Salesforce

Salesforce - is if not the trend-setter in the Enterprise, than it's certainly the indicator of most important trends in this sphere. The company had grown on the wave of CRM and SaaS, then came to the front edge of cloud platforms, mobile applications and social software. And now Salesforce wants to occupy two more hot areas - Talent Management and Gamification. The common goal of these technologies - is staff motivation and development. Crazy demand for talent management system has been proven by SuccessFactors, which has set several records in SaaS-implementation and recently was acquired by SAP. And we have already mentioned about Gamification potential. So, today Salesoforce has bought one of the most promising startups in these areas - Rypple (known as Zynga for Enterprise).

Salesforce always used to call its products - the Clouds. Until now, Salesforce had 3 product-clouds: Sales Cloud (CRM system), Service Cloud (customer support system) and the Collaboration Cloud (or Chatter). Today the company is launching the new Social Marketing Cloud. It's a combination of two products: the social media monitor Radian6 and cloud CMS for creating websites Siteforce. We have already told a lot about Radian6. Radian6 was acquired by Saleforce earlier this year and it's customer list includes Dell, GE, Kodak, UPS, etc. Radian6 can monitor social networks for mentioning of your brand, company, products, competitors, analyze public opinion, engage in to social conversations. Integration with Salesforce CRM now allows to use Radian6 to create social profiles in CRM and track the history of social communications, send messages to social networks directly from the CRM interface (watch video).

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff can use any news or events for his marketing purposes. In his latest speeches, Mark is  talking about the well-known social movement Occupy Wall Street. As you know, this demonstration was organized mainly via the social networks, and in particular thank to the Twitter hashtag #OccupyWallStreet. "Look, what social networks can do" - says Benioff - "they can overthrow governments. And they also can easily destroy your business. Ignoring social networks - is ignoring your customers." Benioff has launched his own Twitter hashtag #OccupyTheEnterprise and scares enterprises with it. And from the other hand, he cites the example of using social networks by the Salesforce client  - KLM airlines.

A year ago at Oracle's OpenWorld conference the Salesforce CEO, Mark Benioff, took the stage to criticize Oracle's cloud technologies. He said that clouds can't be sold in metalic boxes, and in fact - these are false cloud, and everyone should beware of them. And thought the Oracle's boss, Larry Ellison, joked back then, but the offense remained in his mind. This year, he decided to revenge. First, he unexpectedly canceled the scheduled and paid Benioff's session at the OpenWorld. Of course, this didn't scare Benioff - he immediately organized the alternative session in the restaurant across the street. And, of course, the main topic of his speech was Oracle's false cloud, and near the restaurant people were walking with banners "The Cloud Must Go On".

Salesforce seriously decided to become the leading provider of customer support solutions. Its own solution Salesforce Service Cloud is already almost flying to space, but its price is also too cosmic for small business. Therefore, in order to land SMBs, the company decided to buy (for $80 million) the one of the two most popular SaaS Helpdesk services - Assistly (the second - is Zendesk). Assistly fits perfectly into the Salesforce's new Social Enterprise concept. This service allows you to communicate with customers via Twitter, Facebook, client forum, live-chat as well as via traditional channels (email and phone). At the same time support people work in one simple interface. Also, Assistly is known for its original pricing: it's free for one helpdesk agent, and the additional agents can use the service on per-hour based model ($1/hour). So if no requests are coming to support - your company pays nothing for the helpdesk.

We continue to monitor the gamification of business applications. And the first gamified CRM is ... Nitro for Salesforce. This system was presented at the recent Dreamforce 2011 conference and will launch later this month. It's interesting that Nitro for Salesforce is created not by some guys from garage, but by the gamification professionals at Bunchball. For several years, this company is developing games for various projects. Its clients include Warner Brothers, NBC, HP, Comcast, Playboy. However, so far the company developed game mechanics only for consumer projects, and now decided to try its technologies in business application. As it's clear from the title, Nitro for Salesforce - is an add-on for Salesforce CRM.

