Salesforce.com, an enterprise cloud computing company, is set to propel the cloud computing industry forward. Collaborating with its community of developers, customers, partners and employee, Salesforce.com is leading the enterprises to an era of “The End of Software.”

 

With a new capability called Force.com Sites, Salesforce.com allows its customers to run their Web sites in Salesforce.com’s cloud. Force.com Sites technology runs entirely in the cloud without the cost and complexity of traditional software.

 

Aaron Katz, area vice president, Corporate Sales, Asia Pacific salesforce.com, says Force.com Sites will revolutionize customer relationship management (CRM), allowing companies to deploy online customer communities on any public or corporate Web site with Salesforce Ideas.

 

Katz spoke to TMCnet about the scope of cloud computing in enterprises, especially those in Asia-Pacific markets like India. Our exchange follows.

 

 

AK: The cloud computing model has a number of benefits - it is easy to use, lowers cost, does not have the maintenance and upgrade hassles of traditional software, and does not require the large up-front investment in software and hardware and is therefore lower risk as well. Since companies generally pay on a per-user, per-month basis, licenses do not go unused and shelfware becomes a problem of the past.

 

Cloud computing is very new and hitting an inflection point globally with regards to acceptance and adoption. With many companies tired of wasting time and money on traditional software projects that are difficult and expensive to customize, difficult for users to grasp and that may never get off the ground because they go over time and over budget - companies are looking for alternatives. In addition, with the acceptance and success of consumer Web companies like Google, eBay, and Amazon.com (News - Alert) (which use a similar technology model to ours), people have become very comfortable using the Web for personal transactions, and we think managing your business on the Web should be this easy.

 

For the past 10 years, Salesforce has concentrated on the development of a killer package of applications, our core CRM product.   We believe that the ability to access CRM applications via mobile devices presents a large opportunity in the region. More and more businesses across industries are reaching out to the more than nine million SMBs in India, increasing the need for salespeople, service reps, and managers to be on the road. Having access to critical information—including contacts, accounts, tasks, leads, opportunities, cases, solutions, and other CRM information— and having the ability to updated information immediately after completing a task, phone call, or email, will be the driving force to help management can stay on top of important customer developments as they happen.

 

In addition, we see that CRM is not just about the people that sit behind a company’s firewall – it is about marketing to people outside your company, selling through a channel - collaborating across various communities. In the beginning of November at our Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, we talked a lot about how collaboration will shape CRM. Looking at some of the applications in our CRM suite, you can see how the Internet is changing not only how people behave at home, but how they look at business applications.  

 

Collaborate internally – Salesforce Content helps to get the best materials in your sales people's hands, fast. With Web -based features like tagging and subscribing, it is something sales people find easy to use and immediately see value in.

 

Collaborate with partners – Salesforce CRM allows companies to have one view of their direct and indirect sales channels. And cloud computing's unique model has enabled Salesforce CRM to easily and securely connect separate Salesforce CRM deployments, allowing companies to share sales leads, contacts, and company information, without the need for complex integration software

 

Collaborate with customers - new Force.com Sites technology allows companies to think of CRM in a whole new way - deliver applications as Web sites. With the recent introduction of Force.com Sites, companies will be able to deploy online customer communities on any public or corporate Web site with Salesforce Ideas.  Salesforce CRM allows companies to bring the 'wisdom of crowds' to businesses for the first time by allowing online communities to submit, discuss and promote ideas.  Companies can unleash the power of online communities to drive the best ideas and innovations for their business. 

 

 

AK: Cloud computing is an emerging trend and is something we see Indian companies taking a lot of interest in. It is enabling a new class of entrepreneurs since one doesn’t need to build offices, distribution centers, data centers or really infrastructure of any kind - everything is managed in the cloud. Leveraging the Internet, and building on Internet-based platforms like Force.com, these new entrepreneurs need relatively little capital to grow and can tap into vast IT expertise in India. The Web also offers great marketplaces like the AppExchange that provide global distribution. We are entering a new era of democratization for developers around the world and a huge shift in power in the software industry, which symbolizes an explosion in choice and innovation.

 

Salesforce.com has more than 1.1 million users at over 51,800 companies globally including global industry leaders like Dell, Symantech, Cisco (News - Alert) and Starbucks. CIO’s from organizations like Citi and Harrah’s Casinos are just starting to realize the power and benefits of the model.

