September 30, 2011
Ok, so maybe it wasn’t paradise but then again with all the new tools Salesforce is rolling out for multiple kinds of computing whose primary overlap is the significance of the Internet is their use, this was kind of a Bonanza — Little Joe! Get my compiler! (Sometimes I crack myself up.) At any rate, my thoughts on what Dreamforce meant to developers in the form of a post can be found at SearchCRM here.
The recently concluded Dreamforce conference in San Francisco might have been the most successful CRM conference ever. That’s not hyperbole. I have been at some major events in the last ten years that rival this year’s Dreamforce. For instance, whenever Siebel had a user conference that was also major. But a lot has happened since the last time Siebel held an independent user event not associated with Oracle — that was in 2005 and much has happened in the intervening six years.
In that time SaaS and cloud computing have finished their takeover of corporate computing — at least the majority of the hearts and minds. Analytics has become important everywhere (including analytics in CRM was pioneered by Siebel) and, of course, social media has given new life to the whole front office. All of this came together in the recent Dreamforce. Beyond that, though, Salesforce has clearly shown that it intends to change the business application development and deployment paradigm with a host of databases, data storage options, programming languages and platforms.
You might think that this is a good time to take a breath and contemplate a new line of work because this all seems locked down but you’d be mistaken. Despite all the glitter of Dreamforce there are still many minds to change. Social and cloud computing have nicely established beachheads in strategic areas and even skeptics are likely to acknowledge that the world is changing. But there’s nothing pre-ordained that says cloud and social will carry the day.
There’s still a good deal of skepticism in the IT community about using applications from the cloud, about data security in the cloud and about performance. Where social business techniques are concerned many old line IT directors and CIOs still regard social media applied to business as something between a fad, a waste of time and coddling young employees.
As many of you know, I’ve been a judge in the CRM Idol competition organized by Paul Greenberg. Most of the heavy lifting (it’s still ongoing) was taken care of before Dreamforce. For instance, we all took about forty briefings in a two week period and our brains are tired. But the confluence of these events has left me with a unique perspective on the marketplace enabling me to look forward and back about ten years in each direction.
Looking back I can see applications built in the last decade or even earlier that still try to cover CRM’s basic stovepipes. They are applied to shrinking niches but their owners still manage to find an audience. These applications are serviceable but no one will confuse them with the systems of tomorrow. The futuristic applications we saw do things I didn’t even know we needed but now I wonder how long before they’ll hit the big time. In all of this I learned that the marketplace is simultaneously rather conservative and equally progressive.
The market is conservative in the way of the old maxim, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And that maxim informs much of the IT community that can’t see the benefit of socializing front office business practices no matter the growing list of success stories to the contrary that you point to.
However, in its more progressive moments, the market is like a machine hungry for fuel and raw material so that it can make the next products. This hungry market is what propels us and keeps the conservatives on their toes so that at the first sign that the old paradigm is broken, they leap to fix it with whatever new solutions are at hand.
This is not to say that backsliding is impossible. If you look at most of the cloud offerings today, you notice an eerie similarity in many products. They aren’t so much cloud solutions as they are what Marc Benioff likes to call false clouds. They are conventional applications running in a datacenter in the sky without benefit of the standards and multi-tenancy that is the heart of cloud computing.
August showed me all of that — from Idol to Dreamforce — and in the weeks and months ahead you’ll hear more from us about Idol and what seems hot to us. We’ll also be watching Salesforce to see how well it makes good on its Dreamforce promises. The conservatives and progressives will continue their back and forth and it will seem like there is no progress yet when you raise your head from the tasks immediately in front of you it will be apparent that progress is incremental as it has to be. That’s why, despite the success of Dreamforce, the IT debates are not over and the work continues.
It’s worthwhile to consider the economic consequences of Dreamforce — the products announced as well as the cultural issues it raised. Now, I am not an economist and I encourage you to think about that and maybe not read this if that matters.
