As I recover from yesterday’s Thanksgiving festivities, I’ve been struck by two thoughts regarding last week’s Dreamforce conference,

Salesforce.com’s new Chatter social computing functionality may be a defensive as well as proactive move.
An acquisition of Salesforce.com by Oracle may be a friendly maneuver rather than a hostile takeover.

As I reported in my previous blogpost, Salesforce.com’s introduction of Chatter last week at Dreamforce was met with mixed reviews. Many customers, partners, analysts, press and even internal staff and salespeople were uncertain about the company’s goals and capabilities in this new area.

I believe that building an ‘enterprise-class’ social networking component makes sense and adds a timely new dimension to salesforce.com’s fundamental functionality.

Marc Benioff justified salesforce.com’s move by claiming in his keynote address at Dreamforce that neither Facebook nor Twitter were willing to fortify their services to meet the needs of enterprise users.

But, what … Read More »

I’ve always been an admirer of the marketing prowess of salesforce.com…although it always drives me crazy to comply with the lower-case spelling of their name because it seems to genericize their value in my eyes.

One of the specific aspects of the company’s marketing tactics which I’ve particularly liked is the way in which it continuously extends its brand identity by incrementally broadening and redefining its functional capabilities. This is a technique which I call “iterative marketing”.

Some people use this term to describe a marketing approach in which a company continuously tests its marketing messages and lead generation tactics to see which works best. I’m using the term differently to refer to the way a company can continuously evolve, extend and expand their marketing messages to gain greater mindshare and ultimately marketshare as well. 

The simplest example of this marketing technique is salesforce.com’s seasonal releases which routinely … Read More »

Day 2 of Dreamforce came with a little less enthusiasm than yesterday’s kickoff as many of the attendees recovered from the previous night’s parties. Today’s focus was on the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) which salesforce.com calls “Custom Cloud 2”.

Unlike yesterday’s meandering keynote regarding the Sales Cloud 2, Services Cloud 2 and new Chatter social computing capabilities, Marc Benioff immediately went to work at convincing the Dreamforce audience of the power and growing adoption of salesforce.com’s PaaS capabilities by quickly introducing the CEO of BMC, Bob Beauchamp, who unveiled its new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) IT service desk application developed on the Force.com in a couple of months.

BMC’s use of Force.com to ‘SaaSify’ its application is another important endorsement of salesforce.com’s PaaS by an established independent software vendor (ISV). It is particularly compelling for other ISVs who have grappled with the technological and operational challenges of migrating their applications to a … Read More »

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing movements have converged on the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week for the latest salesforce.com lovefest—Dreamforce.

[Disclosure: Salesforce.com paid my travel expenses to attend this event.]

Despite the downturn in the economy, or maybe because of it, this year’s Dreamforce has attracted over 19,000 registrants, up from around 10k a year ago. The opening keynote session was bursting at the seams with people and energy.

The event comes a day after the company announced its latest quarterly results, during which the company added 4700 net new customers, bringing its total user count up to approximately 67,900, up 31% from a year ago.

This growth is especially impressive given that one of the company’s primary growth engines in years past was the financial services sector which imploded over the past year. Despite these potential setbacks, salesforce.com is on a run-rate to exceed $1.2 … Read More »

I was invited to attend the fifth annual ConnectWise Partner Summit in Orlando this past week and was surprised to discover that it has become one of the premier meeting places for aspiring Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and industry enablers.

I was also impressed with the amount of attention ConnectWise’s executives, other event speakers and sponsors, and the conference attendees gave to the convergence of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), managed services and cloud computing.

ConnectWise may not be a household name in the SaaS or cloud computing markets, but it is a key player in the managed services arena. Although ConnectWise calls itself a professional services automation (PSA) provider for IT professionals, its software also helps them manage their helpdesk operations and sales processes. 

ConnectWise’s solutions are typically used by IT service providers, including VARs and MSPs, and it has built its success on a highly leveraged partner strategy. Its software is … Read More »

I’ve been suggesting for years that PC vendors could be great channel partners for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors, and Dell now has an opportunity to prove me right.