 

For internal IT departments, the Force.com platform will completely change the role of IT departments. The break-fix-patch-upgrade components of IT will become irrelevant, because with the cloud everyone runs on one shared infrastructure and one version. It also creates a new role for IT departments: innovation. When you can develop, deploy, and run apps in the cloud, without having to worry about buying and maintaining hardware and software, you can focus on adding value to the business. 

 

One thing we always keep in mind – people always overestimate what they can do in one year, and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. We are at the beginning of a huge technology shift, and only time will tell. We think all arrows point to the end of software.

 

 

AK: Over the last few years, we have built out an amazing platform strategy, and introduced Force.com, delivering Platform-as-a-Service technology. Force.com provides the building blocks necessary to build any kind of business app, simple or sophisticated - and automatically deploy them as a service. The multi-tenant Force.com platform has a complete feature set for the creation of business applications including the ability to create any database on demand, any custom workflow, the Apex code programming language for building complex logic, the Force.com Web Services API for programmatic access, mash-ups, and integration with other applications and data, and Visualforce, a framework to create any user interface. Now we have over 800 applications that have been built on Force.com by customers, partners and employees.

 

CIOs are less attached to having data and running applications on-premise than you might think. Let's take those investments that they have made. Did they pay off? Do they make sense in today's environment? The truth is that many client-server applications have failed to deliver returns, and that risk has been born almost entirely by the customer. Frankly, that's not a hard record to beat. I think if you met a CFO who insisted on keeping the company treasury in a safe in the basement, you'd think that he or she were nuts. Why isn't that money in a secure, internationally accessible system that it reliable and highly available? I think we aren't far away from a similar view towards data and applications.

 

We think the Force.com platform provides a huge opportunity for both CIO’s and ISV’s.

 

 

AK: One thing that we are very excited about – and think that the Indian market in particular is ready to embrace, is Force.com. PaaS represents a significant opportunity for India – there is a highly educated, highly technical workforce and great bandwidth capabilities - the combination of these two things along with the power of PaaS creates an immense opportunity for local ISVs and independent developers. The only requirements for developers are an Internet connection and a great idea. The Indian market is THE market best poised to leverage the opportunity to build and deliver applications in the cloud. There is potential for this to create new economy locally while delivering business application to the global business community. Just as Amazon.com, eBay, Google (News - Alert), iTunes, and YouTube made it possible to access new capabilities and new markets through a Web browser, PaaS offers a faster, more cost-effective model for application development and delivery.

 

PaaS provides the entire infrastructure needed to run applications over the Internet. It is delivered in the same way as a utility like electricity or water. Users simply “tap in” and take what they need without worrying about the complexity behind the scenes. And like a utility, PaaS is based on a metering or subscription model so users only pay for what they use.

 

With PaaS, ISVs and corporate IT departments can focus on innovation instead of complex infrastructure. By leveraging the PaaS, organizations can redirect a significant portion of their budgets from “keeping the lights on” to creating applications that provide real business value.

 

This model is driving a new era of mass innovation. For the first time, developers around the world can access unlimited computing power. Now, anyone with an Internet connection can build powerful applications and easily deploy them to users wherever they’re located.

 

 

AK: Forrester defines social computing as "A social structure in which technology puts power in communities, not institutions."

 

User-generated content and collaboration tools are fundamentally changing the rules of business in a big way. Social Computing encompasses fast-growing peer-to-peer (P2P) activities like blogging, RSS, file sharing, podcasting, and user-generated content. Technology and social changes are creating a potent mix of forces that will transform the way all businesses operate, create products, and relate to customers. Just take a look at a couple of offerings from salesforce.com:

 

1. Salesforce Ideas is the world's first application that enables the wisdom of crowds to drive business innovation.  Based on the idea popularized by the consumer Web on the power of the collective ideas of a group, Salesforce Ideas, enables companies to build their own communities in the cloud - with their employees, customers, partners or prospects. Every company has internal and external communities that know the business, generate ideas, and can serve as a company's innovation engine. Salesforce Ideas allows companies to unleash the power of these communities to improve their business and to deepen valued relationships.  For the first time, companies can tap into customers, employees and partners across divisions, organizations, and boundaries to drive the best ideas and innovations for their business. 

 

2. Force.com for Facebook, brings together the Facebook and Force.com platforms to allow developers to build new kinds of social and business applications. By leveraging the social graph data on Facebook Platform, developers will have unprecedented capability to create applications that take advantage of the best of both platforms.