Many people might look at the news coming out of San Francisco and try to calculate the ROI on one or another introduction or announcement but I think that’s like looking through the wrong end of the telescope. ROI is a financial measure and when I think about economics, especially marco economics, I am trying to figure out how the changes affect the ways we work and make money now and especially in the future. Let’s take a look a just a few ideas.
DRO
Salesforce announced a data residency option (Database Rights Option or DRO) aimed at letting companies store their data on their own devices rather than in the cloud. I’ve already written that this approach will be welcomed by companies and government entities that can’t for regulatory or policy reasons, let their data reside on a cloud infrastructure. There are many organizations in that position and this should be a boon to their approaches to IT but also a boon to Salesforce’s business.
About the only folks who might be adversely affected will be other vendors. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle have made a big deal of offering architectures that run in any mode including on-line, on-prem and hybrid implementations. They’ve taken this to market and used it as a differentiator with Salesforce but that’s rapidly fading in importance, in part I believe, because these solutions preserve single tenancy for applications.
True enough, the other vendors can claim that companies can still own their source code and to be able to manipulate it at their whim while Salesforce still holds the code and is totally responsible for managing it. Of course customer developed code might be stored in the cloud but Salesforce will not be editing it. Just backing it up and acting as a custodian.
Which is better? I like the idea that Salesforce will continually upgrade its code and make sure that its updates do nothing to corrupt my code. In my humble opinion VRO is a net positive. Sure it goes against the Salesforce religion but it gives customers what they want and does not compromise the applications.
The Social Enterprise
Salesforce did a good job of defining what is most important — the social enterprise. This is not a new buzz word or a new shiny object. In incremental steps over the last three years the company has been defining social business, building products to support it and training the early adopters.
There is a lot of heavy lifting left to do here and the world outside of Dreamforce is not always welcoming. At a press conference on Thursday, Marc told an interesting story about this reality. He said that he speaks with CIOs and other C-suite people all the time and on one occasion recently — a conference, I think —he showed a CIO Chatter. When the CIO saw the stream his first question was, “So now the person receiving all this has to answer it?” The answer was not, shall we say, appreciated and with that the CIO said this isn’t for me. Net/net there’s still a lot of proselytizing to be done and a lot of reticence to be over come. Last week I mentioned some research just out of Cornell that examines why we like creative ideas but shy away from creativity, check it out here xxx.
The Social Customer
There are many manifestations of the social customer. It can be someone who renders an opinion on a product or service, someone who lends a hand to help out someone with a question or an issue and it’s someone who values privacy. I was struck in watching Marc’s conversation with Eric Schmidt of Google, of how many times Schmidt in describing a social interaction, used words like, “With the user’s permission”.
One question from a British reporter at the same press conference had to do with not wanting a socialized customer service person to see everything a customer might have recently posted on social media. Some things while social are still reserved for the intimates of the poster. That’s a fair point and one that right now gets the very unsatisfactory answer of, well if you don’t want the world to see it, don’t post it. That’s hardly comforting to many people but I think the issue won’t be solved with more technology. I think it will be an issue of professionalism. We forget that in addition to building out a new technology infrastructure that we’re also building the rules of the road and this might be an example of where smart use of the technology trumps more technology.
This will likely be a touchy topic for some time and the sensitivity will be different from culture to culture and country to country. As an economic issue privacy might be the biggest roadblock to mass adoption and my advice to anyone listening would be to never take it for granted and to continue being as explicit as Schmidt.
Heroku, Ruby and developers
One of the areas that gets almost no coverage is what all this means for developers and as it turns out there was a lot at Dreamforce for them. Salesforce is on a path that delivers tools for three major kinds of development — business applications, websites and I don’t know what to call it, web resident apps. Schmidt was emphatic about the need for the modern company to be able to develop quickly and iterate toward perfection while enabling users to get at products quickly.
