Oracle OpenWorld 2013 Sails On
Like any major trade show of long standing, OpenWorld has been in planning for a long time. But this OpenWorld might be the most planned show of its kind ever because in addition to the extravaganza taking place in the Moscone Center, many of the hotels in the area and even in closed-off streets, an important sideshow and object lesson — America’s Cup — is happening in San Francisco Bay.
You might wonder about the connection between the America’s Cup races and OpenWorld. Everyone knows that Oracle is a sponsor of the American Boat and that CEO Larry Ellison has poured significant personal wealth into the cup over many years. The reason the cup is being contested right now is due to the fact that Ellison’s boat won it last time and the defender has its choice of when and where for the defense. So what does this have to do with CRM? Keep reading.
The races, which have been going on all summer if you include all of the qualifying heats have not all gone Oracle’s way for the most part. If you’ve been following events, Oracle started the finals against the New Zealand entry, with a penalty of two races. As always, the Kiwis have a well sailed and skippered ship and it only needs one more win to take the cup home. Now comes CRM.
At OpenWorld many of the breakout sessions start with a short video of CEO Ellison looking right into the camera and intoning, “They don’t call this the PC Age,” along with several other tropes and then, “They call it the Information Age.”
Oracle is making the most of this conference to cement its place as a cloud computing leader, not only in applications but also in hardware and infrastructure software that makes the cloud run. So they’ve introduced some big and very powerful machines and software to run them, that put the whole database in memory and run it from there without the latency you get every time you run to a disk to get more data. Ellison’s keynote introduced the newest version of the database, 12c, which is the in-memory version, plus a new device prosaically called the M6-32 to run it even faster.
All the details will take some time to leach out of this meeting, but in-memory is supposed to improve database performance by a factor of 100 times for some operations and even greater performance has been achieved over the last few years as Oracle’s Sun Microsystems division has repeatedly introduced machines that follow the same script.
But now back to the races. We all know this is not simply the information age but the age of Big Data and that information is only acquired by crunching it. The Oracle boat is bristling with sensors, as have been most America’s Cup entries for decades. But no team has ever been able to crunch data and model boat performance quite the way this year’s contenders have. Team USA has been trailing the Kiwis for the whole series having started with that two race penalty, but then a funny thing happened. Over the weekend the American boat started winning consistently. Indeed they have to because another win ends the competition. It was almost as if the boat had a motor bolted to its stern.
A better explanation, though, is simply that after the first four races the team had enough data to model its boat’s performance and, through the power of analysis, they’ve been able to figure out how to sail the thing a bit better. As I write this, New Zealand has a two race lead and just needs to win one more. But the American boat is sailing different and better, and obviously faster thanks to whatever machinations they’ve been able to figure out, and it’s working.
If the Americans pull a rabbit out of their hat, it will be a stunning demonstration of good sailing but also of the power of analytics paired with Big Data. And even if they fall short, the impressive role reversal on display since late last week will still be enough to fuel endless discussions and possibly end the debate, once and for all, of the importance a disciplined approach to data and information — and modeling — will play henceforth in business and, yes, CRM.
As I wrote earlier, this show has been in the works for a long time, in some respects, you could say since the beginning of the information age. It is rare that you can put your finger on a moment in time when everything changed and the moments when the change is actually good are even more rare. Yet here one is apparently playing out in San Francisco on land and even on the sea.
Salesforce and Workday Get Closer
I started getting rumors last week when a reporter called me to ask about Oracle buying Salesforce. She was riffing on the announcement over the summer by Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, that the two companies would use some of each other’s technologies and make it easier for customers to use heterogeneous combinations of their products.
I said, and still believe, that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the U.S. or an equivalent body in the Euro-zone would not bless the marriage for the simple reason that Salesforce is both the market leader in CRM and the most significant independent vendor. Buying Salesforce would leave Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft as the dominant players and because each is more of an ERP vendor than a CRM vendor, I fear — and I think the regulators would too — a slowdown in CRM innovation right when we need it the most. So I don’t give that rumor much credence.
Instead, what we got was an announcement today that Workday and Salesforce will develop closer ties to enable their joint customers to more easily use their integrated products. This will be accomplished by the two companies making their platforms work better together.
