Monday, November 23, 2009
Software Graveyard
Saturday, November 7, 2009
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.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Great Article
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
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Subprocesses
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
Monday, March 30, 2009
Media Disintermeditation
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
SAAS Cloud Confusion
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Is CRM Dead?
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