smack talk between Oracle and Salesforce, this year saw Benioff mention his competitors a few times, and articulate that, in his view, they provide a good “back office solution”. This is as good an example of damning by faint praise as I’ve ever heard, with the rise of developers, of customization, and of interplay between the organization and the outside world, back office solutions are not only losing the tiny bit of sex appeal they once had, they also rapidly becoming simply the boring pipes that underpins what really matter – the front office systems that speak to, and listen to, the real world.

Many enterprise vendors are realizing both the business need for custom applications and the inherent value of providing a platform that lets developers create applications – it’s the age old “letting a thousand flowers bloom” theme. But at the same time I’m often struck by how many legacy enterprise vendors mistake just how important a vibrant ecosystem, and the developers who fuel that, really are. The fact of the matter is that the balance of power is shifting in enterprise IT and it really is no exaggeration to say that it will be grass roots developers who are pivotal in deciding which enterprise vendors will be sitting at the “top table” over the next decades.

While arguably DreamForce 2012 was somewhat lacking in big attention grabbing product announcements, the cheers from the developer keynotes told me more about the prospects for the company than anything else. Developers are indeed the new kingmakers and Salesforce has shown itself adept at courting these critical influencers.

The combined solution is pretty interesting, the MindTouch CRM Connector automatically scans the Salesforce support case and in real-time recommends to support agents the best help and product content from within the knowledge base. Support agents can select or drag-and-drop and then send from within the Salesforce case window. Similarly agents can post case solutions into the MindTouch knowledge base, without leaving the Salesforce window.

According to MindTouch, the combined solution will deliver the following benefits;

• Faster, more accurate support ticket resolution
• Better consumer product and support experiences
• A seamless and unified help experience
• Actionable data and knowledge collection from your frontline support team

Why is this important?

Institutionalizing individual knowledge, and then disseminating it out to support workers is critical in order to ensure customer service delivers quick and accurate support. However the knowledge base has traditionally been siloed and separate from the customer service solution. Any time a service agent needs to switch between two systems of record, a degree of cognitive dissonance occur which, at best reduced efficiency but at worst lessens the customer support outcome. Building a self learning knowledge base that feed in two ways to and from customer support agents is a key step to make customer service faster, more accurate and more resource-efficient.

Scott Collison from Salesforce speaks to this fact when he says that;

The way that software companies or cloud companies used to do support was “hey, we are going to have a documentation team, write up the docs, put them on website, hopefully you can find them.” You want to call someone, – that might be difficult or might cost you some money. But I think by incorporating the community into creating living documentation describing how to use software – that has been a huge thing for us.”

Collison and Fulkerson discuss the integration ,and the over arching trend in customer service, in the video below

Strong words but, as I predicted, the announcements at this years DreamForce point to Salesforce firmly creating for itself the position of first true IT platform of the cloud era – that’s a lofty statement but a justified one I believe. From the release, here are the announcements:

• Salesforce Touch, Salesforce Chatter Communities for Partners and Data.com Social Key: Salesforce Touch, powered by HTML5, expands on salesforce.com‘s native mobile strategy and will bring Salesforce to any mobile device—regardless of platform—and empower reps to collaborate on deals anytime, anywhere. Chatter Communities for Partners will connect companies with distributors, resellers, suppliers and more to drive sales through seamless deal registration, access to proven sales tools and collaboration with the right experts. And Salesforce Data.com Social Key will unite the best context from social networks with traditional company data, enabling enterprises to build stronger relationships with customers and close more deals, faster.
• Chatter Communities for Service: Chatter Communities for Service will turn the old world of legacy portals upside down by enabling customers to tap directly into a private social community of industry peers and company experts. And Chatter Communities for Service will integrate with the industry-leading Service Cloud to ensure customers get the best service.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud: The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the first suite to unify social listening, content, engagement, advertising, workflow, automation and measurement. By combining industry leaders Buddy Media and Radian6 to power the Marketing Cloud, brands now have a proven suite to manage all social marketing activity and access common assets in one place.
• Salesforce Chatterbox: Salesforce Chatterbox will deliver simple and secure file sharing across any device with the proven trust of Salesforce. With Salesforce Chatterbox, people will be able to manage and share files in the context of their business.
• Salesforce Work.com: Work.com, the world’s first social performance management platform, transforms the way companies align around social goals, motivate their people with real-time recognition and rewards and drive performance with continuous feedback and relevant performance reviews. In addition, a new partnership with Amazon.com enables companies to reward and motivate their people directly from within Work.com.
• Next-Generation Salesforce Platform: The Salesforce Platform, the world’s leading enterprise cloud platform, today introduced Salesforce Identity and the Salesforce Touch Platform. New Salesforce Identity will deliver “Facebook-like identity for the enterprise,” a single, social, trusted identity service to access and centrally manage every cloud app. And the new Salesforce Touch Platform will allow mobile apps to be written once and deployed anywhere, using the same cloud platform services developers love using today. With nine major enterprise cloud platform services, companies can now accelerate innovation and deliver next generation social and mobile apps with unparalleled levels of speed, mobile and trust on the Salesforce Platform.