For business applications there’s the Force.com platform with a choice of Java and Apex, the company’s proprietary language that basically fills in declaratively where point, click, drag and drop don’t do enough. Then there’s the company’s website builder. You can build a website integrated with your Salesforce instance using your data. This capability is most useful for building customer facing apps that capture customer data and interact directly with them. So a registration page is the obvious example.
Finally, Salesforce spent a lot of cash buying Heroku which is a development environment that uses Ruby on Rails and several other languages like Java, to build applications that are intended to live on the web perhaps at other sites. A great example of this is Facebook integrated applications. Some people are referring to F-commerce meaning commerce apps on Facebook and that’s very exciting. Heroku is a go to choice for building applications that run well and scale massively for the Web. In a demo we saw an application built by NBC to promote Warner Borothers’ new Harry Potter movie.
Obviously, this illustrates the idea that Heroku might be a good choice for this kind of app but even more importantly, it shows us that we probably don’t know how all of this technology and infrastructure will be adopted and consumed in the years ahead. That’s what makes Dreamforce so interesting and the ideas unveiled there so powerful.
I am glad I dodged a hurricane to get to Dreamforce. I lost my voice but recovered and saw a lot of cool people. It’s going to give me something to write about for a while.
Necessity is the mother of invention and last year when Bill Clinton was late for the closing keynote, Marc may have discovered an ideal medium for closing out Dreamforce. This year he perfected it.
I don’t know if Clinton was scheduled to give a conventional speech last year or a sit down interview I only know that in selecting Stevie Wonder as an interview subject, the limitations of the situation bred a new kind of closing ceremony and enabled a new level of customer or audience intimacy. Mr. Wonder is many things but one thing he is not is a stump speaker like the former president. In selecting Wonder, Benioff had to accept that limitation and from it the interview format was a natural outcome. But who knew the Marc could be such an engaging interrogator and listener?
This year the interview was established and organized as much as such a thing can be. In selecting Eric Schmidt of Google, Benioff called on a friend of several decades, a former colleague at Oracle and an individual who has by any measure lived the life of a highly successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur and innovator. Benioff and Schmidt spent more than an hour discussing the evolution of their industry and setting what Dreamforce had been all about in that context. When you left it was still possible to think of an alternative universe, but only with great difficulty.
In fact, there is no alternative universe. You get what you have and what we all have is an industry that is leading business into the new century and a new era. That era is mobile and social, it is connected physically and emotionally and increasingly the connectors are technologies. It is also rapidly iterative and Salesforce was careful within Dreamforce to ensure it touched all bases.
Benioff’s breakthrough with Schmidt at this year’s Dreamforce was the realization that other people could carry the ball and deliver the same kind thought leadership that Salesforce is delivering. Salesforce has always been about extending thought leadership; about getting people to imagine a world without the complexities of conventional IT. The closing interview didn’t just expand that franchise, it sent a lot of people home knowing they were on the right track and doing something important.
One of the more announcements Marc Ben off made in his Day 1 Keynote was related to database.com. The news is that Salesforce is now enabling its customers to store their data on their own hardware inside their data centers.
There is a need or at least a demand for this capability as many large enterprises and government institutions do not wish to, or are prohibited from, sending their data outside of their four walls. In some geographies they can’t let data cross national borders. So, in Europe for instance that would at least in theory mean a need for a Salesforce data center in each locale. That’s clearly not going to happen so the move to in-house storage makes a certain amount of sense.
Nonetheless, this also introduces a new level of complexity to the situation and potentially makes cloud computing less rather than more stable. With more points of physical integration and storage, individual customers are paradoxically, now at their own mercy. If their storage goes down, who do they point fingers at?
This certainly takes a little wind out of the sails of the competition who have been hammering on the idea that their solutions are more configurable because they offer on-premise options. That’s getting to be a difference without a distinction.
At least and most importantly the software stays in the Cloud where Salesforce can manage and upgrade it. Multi-tenancy lives on and perhaps this concession to storage will bring more people into the fold.
