Software Graveyard

Tuesday's keynote at Dreamforce was deceptive.

Like in prior years, attendees were treated to an A+ production. From the "Star Wars" like video, to the bombastic welcome from CEO Marc Benioff, to the heartfelt philanthropic discussion with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome, to the product announcements and humor and reinforcements that salesforce.com continues to defy the odds as it snaps up enterprise after enterprise. Yet, despite Dreamforce being phenomenal, it was a study of unintentional deception.

We were deceived because the significance of the main product announcement, salesforce.com Chatter, was lost in the hoopla. We took it as yet another salesforce.com milestone. Similar to AppExchange, Apex, and salesforce.com sites. We just assumed it was another development that would put another brick on the salesforce.com empire. Nothing more.

Moreover, we were disappointed, because in the back of our minds, we saw it as a "follower" move by salesforce, picking up on the collaboration paradigm previously trailblazed by Facebook, Twitter, et all. The new user interface and chatter were copycats from what we already know in the consumer web. While many sat in the audience awaiting the announcement of a marketing automation solution, or a business intelligence solution--these were on the wish lists of many bluewolf customers--Benioff went the chatter route.

So how were we deceived?

We were deceived because we witnessed the most monumental piece of evidence yet that software is officially doomed. Dead. Graveyard. Goodbye. SAP, Oracle, Microsoft. It's over. You read it here. Track their valuations for the next 24 months and then come back to this post and pinch yourself. You can look it up. I mean it. I have witnessed On-Demand and SAAS and The Cloud firsthand for the past ten years--I have built my own business around it--all the while meeting with CIO's whose inalienable right is to deny the future, catering to their legacy infrastructure while users moan and budgets rise. I, too, have sat with these CIO's doubting the speed with which the Cloud model could take hold. No longer.

We were deceived because right in front of 20,000 people Marc Benioff took his enterprise CRM product and turned it into Facebook. Presto. As if it were nothing. And when it is available, in the not too distant future, all of his customer's will get it. Instantly. No upgrades, no fussing, they'll just get it. And they'll be able to share information and collaborate on deals or invoices or customer solutions or whatever they want to collaborate on. In the same manner that they collaborate with relatives and friends and personal networks. In the same manner that we have been begging to collaborate in the business world, without knowing it. In a way that gets us OFF of email, and voicemail, and get's us INTO an easy to use business application that can be accessed from anywhere, tracked, reported on, and shared with anyone.

We'll be able to define our own interface in the same way that that we drag icons on our I*phone or Droid. For the the first time, business users--yes, sales people and service people and controllers and CEO's and marketing vp's--will be able to dictate their own view into enterprise data. Everyone. All 57,000 salesforce.com customer's. No fuss.

Think SAP or Oracle could ever pull that off? How's retirement, Bill?

Chatter is only the beginning of the new salesforce.com. But watch: it will take off fast. And it is a simple change, because the underlying data structure and security and workflow remains intact, leveraged in a manner that will increase the stickiness and adoption of salesforce.com's core services. The fulcrum of the application will become the discussion. Isn't that the fulcrum of every business in the world? If the discussion can be turned into action--by increasing a forecast, or requesting an approval, or booking an order, or talking to a partner, or solving a customer inquiry--without having to then log into another system, won't that make salesforce.com an application that people will instantly adopt, similar to their facebook at home? Won't we solve--for once and for all--the adoption problems of CRM? Has anyone ever been "trained" on facebook?

Benioff has been fighting the consumer web vs. business web conundrum for several years now. It comes up in many of his presentations. But, before Tuesday, his struggle had never pushed through to a solution that stacks salesforce.com well against those solutions. Rather, the interface of salesforce and its basic navigational requirements have slowly become more and more archaic as they have stood still. Those of us that have used it for the past decade will admit, behind closed doors, that it is no longer the "easy to use" application that drove us from Siebel in the first place, only because we have become accustomed to newer things that are now, indeed, "easy to use"--from social networking to the lastest PDA's. Chatter changes things. Dramatically.

And now, what do we stack it up against? Not SAP. Not Oracle. Not Microsoft. There is no one. For Oracle to put this in their product, and ship it to its already "stuffed" customer base, is pure science fiction. To do it to protect their 20% maintenance stream is not enough incentive. In fact, one can argue that the Cloud annuity model is finally turning the corner, because the leverage that a company like salesforce.com can attain from recurring revenue enables them and incentivizes them to innovate--stay still, and they lose customer's. Believe me, this has been the biggest fright at salesforce.com during the recession. When they lose a customer, they lose 100% to a typical software companies 20%. As great as the recurring model is when customer's are buying, it has the opposite affect when they are fleeing.