On Friday nobody wants to read long news. Good video is much better. This is the video that was shown at the opening of the Dreamforce 2011 conference - probably the most glamorous event in the IT-industry. This video marks the focus change of Marc Benioff and his Salesforce. Last eight years the Dreamforce conference started and ended with the word Cloud. Now it changed. Moreover, one of the main news of this year conference was the opportunity for Salesforce customers to store part of their data on a local server, not in the Cloud. And the new main focus for Salesforce is Social Enterprise. Benioff is comparing modern companies with the Arab countries falling under revolutions: "Either CEOs will make their companies social, or customers and employees will depose them like Muammar Gaddafi". So what should a company do to become social?

Your company still don't use the (free) Chatter? Then Salesforce is coming to you. Today, the company has introduced the new version of this social collaboration tool. The new Chatter absorbed the functionality of the web-conferencing tool DimDim, that Salesforce acquired earlier this year. Now Chatter allows to see the online status of other users, communicate with them in real-time chat and even start screen-sharing sessions. The chat and screen-sharing support the group mode. In addition, Chatter now allows you to collaborate not only internally but also with external users. Now you can create an private group and invite your customers and partners to it.

It wasn't so easy to create a list of the largest SaaS projects. Because though SaaS vendors would like to promote themselves, they often have no clearance from customer to go public on their deployments. Sometimes, when a dispute on the largest projects starts, they claim that they have a customer with XXX users, but don't tell what customer and provide no proof. Therefore, our rating is based on unverified information. However, it is interesting that neither Salesforce nor Google Apps are included in it. And four out of five deployments - are talent management (or human capital - HRM) systems:

Columbia Pictures film makers are said to be keen to follow-up the phenomenal box office success of The Social Network with the new IT blockbuster. And they see the meteoric rise of the Cloud giant Salesforce.com as the perfect story. In addition the screenplay is almost ready - it will be base on Marc Benioff's book "Behind the Cloud". The new movie, that will be called "Salesforce. The Movie" - is the story of how a simple idea grew out into the billion-dollar business, of how young Benioff did not give up when the leaders of the software industry, led by his former boss Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, laughed at him. At the moment Columbia Pictures has already commissioned a screenplay and is casting for the major roles. Russell Crowe is strongly tipped to land the lead role of CEO Marc Benioff:

Social Web monitoring is becoming an integral part of modern CRM systems and Salesforce is intending to be at the cutting edge of this trend. Today the company announced the acquisition of Canadian service Radian6, that has the reputation of the best social Web monitoring tool. Radian6 has such customers as Dell, General Electric, Kodak, Pepsico, UPS, Microsoft. In addition, Radian6 is used as an inbuilt tool in other CRM systems and social software, such as Jive and HubSpot. Also recently Radian6 was integrated with the customer support system Salesforce Service Cloud and probably Salesforce liked it so much that decided to buy it. According to Mark Benioff, they're going to use Radian6 also for Sales Cloud and Chatter (to merge the internal and external communities) and Force.com platform (to enable third-party developers to easily integrate their apps with social networks).

The guys from Salesforce, that are engaged in developing Service Cloud, can't help repeating that traditional customer support systems (Call-centers + CRM / Helpdesk) - are already obsolete. They are built in expectation that a phone call is the primary communication channel that customers use to get support. But the world has changed. Customers want to solve their problems via the Internet - in Facebook, Twitter, forums. They want to talk to tech support via online chat or personal account at the company's website. They want to read what other users say about a product. They want to use video and screen-sharing, to show the problem to support engineer, rather than explain everything by phone. All these requirements are met in the new version of Service Cloud 3.

In the past few days, the hype around Salesforce Chatter overshadows all other Enterprise 2.0 news. And of course, the developers of Chatter's main rival - Yammer have taken the chance to get a share of public attention and reminded Salesforce boss about how all this stuff was started. It started 3 years ago, when at the startup contest Techcrunch50 Yammer team introduced the world's first enterprise microblogging tool. Marc Benioff was the judge there and he expressed his excitement about the new service. And now, 3 years later Salesforce has introduced the Yammer's twin - Chatter.com. However, Yammer developers say that during those 3 years they where busy adding new features and have built much more advanced functionality and market progress. Yammer's progress is really amazing, but now it will be hard for them to compete with FREE Chatter.

