Cloud Economies

I was present in Dreamforce 2009, salesforce annual mega event held at Francisco. This year we have around 19000+ whether they are partners, customers or coming in.

Last year crowds were at 10000 now they have increased to almost 100%. That's how On-Demand / Cloud generates interest in these days of recession.

Marc was little less aggressive :) this time during his keynote. But he is aggressive rolling out new product strategies and setting direction to his company.

He unveiled Chatter new collaboration cloud from salesforce which is combination of facebook and twitter. He was honest in saying he is trying to bring facebook and twitter innovations to enterprises.

Its just struck to me that just one month back one CEO of global company asked me whether he can get some thing simple like facebook or twitter that can be used for Collaboration. He seems to be cluttered with all tools.

This drives point what Marc has been saying in keynote. When we can collaborate with strangers on net with these platforms why cannot we do the same with our own employees.

Great concept and I am sure it would have wider acceptance. As the current generation grows with facebook and twitter its logical for them to expect similar tools in their workplace.

I always have a feeling with clouds that they grow as large as economies. Look at ecosystem of force.com with its huge set of customers, partners, transactions etc etc. I guess its time near for them to outgrow terms of GDP than most of nations out there.

Its time for us to have cloud economics. Economists should take a look at them seriously. As internet, cloud concept is going to stay and change the way we do business. When businesses succeed they create large trade areas and when trade happens its going to impact economies.

And saleforce with its force.com would be leading cloud economy in near future.

Well done Marc, you had built a nation barring boundaries in business.

Dreamforce

I should be attending Dreamforce, Salesforce mega annual event next week in San Francisco.

Salesforce being pioneer in what we call cloud today always amazes me with its growth and direction. I am sure that I would have lot of take-aways from the event. As I work on lot of integration projects salesforce is one platform that I always get head on. We do have lot of cloud vendors out side, but force.com (salesforce cloud) brings in market of 59k customers they have to any cloud based start up. While this is up side down side would be of vendor lock, like what ever we develop on force.com is in its proprietory language. I know for sure that there are some efforts going on in direction of having common standards between cloud vendors. When those efforts are realized we would probably have more cloud apps than on premise.

Will connect more from dreamforce.

SaaS CRM in India

Last week I had interesting conversation with CIO of global pharmaceutical corporation. This happened when we are trying to explain him on the advantages of SaaS CRM and Cloud. His points were simple and straight forward.

He says that company like theirs had invested in hardware and on-premise software for long time.

He asked us justification on why he should pay recurring charge for On-Demand CRM application. He would jolly well get proposed CRM functionality developed with in that money as on-premise software. He says in India he can get developers / support staff in much cheaper rates so its finding difficult for him to understand rationale on the recurring cost.

He suggested that SaaS software works well for SMB in India and not for large corporations like theirs.

When I look back I find it reasonable from his point of view.

I guess all SaaS vendors should come with proper ROI framework for these large corporations. I see generalized ROI templates but these would go well with these large corporations. These templates should be customizable for each company. That way as part of pre-sales exercise vendors would be able to show clear value add and ROI specific to each company. I am working on such template and would share the same once its done.

Cloud Categories

I was reading Kunal Blog where he writes on the classification of cloud providers .

I am glad that Integration is getting noticed as key piece and I strongly believe that integration as service (of course with scalable and robust architectures and revenue models) will solve lot of cloud adoption issues.

Being a On Demand CRM implementer in SAARC and APAC region I often hear lot of questions about integration. These markets are traditionally On-Premise software markets and most of the customers are willing to move to cloud if they are convinced on integration capabilities.

Integration when handled as service can be bought on demand as per the requirement. That concept is compelling in these markets.

I will concentrate more on the current vendors and their offerings in subsequent posts.