Innovation becomes the constant necessity. As much as Benioff relishes his annual Dreamforce keynote, he does it for pure survival. That is a good thing for the customer, because if he stood up there every year and pushed out release dates--hello, Larry--he'd be out of business. This year, if you were up close, you could see an extra twinkle in his eye. He knew this was not a typical product announcement. He took his time in the build up--the keynote ran 45 minutes over, and most people said it "dragged on"--and he kept lamenting on the consumer vs. business conundrum. He really, really, really, wanted the crowd to see the impact. But he lost them in the significance of what he was announcing, only because he has done this time and time again, and his audiences trust him, but they trust him to do visionary things, not monumental things.

In the end, it was another great Dreamforce. In the end, the critics will attempt to categorize the announcements and developments into their charts and graphs, and the doubters will complain that the buffet was average or that the Black Crows--the Gala Event concert--are showing their age. In the end, we'll read that CRM is one soft quarter from being sucked up by Oracle.

But mark my words. This was monumental. Goodbye software.

The Importance of Dreamforce

The Importance of Dreamforce

I harbor an extreme detest for trade shows.

They are a waste of time. They are for people that are more comfortable kibitzing around booths than being in front of customers selling. They are for nose pickers. Tire kickers. Trolls. Blueskyers. I believe that most people attend trade shows on a perpetual tour—hopping from venue to venue, Vegas to Miami, burning company funds, holding endless, useless, conversations, gorging on buffets and drowning in cocktails. All the while, they are ignoring their businesses, their kids, and their own personal well- being.

There. I said it.

Dreamforce—salesforce.com’s annual user conference—is the one, lone, exception to my stern conviction against trade shows. And before you call me a two-faced trade show detester, let me explain.

Salesforce.com launched Dreamforce in 2003, in front of 500 attendees in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco—hardly your typical tradeshow venue. At the time, salesforce.com was a private company, with very little revenue, and a grand vision for the “End of Software.” Little did we know what it would become. Its lore, since 2003, is both entertaining and telling.

There was Colin Powell’s speech in 2005, referencing Europe as an “emerging” economy (entertaining); there was the morning keynote that year, when CEO Marc Benioff walked onto stage with an uncontrollable grin, having just learned that Oracle had purchased his nemesis Siebel (telling); there was George Lucas in 2008, warning the audience that we were doomed to be eaten alive by bacteria (entertaining); and, most philosophically, there were keynotes in 2003, 2004, and 2005 by Adam Bosworth, from Microsoft and Google, espousing the benefits of iteration and experimentation in software development, playing directly into the hands of the Cloud, where the cost of change is so much lower than that of traditional software (telling).

My favorite Boswirth moment was his “Intelligent Reaction” keynote, in which he referred to old school software companies who “retreated to these places they called campuses, surrounded by lakes and trees, where they wouldn’t be bothered by the ugliness of the real world.” Four years later, his 15 minute discussion is still a highly relevant and important underscoring of the cultural and organizational shift that cloud computing is enabling across enterprises of all shapes and sizes.

Have a listen: https://admin.acrobat.com/_a13852757/intelligentreaction/

Over the years, Dreamforce has launched Multi-Force (custom tabs), AppExchange, Apex, and just last year, Sites. These are all bold features and approaches that have come to fruition—they are never “marketing” initiatives that defy relevance—and it is for this reason that Dreamforce justifies its existence, despite all of the hype of the cloud. At Bluewolf, our customer’s use original Dreamforce visions on a daily basis. They are real; they are always groundbreaking; and if an enterprise is serious about Cloud computing, Dreamforce is the only venue where it all comes together.

One last question solidifies Dreamforce as a “must attend” show: who else out there, with real Cloud Computing aspirations, has the confidence and commitment to host an annual conference of this magnitude? No one. Not Oracle (Larry doesn’t do Cloud), SAP, Microsoft, or Google; not even Netsuite, Sugar, or Rightnow. These organizations, in my opinion, do not have the fortitude or the risk profile to stage an annual event that broadcasts a future vision of the cloud’s role in enterprise computing. And don’t forget, salesforce.com has been doing this for seven years; they did it when they were private and small; and they are doing it as a billion dollar public entity.