Though Salesforce announced free Chatter back in November 2010 and it was officially launched on Feb. 1, 2011, we specifically waited for today when the joint project of Salesforce and Black Eyed Peas has been unveiled. It is a cool example of the beautiful marketing, that becomes an integral part of Enterprise 2.0. To be successful in today's economy every IT business needs to attract attention and, therefore, should become a show business. No one is very excited about the news like "Salesforce partnered with Dell". But the news "Salesforce partnered with Black Eyed Peas" - really attracts attention of potential customers. Nobody wants to look at how Marc Benioff talks about Chatter advantages, but it's very interesting to at him dancing to the Will.I.Am's bit:

Salesforce has acquired the popular SaaS service Manymoon, that is known as the best project management tool for Google Apps. Moreover, since Google Apps Marketplace opening, Manymoon has been the top app there. So, it would be logical is Google bought the service. But Salesforce, that is now aggressively taking on collaboration market, did it first. Obviously, soon the project management functionality will appear in Salesforce Chatter. In addition, for Salesforce this acquisition means getting a connetor to Google Apps. So we can also expect better integration between Chatter and Google services. According to the official Manymoon announcement, the service will continue to exist separately and will not change anything for the free and paid versions. Besides, the developers promise to continue adding new features. They also say that Salesforce will significantly improve the scalability, reliability and security of Manymoon.

Salesforce has announced the acquisition of Indian web-conferencing service DimDim for $31 million. It's very appropriate acquisition for Salesforce. The company wants to dominate on the collaboration market with its social collaboration system Chatter. And web-conferencing and video conferencing (provided DimDim) - are the necessary collaboration components. Besides, DimDim can be used as a solution for online presentations and remote support, built into Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. The only thing that seems inappropriate - is difference in business approach of these two companies. DimDim is known for its freemium open-source model, that was very annoying for the key market players - Webex, GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect. Salesforce, on the other hand, likes to count money and provide something for free only having counted the profit. Therefore, it's not surprising that immediately after the announcement the free SaaS and open-source versions of DimDim have disappeared from the site. And those users who are already using the free SaaS version - can continue using it only until March 15, 2011. The open-source DimDim version can still be found on Sourceforge.

Social Email plug-ins have become a hot topic. And as a result - the increasing interest towards them from the large vendors and investors. The most well-known representative of this class - Xobni was actually acquired by Cisco. Rapportive recently received the $1 million investment. The other day it found out that RIM (Blackberry) is going to acquire Gist. And yesterday, Salesforce bought for $6 million another similar service - Etacts. As all above mentioned alternatives, Etacts can pull contact profile data from public social networks and display it in email-client - so it acts as a the social CRM. But besides that, it lets you send personalized email-campaigns, display the history of communications with certain person and remind you when you need to contact him. How does it do it?

At the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce demonstrated one more time that now it's not so interested in CRM (it was mainly a subject for jokes) as in cloud platforms. Following the release of SaaS database Database.com, the company introduced another big Force.com feature - Heroku - the PaaS startup that Salesforce has recently acquired for $ 212 million. Heroku - is a cloud platform for developing and hosting Ruby-applications (Ruby - is a popular framework for developing Web apps, created by 37Signals). Heroku became one of the five PaaS-services included in the new version Force.com 2. And the new structure of the Force.com platform now looks like this:

Microsoft marketing people couldn't get enough of their cool marketing idea. On the street near the conference center, where the Salesforce's Dreamforce conference takes place, they send their people on segways with banners (on picture). The banner shows a dissapointed man, who has moved from Saleforce to MS Dynamics CRM Online. Under his photo there is a strapline: "I didn't get forced". But Microsoft marketers did not know whom they are dealing with... In the beginning of the second coference day Mark Benioff, Salesforce CEO, entered the stage...

