The next Chicago Salesforce User Group Meeting
When: Thursday, May 5th, 2011
Time: 2 to 5PM
Where: Citigroup Building
500 W. Madison, 3rd Floor Conference Room
Chicago, IL 60661
Salesforce.com will present on the following topics:
In addition, there is going to be a discussion on Chatter best practices, tips and tricks.
For those who have never attended a Chicago Salesforce User Group meeting before, I can tell you that you won’t be disappointed if you attend. This is a very lively, active and helpful group. Come and check it out!
To join, click here and select Chicago in the drop down. It is of course free to join!
In Cloud, integration IS a key differentiator
My post last week about cost savings with salesforce.com led to some interesting conversation off the blog. One of the readers questioned the cost benefit of salesforce.com, particularly the cost of integration, and declared that moving to salesforce from an on-premises system simply moved the integration costs.
I agree to an extent. Moving to cloud doesn’t eliminate the integration costs. Nobody ever claimed it would. Costs do get moved, but those costs are very likely to be significantly less. It has not only been my direct experience but also of several folks I’ve interacted with. And there are of course several case studies here. I don’t have enough reasons to believe they are falsified.
There is no debate about the fact that the days of siloed IT systems are gone. Systems must co-exist and integrate to provide any value. Whether you are in the cloud or not, you are going to have to build integration. As is the case with any technology, Salesforce.com cannot solve every business problem. In fact, it will be a total misfit in certain situations. The key to success is aligning business needs and available technology to deliver the optimum solution for your specific needs. More likely than not, this solution involves multiple technologies, and how they integrate can prove to be the real difference between success and failure.
And this is one of the key areas where salesforce.com leads the pack. Just take a look at the number of integration middleware available in the market. And if they don’t meet your specific needs, you can write your own without sacrificing an arm and a leg. More than 50% of the traffic on salesforce.com is integration-related. Force.com API today is one of the most popular APIs around. Not without a reason, I am sure.
Before we get too hung up on the cost factor, a word of caution: The real role of IT in any enterprise is not of saving costs for the company. Just like any support service, its primary role is to provide tools and technologies that make the users more efficient and more productive so they can help grow business. If you are picking solutions purely based on cost, you’ve got it all backwards! With salesforce.com, the cost benefit is only incidental, a huge added bonus you get because of the way it has been architected.
Way too often, IT departments’ lack of agility proves to be an obstacle for businesses. How many times have you had to wait weeks if not months before your IT department delivered what you asked for? Not because they don’t care, it’s just that they are too busy doing stuff they shouldn’t have to be doing. If this situation is familiar to you, maybe you should seriously consider salesforce.com.
Can you really save on IT costs with Salesforce.com? You bet!
One of the questions I get asked a lot by folks who are just getting acquainted with Salesforce.com is “does it really save you money?”
Fair question, because obviously they have seen the pricing chart. Anybody can tell that Salesforce/Force.com licenses are anything but cheap.
But my short answer is always: “Yes it does.”
You see, when you talk about cost, it is not always the license fee that burdens you. On-premises infrastructure consisting of disparate systems with different hardware/software requirements, different upgrade cycles and the necessary logistics is almost always going to cost you more money in the long run.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at what IDC found:
Having built custom applications on various platforms, both on-premises and cloud, I can tell you that it is way faster to build applications on salesforce/force.com. If you have questions or want to know more about Salesforce.com, let us talk!
force.com IDE in the cloud?
Your IT infrastructure is in the cloud, your apps are in the cloud, your data is in the cloud. So it is quite reasonable to wonder why your app development tools are not in the cloud! Sure, you can do quite a bit of development using force.com’s web-based development UI (including writing triggers and apex classes) but it is nowhere close to what a decent developer would expect.
And with Salesforce.com actively pushing eclipse as their sole IDE for serious development, a cloud-IDE was most likely not going to come from them. Not that I was asking for one!
But it appears there will be a cloud IDE afterall! Not from Salesforce, but from BrainEngline Systems:
Having been a hardcore eclipse user for years (I use it for all my java and force.com development), I confess that it will take a LOT to make me move away from eclipse to any other IDE, let alone a cloud IDE. But I’m very curious to see how it will look/work. I am definitely looking forward to giving it a serious try.
And till the invitation arrives, back to eclipse.
Force.com Sites Gallery
Apropos my previous post where I talked about the need for a public gallery showcasing a variety of enterprise applications that have been built on Force.com platform, I wanted to provide a link to a gallery of web sites built using Force.com Sites (which runs on Force.com platform). While this gallery is restricted to ‘web sites’ and doesn’t address the need I was talking about, it should give you an idea about the potential this powerful platform holds.
Evolving with Salesforce.com
During the initial days of my exposure to Salesforce.com, the overwhelming impression that I got from reading and hearing about it was that it was an awesome CRM solution. That impression kind of made me not take it too seriously because, for me, as a consultant looking to expand my company’s solution offerings, it appeared too limited. First of all, right off the bat, your target user-base got restricted to a sales team within a company. And these are typically the folks who would not like to use a computer for anything other than a business development activity. Their world revolves around a CRM suite! So how many different custom applications can you build for such folks?
Not that it is a bad thing for everybody. If you are somebody interested in just selling/implementing a cloud-based CRM application, this is perfect! Cloud computing is an awesome concept, and Salesforce mastered it and took it to such a level that it blew away the competition. Just look at the way Salesforce is growing! It is phenomenal! And the market Salesforce is creating for its partners is equally stunning!