So, I will be there again, for my seventh year, in a few short weeks. And my colleagues at Bluewolf will be there again, for the seventh year, in a few short weeks. And we will listen and learn alongside our clients, looking for ways to leverage the Cloud as a means of conducting better business; selling more, servicing more, and doing more—all tenants to building growing, healthy, enterprises.

Dreamforce is a venue that all organizations should leverage as they look for Clear Success in the Cloud. Just don’t get caught lingering at the booth with those perpetual trade show junkies.

Eric Berridge is co-founder and Principal at Bluewolf, a global provider of Professional Services in the Cloud Economy. He is the co-author of Iterate or Die, a popular treatise on agile software development and the business benefits of Cloud computing. Eric has been recognized as an Ernst & Young entrepreneur of the Year and as CRN's Top 25 Technology Executives.

Great Article

on the confusion surrounding Cloud Computing...remember, it is the Business Process that counts!!!

The Internet Industry Is on a Cloud -- Whatever That May Mean

Forget ASP and Web 2.0: Tech Companies Push Cirrus, Stratus, Other Cumulo-Nebulous Lingo

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER and BEN WORTHEN

Ever since Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt publicly uttered the term "cloud computing" in 2006, a storm has been gathering over Silicon Valley.

Companies across the technology industry are jockeying to associate themselves with clouds. Amazon.com Inc., better known for peddling books online, began selling an Elastic Compute Cloud service in 2006 for programmers to rent Amazon's giant computers. Juniper Networks Inc., which makes gear for transmitting data, dubbed its latest project Stratus. Yahoo Inc., Intel Corp. and a handful of others recently launched a research program called OpenCirrus.

While almost everybody in the tech industry seems to have a cloud-themed project, few agree on the term's definition.

"I have no idea what anyone is talking about," said Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison, when talking about cloud computing at a financial analyst conference in September. "It's really just complete gibberish. What is it?" He added: "When is this idiocy going to stop?"

In its broadest sense, cloud computing describes something apparent to anybody who uses the Internet: Information is stored and processed on computers somewhere else -- "in the clouds" -- and brought back to your screen.

But no two clouds, apparently, are alike. A company's backroom mass of servers and switches is cloudlike. So are social-networking sites like Facebook Inc., or the act of buying a book on Amazon. Some clouds, like Google's email service, Gmail, are public. Others, like corporate networks, are closed to outsiders.

Part of the problem, say observers, is that the tech industry has become bogged down in jargon. Companies have long pushed the likes of "network-distributed parallel processing," often packaged as "solutions" that are "end-to-end" and "scalable." Cloud sounds much nicer.

"What took them so long? Cloud-based services seem much easier to grasp than 'Application Service Provision.' ASP -- who came up with that?" says Michael Litchfield, a creative director at Omnicom Group's Doremus, a communications firm that specializes in technology and financial topics. "The cloud is accessible. It may, in fact, be brilliant."

And possibly overused, says Hewlett-Packard Co. executive Russ Daniels. He says H-P, a backer of OpenCirrus, tries to use the catchphrase only when appropriate. "There is so much pressure to just go with the flow and wrap everything up in this single word," said Mr. Daniels, H-P's vice president and chief technology officer of Cloud Services Strategy.

Despite its recent surge in popularity, the cloud is among the oldest pieces of computer jargon, says Alex Bochannek, a curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. For decades, engineers drew them in schematic diagrams to show where their own network joins another whose inner workings are unknown or irrelevant. "You symbolize that with a cloud, or some amorphous shape," says Mr. Bochannek.

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Salesforce.com

In San Francisco, workers greet attendees at a November conference on 'cloud computing' sponsored by Salesforce.com. The tech industry has adopted 'cloud' as a catchphrase, though few agree on what it means.

By the late 1990s, clouds had become the go-to metaphor for all things Internet. The PowerPoint set used cloud icons in their presentations, at times referring to the Internet simply as "the cloud." New shades of meaning emerged over the past decade as Google and other Internet companies created software that could run simultaneously on multiple servers -- hence, operate in a "cloud."

At a 2006 conference, Google's Mr. Schmidt delivered his public description of the emerging model. He added: "I don't think people have really understood how big this opportunity really is."