It seems that Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, was thinking for a long time about how to outdo his "friend" Larry Ellison and prove to him that Cloud Computing - is not a vaporware. And he invented a cloud database that will run as a SaaS service without any software and hardware. After all, Oracle is now virtually a monopolist in the database market (after the SUN/MySQL acquisition) and if it will work, it's the best way to hurt Larry. For greater effect, Benioff has bought an ideal domain Database.com. And today at Dreamforce conference Mark presented the new service. Database.com allows to create reliable, scalable databases using the visual interface and access them from any mobile / web / desktop application via API-interfaces (SOAP and REST). It allows to store any type of content (including documents, pictures, video), supports the SQL query language and provides many additional bells and whistles, like push-update data from the database to application, user management and user authentication.

Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, was in good mood during his conference call with financial analysts. First, he boasted that the company's revenues has grown by 30%, and profit - by 100% compared to the previous year, and that in 2012 fiscal year Salesforce expects to set the new great record for a SaaS industry - $2 billion revenue. Secondly, Mark announced that the social collaboration tool Chatter will be available in free edition. Benioff was very proud describing Chatter. This is the most successful Salesforce product in term of annual growth. Since the year after launch, it's used in 60000 companies, that makes it the most popular intranet social network. Among its users - Dell (90 thousand seats), Amazon, Bank of America, Motorola, Siemens and Vodafone. Yahoo! and Nokia use Chatter even not being Salesforce CRM users. And unlike Salesforce CRM users, that get Chatter for free, they pay $15 per user per month.

At least since the previous year experts are talking about Social CRM, as of the most promising technology on the large CRM market. Now, these talks have the official confirmation - Gartner has published the Social CRM Magic Quadrant (as a rule, such reports are only created for the largest markets). According to the report, 80% of the CRM market growth in 2010 is due to the Social CRM development and the total investments in the social CRM in the next year will reach $1 billion. So what is social CRM? Gartner refers the following technologies to this concept: social Web monitoring, fetching contact information from social media, customer/partner community management, collecting feedback and ideas from customers. According to the report, Social CRM market leaders are Jive SBS and Lithium. Both solutions do not contain traditional CRM functionality, but rather, are designed for integration with traditional CRM. Salesforce, thanks to the release of Chatter, Ideas and acquiring Jigsaw, managed to get only into Visionaries section. Note the absence of startups in the Challengers section - it promises good opportunities for those who will decide to enter this market now.

This week, Microsoft filed a lawsuit against Salesforce, blaming the SaaS company in violating 9 patents. These patents are not about CRM functionality (it would be strange, because Salesforce CRM appeared earlier than Microsoft CRM was developed), but about basic software technologies. For example, here is the technology of displaying web-page with embedded menu: "A request for a web page is received from a web browser In response to the request, a web page and an applet associated with the web page are packaged for transmission to the web browser. The web page and the applet are then transmitted to and downloaded by the web browser. When the web page is displayed and the applet is executed by the web browser, the applet creates and manages an embedded menu in the displayed web page under control of the applet . This embedded menu provides a user of the web browser with a plurality of links through one action in the displayed web page." Perhaps having this patent, Microsoft could close any SaaS vendor, but they have chosen Salesforce, their main competitor on CRM market.

If you develop SaaS service or intend to move the IT infrastructure to the Internet, then, of course, you can buy VPS or dedicated server. But in the era of Cloud Computing that option is obsolete. If you want to have a really reliable, secure and scalable hosting,  to automate most operations and (eventually) save money, it is logical to use one of the cloud platforms. And, depending on your goal, you can select a very interesting solution, which provides far more opportunities superior than conventional hosting. For example, for SaaS developers some platforms provide ready client base. Below - our top ten list of cloud platforms.