Among several other things they did right, what was that one thing that might have directly influenced the initial growth? The general consensus is that choosing to focus on Sales professionals as their initial user-base was a masterstroke. And it does make sense! Give the sales folks tools that are simple, fast, and stable so they can sell more. Selling more makes the company grow so they can do a lot more (other) stuff. Who wouldn’t want that?
And then, it got even better. Force.com arrived and suddenly you could develop custom applications for the cloud without limiting yourself to CRM! Add to that free Chatter for enterprise, Chatter.com, database.com, VMForce, etc., and the possibilities appear virtually limitless! You can now write all kinds of applications — business, social, collaboration, mobile, etc., and integrate with almost any other platform! The next wave of revolution is waiting to take off.
But the big question is, how will Salesforce.com make the developer/user/partner community see the possibilities? How will Salesforce.com help users and developers evolve with it?
I was at Dreamforce last week, and I must say it was AMAZING. Over 30000 people attending from all over the world (up from 15000 last year) indicates the massive pace at which Salesforce.com is growing. I came back even more convinced and a firmer believer in the concept of Cloud Computing in general, and Salesforce.com in particular. I am definitely looking forward to going again next year.
The only thing that I found not well addressed at Dreamforce was the delivery of this message: Salesforce.com is not just a Cloud-based CRM company, but much more than that! It is a cloud platform provider that gives you awesome tools to build custom applications, to collaborate internally and externally, and is continuously innovating so you can expect even greater things to arrive in 3-month cycles. I was really hoping to see a showcase of diverse applications to drive home this message. In fact, I even said this to Marc Benioff on the Dreamforce Chatter application. Hope it reached him!
(names and pictures of other commenters blurred out in respect for their privacy)
I know it is a slow process, and I would love to hear how other Salesforce.com partners are addressing it.
During Marc Benioff’s keynote last Tuesday, he asked will.i.am who was sitting in the front row what he thought of the cloud‘s possibilities. It looked funny as will.i.am started fumbling for a good answer but he slowly recovered and said he would love to develop music in the cloud in real time collaboration with his fans around the world. Not bad, eh? I thought why not? Sometimes you need non-technologists to tell you what technology can do.
PSC and Salesforce.com
I am attending Salesforce.com’s annual event, Dreamforce 2010, in San Francisco starting today, and the first and the most important update from the conference I want to share: My company, PSC Group, LLC., is now officially a “Consulting Partner” of Salesforce. This was the first order of business I took care of as soon as I landed in San Francisco Friday night, and I am very pleased to be wearing a ‘Partner’ badge at the event today!
Personally, this is very satisfying because developing a successful “Salesforce Offering” at PSC has been a goal for me since the beginning of the year, and with the active support of Alex Kassabov, we are well on our way. PSC’s business related to Salesforce has been steadily growing recently, and I have personally been involved in architecting, building and delivering our most recent Lotus Notes-to-Salesforce Integration solution. And I am sure we will have many more successes as we grow this offering.
BlackBerry DevCon 2010
It starts tomorrow and, sadly, I am not going to be there. Having attended both the previous DevCons, I was really looking forward to being there to experience all the excitement, interact with awesome guys from RIM, meet my old RIM and non-RIM contacts, learn a lot of new things and come back with renewed energy and inspiration.
And if rumors are to be believed, I would also have come back with a free BlackPad. Who knows!
Well, as they say, C’est la vie. Given the current priorities related to my work, I just couldn’t justify going there this year. Instead, I chose to sit here and feel sad.
But who knows, things can change suddenly and I might find myself at DevCon 2011. For now, I am eyeing a different conference, in the same neighborhood, in a couple of months. Because, given my current focus at work, that is what I can make the most sense of.
And that is what really matters.
BlackBerry OS 5.0
So I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my BlackBerry Bold 9000 to OS 5.0. Not that there was anything wrong with 4.6.1 that I was running all these days, but being a “cautious early adopter” that I am, it was time I tried out the new OS.
I have been using it for close to 24 hours, and it is pretty good so far. A few UI changes, obviously, some good and some I don’t care either way. But I must say it is one of the most tedious/time-consuming/error-prone upgrades. BlackBerry OS upgrades have always been like this. With each subsequent release of OS, it gets worse. My coworkers invariably cringe whenever I tell them to upgrade their OS when they ask for a new feature — it is just too painful for the joy it promises.
It took me 3 attempts to complete the process, not to mention the interminable wait. Can somebody please tell me why it should take up to 30 minutes to connect to the device? Actually, this is a lie. It took me a total of 65 minutes over 2 aborted attempts followed by a 15-minute successful attempt. And don’t tell me it is because my phone isn’t supported. It is. Just that T-Mobile doesn’t offer it yet.
Losing the race in the last lap
When the competition gets stiffer and only the capable players are left in the fray, how do you set yourself apart? When everybody offers comparable quality of service and delivers on time, how can you better others?
One of the things I have heard the most from my bosses over the years is this: “It is always better to tell your client that it takes 5 days to complete a task and deliver it in 4 days than to promise it in 3 days and take 4.” You see, it is all about setting the expectations right. The clients like to be pleasantly surprised rather than be mildly disappointed.
So, if you can really beat the expectation you set, you should really do it. That can set you apart from your competition.
Which apparently FedEx doesn’t believe in.
I ordered something a couple of weekends ago and chose ground shipping as I was in no real hurry. The scheduled delivery date was Dec 16th. The product shipped from California, and as you can see below, it was picked up by FedEx on Dec 7th and made it to New Berlin, WI on the 12th.
Now, how far is New Berlin, WI, from where I live? Hardly about 85 miles. If FedEx really wanted to pleasantly surprise me, they could have delivered it yesterday (15th). They really could have without a lot of extra effort, but chose not to.
In their world, I guess good is good enough.