Estimates, in fact, vary wildly. Research firm IDC predicts cloud computing will reach $42 billion in 2012. (It defines the segment as "an emerging IT development, deployment and delivery model, enabling real-time delivery of products, services and solutions over the Internet.") Gartner Inc. projects world-wide cloud-services revenue will rise 21.3% in 2009 to $56.3 billion. (Gartner calls it "a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are provided 'as a service' to external customers using Internet technologies"; its forecast includes online advertising.) Merrill Lynch last year estimated cloud-computing revenues would reach $160 billion in 2011. (Merrill declined to provide a copy of its report.)

Analyst Frank Gillett of Forrester Research, which doesn't currently measure the cloud market, says makers of existing technologies -- "grid computing," "virtualization" -- are attempting to co-opt the word. Mr. Gillett calls this process "cloud washing."

Marc Benioff, CEO of online business software company Salesforce.com Inc., cottoned on to the term in December 2007. That was when he read a magazine article that dubbed Google and Amazon cloud-computing leaders.

"We were a laggard in using that name," Mr. Benioff says. For years, Salesforce had described its offerings in terms of "enterprise applications as online services," "online customer relationship management" and "on-demand business services." For his next presentation, Mr. Benioff added two slides on "cloud computing" and berated his staff for not getting Salesforce mentioned in the magazine.

"I couldn't believe how worked up he was about the term," says Tien Tzou, Salesforce's chief strategist at the time. "We had tried all sorts of terms to get the marketplace to understand what we were doing. Cloud computing was going to be the one that would stick," says Mr. Tzou, who went on to found Zuora Inc., a cloud-computing company.

In November, Salesforce held a conference that one of its speakers dubbed the "Woodstock of cloud computing." It hired people to stand outside a convention center in San Francisco, wearing white puffy jackets and holding oversized cloud balloons. Inside, projectors painted a digital sky on the ceiling. The Rolling Stones'"Get Off of My Cloud" blared on the sound system.

In the full fiscal year since Salesforce started using the term cloud computing, its revenue grew 44%. "I think it's the most powerful term in the industry," Mr. Benioff says.

Cloud-themed puns have since multiplied, generating even a few seemingly contradictory uses. Sun Microsystems Inc. recently unveiled a product called the "Sun Cloud." Microsoft Corp. sells a cloud service called "Azure," which the dictionary defines as a cloudless sky. Apple Inc., of course, is doing its own thing: Its new Mobile Me product is branded not with the word cloud, but with an image of one.

Dell Inc. applied to trademark the term cloud computing last year. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office initially approved the application. But it changed its mind in response to an outburst of criticism, including from bloggers incensed that the term could fall under one company's control.

A Dell spokesman says the trademark was intended only to cover "the design of computer hardware for use in data centers." He adds that the computer maker has no plans to pursue the issue further.

For some, clouds are already empty puffery. "We've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do," Mr. Ellison said at the analyst conference in September. "I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements."

Still, Mr. Ellison acknowledged he was powerless: Oracle, too, would probably start using the label. Last week in an earnings call, Mr. Ellison made good: He described Oracle's upcoming software as "cloud-computing ready."

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at geoffrey.fowler@wsj.com and Ben Worthen at ben.worthen@wsj.com

Subprocesses

Many software projects get caught between two divergent ideas: The high level, elevator pitch, process; and the nitty, gritty, piece of functionality. Rationalizing these two things is the trick to successfully deploying an application.

At our company, Bluewolf, we have defined the area in between these as the "subprocess." Our firm focuses on building and automating Demand Generation to Customer Care processes. We typically engage with organizations whose processes need updating, tweaking, or optimizing. We work with Marketing, Sales, Sales Ops, Channel Management, and Finance to define and automate the flow of information from customer inquiry to customer service.

Many people call this process CRM. And while CRM captures the high level idea, it misses the mark in recognizing the hundreds and thousands of processes that go into an effective Lead to Order process. In today's web driven world, where relationships are often predicated on a suppliers ability to serve up on-line content on a personalized, one-to-one basis, it is the subprocess that will ultimately determine a businesses effectiveness.

Here is an example: a customer of ours was having an issue because it had TOO MANY leads. Imagine that. And it could not separate the good leads from the bad leads. So many times sales people were wasting cycles on the bad leads. To solve this problem, we created an Intelligent Lead Subprocess. This subprocess created a lead scoring matrix, and automated the scoring of each lead. Then, the subprocess grouped the leads according to their score, and served them up to the sales people in a prioritized fashion. The customer's close ratio increased by 16%.