Salesforce and Google are becoming less friends but more rivals. Following the start of the cold war between ChatterExchange and Google Apps Marketplace, the companies will soon compete on the cloud platforms market. Today, Salesforce and VMWare introduced the joint product - VMForce.com - the cloud platform for Java applications, which will compete with Google App Engine. Moreover, compared to VMForce.com, GAE would look like a toy. VMForce.com (theoretically) is the ideal solution for companies using (or developing) Java-applications. On the one hand it's the Force.com's infrastructure, which provides reliable, secure and scalable hosting, database, authentication, interface builder (Visualforce), business process designer, mobile access, integrated collaboration system (Chatter). On the other hand - it's the VMWare's ecosystem for Java applications: open-source Java Springs Framework and the runtime platform vCloud.

Nowadays the confidentiality of personal information is not so important. Especially for sales guys, like Salesforce's management. Today, Salesforce has acquired Jigsaw, which TechCrunch's Mike Arrington at first called evil and then simply amoral. Jigsaw - is a huge (21 million) online database of contacts and companies, filled by crowdsourcing: users add contact information of other people (without their knowledge) usually from business cards. When the service appeared in 2006, it paid people $1 for each added contact. Then Jigsaw sell the access to contacts database to companies using cold calling (or spammers). And there was no way to remove your contacts from the service.

Major SaaS vendors are now less interested in providing applications - they want to create web platforms and grab the world (and earn commission on the other developers). Salesforce was the first to play this game, then Google, NetSuite, SugarCRM and others jumped into this wagon. Box.net (that doesn't have such financial strength as the above mentioned companies) invented even more interesting platform strategy. Box.net wants to be present on each popular platform. First, they created the connector for Force.com, then joint the Intuit Partner Program and Google Apps Marketplace, and recently released modules for SuiteCloud and Sugar 6. Thus, they build the cross-platform cloud content management system. This system allows to store all content in a single online repository and access it in different SaaS systems used in the company: CRM, ERP, Collaboration system. Even more interesting is the opportunity to create shared cross-company extranet based on Box.net: for example, the same file may be available from Salesforce account owned by company A and NetSuite account owned by company B.

When Google Apps Marketplace launched, we noticed that Google's partner Salesforce hadn't joined this ecosystem. Now it's clear why. Salesforce is building its own ecosystem of collaborative applications around Chatter. Although Chatter (Facebook for enterprise) is nothing like Google Apps (email + docs), however the aim of both tools is the same - collaboration. At the ChatterExchange presentation, Marc Benioff has clearly stated that Chatter will compete with MS Sharepoint and IBM Lotus Notes (he modestly omitted Google Apps). "Don't be confused that these systems have little in common" - said Benioff, - "the fact that Sharepoint and Lotus Notes were created back in these days when people didn't use Twitter and Facebook and when the top collaborative technologies were email and shared folders".

Yes, Salesforce still had no inbuilt business processes automation tool (only integrated third-party solutions). But business process automation - is a delicate feature that it's better not to provide it at all than provide it somehow. Many other CRM systems promote their business-process automation modules, but actually they bring more problems than profits. In contrast, the new Salesforce module - Visual Process Manager looks pretty nice and simple. Generally, in this case it is better not talk about business processes, but about automation of any operation in the system. There are 4 main spheres where this new tool could be applied:

First of all, 2010 will be the year when Microsoft becomes a strong Enterprise 2.0 market player. This year Microsoft will launch the commercial versions of online MS Office, Sharepoint 2010 with web 2.0 features and Windows Azure cloud platform, and these products will of course push ahead SaaS and enterprise Social Software technologies. Besides, we expect revolutions in mobile enterprise technologies and VoIP sphere.

SugarCRM, an open-source Salesforce alternative, is trying to keep up with its rival. The newest version SugarCRM 5.5 is focused on the same areas as latest Salesforce versions: platform, social tools and mobile access. Of course, the most significant upgrade is the new integration platform Sugar Cloud Connectors, that allows to link SugarCRM to third-party business applications using Web services. As an example, the company introduced the LinkedIn connector, that allows to display LinkedIn-profile data on contact page inside SugarCRM. The new activity streams module Social Feeds is very similar to the recently unveiled Salesforce Chatter. In addition to short message exchange and status updates, it allows you to receive notifications about various actions in the system, such as invoice creation or customer data change.