This makes a great deal of sense to me for many reasons.
Enterprise business software today is less about individual applications than it is about processes and where application boundaries meet, a business process sometimes has to get off the highway and take a dirt road. It can’t remain like this. Dirt roads happen when there’s an inelegant handoff of both data and process metadata and too often, the solution of integrating the applications doesn’t do enough to pave the process path.
At the same time though, vendors routinely put up roadblocks to their systems to preserve their differentiation and to a degree hold customers captive. The term walled garden has its origins here, I think. So in agreeing to merge platforms to a greater or lesser degree, these two vendors have, or will, greatly reduce those barriers and effectively provide a kind or pre-integration for their wares. And since one is all about the front office and the other is back office oriented it looks like an ideal marriage.
This has been a grail quest for decades going back to COBOL compilers. COBOL may have been one of only four ANSI certified standard programming languages but that never stopped vendors from offering extensions that locked in customers and more to the point, each vendor had its own proprietary compiler that enforced the differences in the standards. Get it?
So making platforms semi-permeable, to borrow a phrase from biology, makes things better for the customer but it also does an interesting thing for the vendors. In a way it greatly reduces the need to buy companies in an effort to merge software and extend the reach of the underlying merged business processes. You don’t buy the dirt road, you just pave it.
Salesforce seems to be taking the lead in using this tactic, which you’d expect from a company in their position — wanting to remain independent while offering the most flexibility to customers living with the reality of heterogeneous systems. It is another example of the Blue Ocean strategy I keep hammering on because it elevates the discussion to process from application.
At some point most vendors will need a similar approach, just as most now pay homage to cloud computing after bad mouthing it for years. But I wonder what will happen in a few years when the software industry comes to resemble the European Union with no tariffs or boarder crossings. Enterprise software could become one massive plasma of process and data. What will the differentiators be? Ideally it will be a further evolution of business services and probably information gleaned from analyzing a very large Big Data pool. Or not. I am not the best prognosticator, that’s why I keep watching and writing.
Microsoft Buys Nokia, Gets Elop Back
With a nod and a wink Microsoft announced it was buying most of Nokia today getting its own mobile phone platform to further its ambitions in that space. It also got ex-Microsoft executive, Stephen Elop back into the fold. Elop had left Microsoft to head up Nokia and when current CEO Steven Ballmer announced recently that he would retire, Elop was among the people cited as possible successors. At the time though, Elop’s tenure at Nokia looked to be a significant barrier. It’s amazing how many hurdles $7.2 billion can clear away.
So the question immediately becomes, does Elop want the job? Does the board want Elop or was the acquisition just more business as usual? Well, with or without Elop as the future Microsoft CEO, the deal makes sense. Microsoft’s Windows Mobile has not seen great adoption despite its really attractive and intuitive interface. Google’s Android leads the parade (it’s hard to argue with free) and Apple’s iOS is the defacto standard in the industry which makes it difficult for Microsoft to play catch-up, a game that’s not second nature to it to begin with.
So what’s the net?
Assume Elop is the future face of Microsoft keynotes. A blind horse knows the future of computing is in wireless, handheld devices and the cloud. But too much has been made in recent years of the device and not much consideration has been given to the huge changes ahead in the data center to make the magic in the device really work.
The device is the new 3270, smarter for sure and much smaller, but it’s a relatively dumb terminal at the end of an extensive network of satellites, storage, and brute force processing. Given this, success in the cloud will be governed by more than whose OS is in your hand. It will be about the back end. Larry Ellison understands this and his team is working overtime to build the plumbing for the new edifice. And there are loads of vendors like the Benioff Company that are staking a lot on the front office and the device while doing a fair bit in the back of the house too.
But Salesforce may be to the cloud what Apple was for a long time to the desktop. Elegant, forward thinking, entrepreneurial — pick a half dozen more nice adjectives here. This doesn’t mean Salesforce is destined to have a measly five percent share of the market, Benioff is too smart for that. But it does mean there is still an open niche in the cloud for a Microsoft-like competitor that understands the front and the back end of the transaction and that wears the mantle of trust so assiduously cultivated by IBM in the business world. It might as well be Microsoft.