Today, Dell and saleforce.com announced that Dell will offer salesforce.com’s SaaS solutions to its small- and mid-size business (SMB) customers via its website.

This is a natural combination. Dell has been a prominent customer of salesforce.com’s on-demand CRM solutions. Salesforce.com uses Dell’s computers in its data centers. This week, the companies’ CEOs will be on stage together at Oracle’s Open World conference.

Selling software to its customers isn’t new for Dell. It has been offering Microsoft Office, Symantec Anti-Virus and other applications for a while. Adding salesforce.com’s on-demand solutions enables Dell to position itself as a fuller, ‘one-stop shop’ for SMBs.

This gives salesforce.com a strong new channel to market and builds on Dell’s core competency as a direct sales company, … Read More »

I was astonished to learn that salesforce.com’s founder and CEO, Marc Benioff, is speaking at next week’s Oracle Open World customer/partner conference.

Although Benioff is an alumnus of Oracle and Oracle’s founder/chairman/CEO Larry Ellison was an initial investor in salesforce.com, there has been no love lost between them publicly because salesforce.com was conceived to compete against Oracle’s Siebel division long before it became a part of Oracle.

Benioff has spent the past decade ridiculing the inefficiencies of on-premise customer relationship management (CRM) software and other legacy enterprise applications, along with traditional hosting models associated with Oracle. Ellison has returned the fire with his own tirades about the impossible economics of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. And, Ellison’s lieutenants in the Siebel On-Demand division have made increasingly aggressive efforts to undercut the success of salesforce.com over the past year.

Yet, folks I know who are a part of the Oracle inner-circle … Read More »

Salesforce.com has teamed with Unit 4 Agresso to create a new company, called FinancialForce.com, that will build upon the Coda 2go on-demand financial application.

This move is another indication that CFO receptivity toward SaaS-based accounting, financial management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications is rising.

The new joint venture will build on Coda’s original Force.com-based SaaS solution, and the growing momentum in the SaaS accounting and financial management applications market produced by NetSuite , Intacct and others in this area. (Disclosure: I’ve done work with all of these companies.)

This announcement is newsworthy because it is Salesforce.com’s first direct foray into the financial application market and its first joint venture.

There are probably an assortment of marketing and legal reasons why the two companies have formed this joint venture. However, the reality is that  few joint ventures in the tech and software industry have been successful because the partners often … Read More »

In the ongoing tug-of-war between on-premise and on-demand vendors, much was made of Steve Lucas’ jump from the SaaS unit of SAP’s Business Objects to Salesforce.com to lead its new Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) initiative a little over a year ago.

With far less fanfare, Lucas returned to SAP last month as its new SVP of Business User Sales for North America. Since Steve is a friend, and SAP and Salesforce.com are also clients, I won’t share any confidential information or insight. However, his move does raise a series of interesting questions about Salesforce.com’s Force.com initiative and SAP’s plans.

Given Salesforce.com’s rapid growth despite the macro-economic slowdown and the major push the company is giving Force.com, it is surprising to see Steve return to SAP which is still struggling to define its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)/cloud computing strategies and solutions.

While SAP’s struggles have been well documented, … Read More »

One of the most controversial aspects of the rapidly evolving cloud computing market among industry insiders is the idea of ‘private clouds’.

Purists insist that cloud computing is all about exchanging legacy, on-premise, inhouse IT resources and functions with online, shared resources via the Internet (i.e., the ‘cloud’).

While this is the origin of the cloud computing concept, a variety of forces have conspired to create an alternative approach referred to as ‘private clouds’.

These include valid customer concerns regarding privacy, security, reliability and performance; along with proprietary concerns among various hardware and software vendors seeking to usurp some of the spotlight away from cloud upstarts like Amazon, Google and Salesforce.com.

In addition to the sourcing and marketing forces fueling the idea of private clouds, there are various debates regarding the technical implementation of private clouds which have raised questions about the viability of this idea.

Just as it … Read More »