Innovative year for Salesforce

Innovative year for Salesforce

SaaS provider expands its offerings in 2007

DON SAMBANDARAKSA

Last year has been one of the sexiest for Software-as-a-Service trailblazer Salesforce Dot Com which has seen the introduction of the Ideaforce user feedback system, Visualforce mobile platform, Contentforce CRM and the evolution of Salesforce beyond mere customer relationship management to a platform as a service provider that allows users to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure.

Speaking in an exclusive interview, Doug Farber, Salesforce's vice-president for operations in Asia-Pacific region, explained how the upcoming Winter '08 would be Salesforce's 24th release in seven and a half years and one where any customisation made all that time ago will still seamlessly roll forward with the new release.

This year at Dreamforce in September, Salesforce announced Visualforce, a toolkit and library which will allow Salesforce application developers to see how their applications look and behave on a variety of small screen mobile platforms such as the iPhone and Blackberry, similar to what Adobe has done with Device Central.

Ideaforce is a feedback platform where users can debate and vote for their most wanted new feature or enhancement to be incorporated into the next release. One 30,000-seat Salesforce customer, Dell, has liked the idea so much that it has rolled out Ideaforce internally to gather feedback on the features most wanted in its next generation of PCs. "Try writing to Oracle and Microsoft to have your features included in their next release," he said.

Contentforce is a very powerful content management system that like many recent announcements, broadens Salesforce's reach beyond traditional customer relationship management.

Farber says that the underlying theme is about the democratisation of software and allowing developers to concentrate on ideas rather than plumbing and keeping the lights on in a data centre.

"Maybe a great Thai application house will come up with this fantastic ERP solution in Thai with Thai accountancy laws. [In the past] they would not have a chance to get it to market as it is blocked by the incumbents. But if you give them the infrastructure and the platform, suddenly these providers can get out and focus on market, innovation and their core competency [rather than IT infrastructure plumbing]," he said.

Doug Farber, Salesforce.com Asia Pacific president of operations.

Farber responded to accusations that Salesforce spends most of its budget on marketing rather than on research and development by explaining that with a single code base and no old or legacy versions of the software to maintain, SFDC can afford to do so. In contrast, he questioned how much of Oracle's R&D budget was actually on innovation and how much it was on maintaining its large library of acquired software.

He cited Siebel as an example. Siebel 7 was a great piece of software but it was designed to run on IBM's DB2 database. When Oracle aquired Siebel, they had to spend a huge amount of money and resources getting it to run on its own Fusion middleware, as well as port it to Unix, NT and a whole raft of other legacy platforms, an act which he claimed did not have any benefit on the customer.

"The nasty little secret in our industry is that the most valuable assets walk out of the door all the time. They may have got a lot of code and the customer base, but the intellectual backbone has disappeared. Siebel 7 was a great product but all the people who have made it are gone and now they are left with this huge empty shell," he said. Farber himself, like many of his colleagues at Salesforce, is a former Oracle employee.

Farber also dispelled the notion that Muslim companies object to having their data in a US data centre under US legal jurisdiction.

"We also hear that from the French, but it really a value proposition, comparing hosted applications and hosted data to investing millions in your own data centre. It's like the knee-jerk reaction to online banking. It's much more cost effective, more secure, but it took a while to get across that awareness, the recognition of the value. Besides, we have proper privacy laws that protect user data," he said.

At this year's Dreamforce user conference, Cisco President and CEO John Chambers was speaking as one happy SalesForce customer with over 35,000 users.

Farber recalled how he was around when SalesForce sold their first five-user deal to Cisco which was then was part way through a two-year multi-million dollar Siebel deployment at the time. The team in Asia was struggling as they needed a solution to deal with the exploding market and the Siebel roll out was behind schedule. The idea was to bring in SalesForce CRM as a stopgap solution and kick them out when Siebel comes along. In the end, they gradually rolled it out across across Asia and then the world as news on how satisfied everyone was spread across Cisco virally.

"We are the warm and fuzzy service provider, we are like the ice-cream truck. Everyone likes us," he said, before comparing Oracle's relationship with some of their customers as a partner in an acrimonious marriage.

For Thailand, the recent tie-up with Metro Systems is still in its early days of market education which starts of with "why companies need CRM," "why Software as a Service" and then "why SalesForce."

For 2008, Farber said that he expected Software as a Service to become conventional wisdom rather than a niche and that the notion of providing a platform as a service will raise the game to an entirely new level.

Asked what he thought of Microsoft's message of Software and Services as opposed to his own Software as a Service paradigm, Farber responded, "You kind of want to own your crown jewels. I think it just fragments the efforts. The further you get away from the mothership, the more the message gets diluted. They are formidable, a great company, but their distribution channel has been conditioned to deal with commoditised stuff. Once you climb up the value chain to CRM and ERP, you require more sophisticated selling."