At every turn we see Salesforce deliver the glue that ties together their formerly disconnected individual services. Let’s look at each one in turn:

Salesforce touch delivers on Salesforce’s long opined perspective that the future will be delivered over multiple devices and in multiple contexts. They were arguably the first company to really recognize the enterprise value of the tablet, and touch will enable their customers to deliver highly contextualized applications to their staff and stakeholders. Similarly with Chatter Communities we see Salesforce spread a fabric of social engagement outside of the organization itself and create continuity across the spectrum of customer to vendor touchpoints. And Data.com Social Key simply allows the organization to move away from the current paradigm where enterprise contact data is seen as distinct from external contact data – rather the two things will be merged into one global contact – the way most of us work in our day to day lives.

Marketing Cloud ties together some existing Salesforce products and delivers the key outcome that businesses need in the social age – the ability to both measure, and react to external social influences. I’ve seen marketing cloud in action and by gluing together the monitoring aspects of social and tying them to actual workflow and automation, Salesforce provides a end-to-end solution that will lower the barriers to entry into the social realm for its enterprise customers.

ChatterBox is a no-brainer. I’ve long opined that DropBox is immature and too great a risk for real business. While I love Box as a product, I believe that content should be deeply embedded within an enterprise application and ChatterBox does this. The reason is simple – content is a part of core workflows and processes and not a “thing” of itself. Any product which stands alone and tries to deliver a compelling content vision misses this point. It’s true that deep integrations of third party applications can be a very compelling model for content management, but it’s hard to look past the advantage that a native product will bring.

Work.com is the continuation of development of the products spawned through the Rypple acquisition – the partnership with Amazon.com is interesting if somewhat secondary to Salesforce building out a compelling HCM solution. I’m still expecting some relatively major announcements of aligning Work.com with products from Workday so this is a “more to come” area.

And with the Salesforce Platform we finally have the answer to how Salesforce will integrate Heroku within the parent organization – identity that works across all Salesforce properties as well as wider into the general cloud space is incredibly powerful – arguably as revolutionary as Active Directory was within the organization but on a much bigger scale. With this move on its own Salesforce has the potential to become the new global enterprise IT hub – after all, as IT departments looks to reduce complexity, any opportunity to abstract responsibility for such a large chunk of work as identity is very appealing – with this move Salesforce have both validated the model of, and lessened the opportunity for, SSO vendors such as Okta.

All this news is exciting, not because any one part of this is momentous, but because as a whole, taken alongside the existing product line, we see the emerging of a player that really has the next generation of IT sewn up. I was talking to someone yesterday who has recently left a very high level job within the organization, when I asked him of his future plans, his answer was illustrative of just what Salesforce has achieved:

The platform space is sewn up. It would be a brave company that tried to take Salesforce on with the depth and breadth of product it has built out

As always there are still questions – the existing vendors, SAP, Oracle and the like, won’t sit still for long. I’m picking Oracle for example will accelerate M&A activity, perhaps even bring forward their plans to acquire NetSuite. Microsoft too is a dark horse that can’t be discounted. But if the 90000 attendees, and product announcements that we’ve seen come today are anything to go by, Salesforce will be up there at the top table for the next decade or two.