Being a traditional software giant, SAP doesn't implement projects quickly. For years the company develops strategic plans, makes presentations, creates prototypes and test new products internally. That's why, we still haven't seen any working SaaS or Enterprise 2.0 solution by SAP. But they make a lot promises. Recently, SAP announced that it develops two fundamental products -  alternatives to Salesforce CRM and Google Wave. Regarding CRM system, we only known that it will be a SaaS solution built on multi-tenant architecture (like Salesforce). It is planned that the system will become profitable in late 2010, so it must be unveiled in the first half of the next year.

It seams, that competition with MS Dynamics CRM is not enough for Salesforce. Now the company wants to become a full-fledged SaaS alternative to MS Sharepoint. It already provides the platform for developers (Force.com) and missing only the intranet functionality. To fill this white-space, Salesforce has just acquired GroupSwim, the SaaS collaboration service. GroupSwim is quite popular startup that allows you to create workgroups (sites) with a wiki, file-storage and forum discussions. Also it uses semantic technology to automatically tag and rate content including discussions, emails, documents, wikis, and more. Until now, Salesforce used integration with Google Apps as a primary collaboration solution. Besides, recently Box.net unveiled the solution for file-sharing in Salesforce CRM. But, apparently, Salesforce, that has recently created the social layer Chatter, now is going to create its own collaborative layer.

Strange, but Salesforce, that always used to be in the forefront of the Enterprise 2.0 trends, still didn't have internal social tools (only the link the outside Social Web by means of Service Cloud 2.0). Therefore, in order not to loose its authority, the company decided not just add an internal social network to its CRM software, but also create a social platform for all applications developed on Force.com. The new product was called Salesforce Chatter, and if you look at the new menu on Salesforce.com, Chatter is on the same level with Salesforce CRM and Force.com. So for Salesforce it's not just a new feature but a strategic product. How it works?

Salesforce and Adobe announced about their strategical partnership, that supposes integration of their platforms Force.com and Adobe Flash+AIR. For Salesforce it means a huge step forward towards rich internet applications and desktop integration. So  now they can enhance these two features in competition against Microsoft S+S applications like Microsoft Online Services. And for Adobe - this is an attempt to enter the enterprise market and to strengthen its position against Microsoft Silverlight attack. The first joint product of the new alliance is Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com - integrated development environment  that allows to create flash-plugins for Salesforce CRM or stand-alone flash-applications, working on top of Force.com platform.

Box.net CEO, Aaron Levie, says that there are a lot of good SaaS business apps on the Web and most of them include (or should include) file collaboration capabilities. But in the world of bestsourcing it would be great for all if these business apps would focus on their specific functions and Box.net would provide the powerful file collaboration layer for them. In other words, Box.net wants to be the same for Internet, as Sharepoint for Intranet. And they decided to start this mission from the leading SaaS player - Salesforce. The other day, Box.net developed the connector, that allows Salesforce users to add Box.net to their accounts and use all Box.net file management tools right from the online CRM system.

Of course, Mark Benioff can persuade anybody to buy his Salesforce CRM. But if it were a bad product, any partnership would stop at this point. But no! It turns out that Salesforce largest customers Cisco and Dell are so loyal, that they start selling Salesforce themselves. Last week Cisco and Salesforce announced the joint solution for customer service (Salesforce Service Cloud 2 + Cisco Unified Communications). And today Dell and Salesforce have unveiled a new offering, combining Salesforce CRM and Dell Integration Services. Both solutions target small business market. Cisco and Dell have the largest customer bases, and probably in the nearest years we'll see the new Saleforce income records.

Service Cloud - is the revolutionary customer service solution, that integrates helpdesk with social networks and tools. Today Salesforce unveils the second generation of Service Cloud with 3 new modules: Salesforce Knowledge, Salesforce Answers and Salesforce for Twitter. All them are tightly integrated with Salesforce CRM and built  on top of Force.com (so they can be customized for particular company needs). Starbucks, Comcast and Dell are already using these new tools.