Subprocesses are the "plays" that an effective CRM system allows. They are the drivers of user adoption, and they have the greatest positive effect on the ROI of a Demand Generation >> Customer Care project. Most importantly, they are measurable.

For an example of the subprocess above, see http://www.screencast.com/users/ChrisP_at_Bluewolf/folders/Jing/media/7c6231e5-ed0b-4bba-9db4-089e164d93c6

Media Disintermeditation

The following is a great piece that discusses the state of the Newspaper industry.

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

SAAS Cloud Confusion

Lost in the religious debate surrounding the cloud-- is it salesforce.com, is it Google, is it Azure, is it all of the above?--is the discussion that matters most:  how do companies effectively improve their business process?  That, in my mind, is all that matters.  Go back to notecards and filofaxes if it'll deliver incremental and sustainable value (which, of course, it probably won't.)

With the emergence of a real dominant player--a.k.a. salesforce.com--that can be trusted and has the scale to handle enterprise transactions, enterprise accounts, and enterprise headaches, comes a whole bevy of vendors that are pretenders and that will get themselves in trouble by overpromising and underdelivering.  Many of these vendors are fueled with VC money that is running dry.  And many are filling niches which will prove too small to build sustainable businesses.

Every company that is evaluating the cloud and SAAS vendors should put their plans through a "Cloud Litmus Test."  Here is a link to a presentation that I gave at Dreamforce that  describes just how to do this http://everydayceo.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-crm-dead.html.

Is CRM Dead?

CRM is still out there. 15 years after Tom Siebel pushed it into the mainstream. It is one of those dinosaur acronyms that gets immediate name recognition, but lacks inspiration. Thud.

The Cloud, Social Networking, Facebook, Twitter-- all are mechanisms and models which threaten to push the CRM acronym into the junkyard once and for all, instead giving rise to the REAL power that CRM should deliver to the business--real business process automation. Being able to use data and tools that users LOVE, to reach customers, sell them products, understand their needs, and cement lasting relationships.

We view CRM with an eye to the past. We think it is about Leads, Accounts, Opportunities, Orders, and Cases. We think it is an "inward facing" application, used by marketing, sales, and support. But in reality, for CRM to deliver its promise, it is much, much more. Think about an airline. Think about their on-line booking system. Has that traditionally been a CRM application? No. Why not? Doesn't JetBlue's website get to the heart of managing customers? In fact, because it is so good, it alleviates the need for anything more complex in the background. The panacea for CRM is automating processes that put your customers in control, removing as much friction from the selling and service process as possible.

Today, CRM still brings with it the same challenges that it has never been able to shake: poor user adoption, messy data, complex user interfaces, difficult reporting, and poor integration with other systems. To overcome these challenges, and to push the old notion of CRM into the past, there are several things that forward thinking organizations can do to succeed at enabling effective business processes, meeting the ultimate goals of the business initiative:

1. Embrace the user. The "stick" mentality, particularly with this next generation of twentysomethings, does not work. Take the time and the effort to understand exactly what they need, and give it to them in the same way that FaceBook gives them information. Simple, inviting, and cool. Listen to the user before you listen to the executive suite. CRM fails without user adoption. Period. If you don't believe this, don't try it. You will fail.

2. Have a data-enrichment strategy. Every sales and support person is hungry for information that will make them smarter about their customers. Much of this information comes from 3rd party sources. Look at ways to integrate these into your CRM environment. A great example of this a is a company called Inside View.

3. Constantly improve. Organize efforts such that new features and functionality are being pushed out to the user. Don't be afraid to shut things down that did not work.

4. Focus on the sub-process. Focus on the layer beneath the traditional Lead>>Service continuum. For example, a CRM subprocess might be an automated approval process for discounts. It might be a lead scoring process to ensure that sales people are only working on qualified leads. Or, it might be a self-service grid to allow customers to pay extra for the exit row on your flight. Once the foundation for CRM is laid, it is the sub-process that delivers value.

5. Iterate. Avoid big-bang. Release new features in a drip fashion.

I'm not sure that we'll be talking about CRM in five years. I believe that the lines between technology and business will blur, and the things that matter--revenue, profit, customer satisfaction, and innovation--will drive new models and processes which 21st century technology solutions can easily support.

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