So, given all that, I look at the Elop acquisition, er, I mean Nokia actually, and I think this could work. Elop’s understanding of Microsoft and his recent baptism in mobile might be a good combo in the new Microsoft chief.
There are other issues well beyond those, however. The new CEO at Microsoft will need to be a consensus maker and someone who can break down the fiefdoms that long time Microsoft executives have constructed. The company has to get lean and to check its multiple egos before it is ready to take on the changed market — from somewhere that’s not the bottom but certainly is not the top either. Also, it’s no guarantee that you can take the once great phone maker, Nokia, and the one time titan of the desktop and get anything more than mush when you put them together. Elop, or whoever gets the nod will need to be a leader of Bill Clinton proportions.
Bracket Labs — Custom Developers for the Salesforce Platform
This post is part of an occasional series on the AppExchange as Salesforce.com celebrates the seventh anniversary of its launch. The series will focus on some of the most interesting AppExchange applications of the last year.
Bracket Labs is a good example of a native AppExchange company. Founded in 2010 in Boulder, CO, Bracket is dedicated to making simple and powerful applications that enhance the Salesforce user experience. Their native Salesforce Platform apps improve business processes and operate across traditional functional areas of business and CRM. The two products in market at the moment include TaskRay an app for project management and a shared marketing calendar for managing Marketing Campaigns.
Don’t be fooled, these apps are not simply reincarnations of paper based management systems. Both incorporate Chatter functionality and leverage data captured in the Salesforce CRM system.
So, for example, TaskRay is useful in a project management situation but instead of relying on paper based Gant charting techniques, the system leverages Chatter to determine what part of a project demands the most attention now and which elements can be done in sequence later. Chatter captures input from the team involved at every point in the process and through collaboration and drag and drop techniques users prioritize effort and solve challenges ensuring that the project is managed to goal.
This approach gives TaskRay a flavor of what Salesforce often refers to as a “scrum,” in which the needed people and resources converge on a problem and participate in creating a solution and then leave to do something else that’s equally important. Using Chatter ensures that the team will have a full record of the process in the Salesforce feed and Chatter also provides a convenient platform for sharing documents and other files needed to support the project.
Campaign Calendar does much the same for marketing projects. The company likes to say that Campaign Calendar helps users to visualize the campaign through calendars and timelines that are color coded for easy reference. It then supports team collaboration and campaign management through Chatter and by capturing and managing the campaign details. This helps the team to share everything about the project or campaign and provides a concise history of the campaign.
TaskRay and Campaign Calendar are two examples of long tail applications. In this case, neither is hard to conceptualize and many companies have built their own versions of these systems in spreadsheets or loose paper files. But neither of those approaches make it easy to maintain communication within the group and they can waste time and resources through inefficiency.
Until the AppExchange and the Salesforce Platform came along however, there was no good and affordable way to automate these processes. But with the Salesforce Platform, this type of application is easy to make and maintain. These applications save a great deal of time and resources by making information sharing easy and that’s one of the most important benefits of long tail applications.
Salesforce.com Platform Powered Obama Re-Election
The technology world made significant behind the scenes contributions on behalf of both political parties in the recent presidential election. That was all kept out of the spotlight for good reasons during the campaign but now that it’s all over some of the people involved are talking, most notably the people at Salesforce who provided IT services to the Obama campaign.
No doubt you recall how close the election seemed and how some people were using old style gut feel to predict a GOP victory. Meanwhile people like Nate Silver of the New York Times and MSNBC were using data analysis and regression testing and who knows what else to tease apart reams of data to arrive at very different conclusions.
The data came from many sources and much of it was collected on iPads and mobile devices and sent to Salesforce.com where the national campaign workers could aggregate, cull and analyze the data and then deploy resources exactly where they were needed. It’s very difficult to discuss almost anything political these days and in New York Marc Benioff emphasized that this week when he introduced this video.
Forget about who won, who you backed and all the other stuff. This is about something else. This video is about how a billion dollar organization came to life and ran full tilt changing its software on the fly as needs arose. As a business case it’s pretty stark too because unlike business an election is a one time thing, the #2 company in a market might still have plenty of opportunities but not a political candidate. That’s one of the things that make this video and what the Obama team did using Salesforce so interesting.