Enable a new class of applications for business on Facebook Platform. Force.com for Facebook enables the creation of applications that run 100 percent as a service, powered by Force.com. Applications built and run on Force.com inherit all the benefits of a proven platform, including security and sharing models, workflow, analytics, customization, integration, and mobile access as well as the reliability, availability and global scale of salesforce.com’s trusted infrastructure.

Leverage Facebook Connect to enrich new and existing Force.com applications with social data from Facebook APIs. The Facebook social graph layers on top of the Force.com platform. With Force.com for Facebook, social data is now readily available to the 450+ partners and more than 100,000 developers in the salesforce.com ecosystem can leverage Facebook’s social graph to build a new class of enterprise and productivity applications.

Create new ways for Facebook users to share and connect. By making it easy for Force.com developers to build robust applications in areas like recruiting, productivity and project collaboration that can be quickly integrated through Facebook Platform, users on Facebook will be presented with new tools for activities such as sharing a job opportunity or collaborating with co-workers or friends on an event or project.

 

 

AK: At Software 2007, Marc Benioff told attendees that it costs a “ridiculous” amount of money to build the infrastructure to run a simple content management system over the Internet. His message to enterprises was basically, “Don’t bother building your own. Come to us.” In India we have seen organizations of all sizes coming to us and embracing Cloud Computing.

 

Salesforce.com is seen as the leader in cloud computing who is known for taking down many of the barriers that initially faced the space. Early issues were seen as reliability, integration and security, all of which salesforce.com have addressed. We provide a Web site called trust.salesforce.com, which allows customers to check the processing reliability of the application services we provide in real-time. Oracle (News - Alert), SAP, and Microsoft do not have a site like this. To gain customers’ trust, it is essential to be as open as possible regarding service content and quality. As far as I know, no other SaaS (News - Alert) vendor is as open as we are about our service levels. Of course, I don’t think we are perfect, and we probably never will be, but we just want to be open and transparent.

 

Of course, not all SaaS vendors are created equally, so companies should always diligently review their vendors before selecting them.

 

AK: The company is constantly innovating to enhance customer and developer success in the cloud. During Dreamforce 2008, salesforce.com’s sixth annual User and Developer conference held in November 2008 in San Francisco, salesforce.com made several significant new technology and product announcements pertaining to Cloud Computing for the Enterprise.

 

Force.com Sites - Bringing the Power of Force.com to Every Web Application and Web Site

Force.com Sites, a new capability of the Force.com platform will allow customers to run their Web sites in salesforce.com’s cloud. Force.com Sites will give customers the power to publish Force.com data and applications to any Web site, extending their reach to new users on intranets, external Web sites, and online communities. Like all salesforce.com services, Force.com Sites runs entirely in the cloud without the cost and complexity of traditional software. Force.com Sites is now available in developer preview at http://developer.force.com .

Salesforce.com and Facebook, the world’s largest online social community, introduced a new suite of tools to marry next-generation business productivity applications to the interpersonal power of social networks. The new offering – Force.com for Facebook – is designed to foster a global development community for Facebook’s 120 million users and salesforce.com’s 100,000 developers. The move makes Facebook an 'enterprise-friendly’ platform for global enterprises and individual entrepreneurs worldwide and puts salesforce.com at the forefront of business applications for social computing.

 

Force.com for Amazon Web Services: New Tools to Better Enable Developer Success 

Salesforce.com ’s new offering, Force.com for Amazon Web Services, extends the power of cloud computing to even more enterprises. With Force.com for Amazon Web Services (AWS), enterprises, ISVs and developers can build powerful new business applications and run them entirely in the cloud, leveraging both the database, logic and user interface features of Force.com and the storage and compute capabilities of Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 services. Through Force.com for AWS, developers can access these services from within the Force.com platform to build applications that seamlessly span both clouds. The capabilities made possible through Force.com for AWS will accelerate the creation and adoption of new kinds of applications in the enterprise that take full advantage of cloud computing.

 

Salesforce CRM: More Innovation, Delivering More Success

Salesforce CRM’s powerful cloud computing approach redefined traditional approach to CRM. Currently, Salesforce CRM is helping more than 47,700 enterprises and 1.1 million subscribers better serve their customers without any of the cost, risk or complexity of traditional, on-premise software. With more than 50 new features, Salesforce CRM Winter ‘09 enables companies of all sizes to manage their customer interactions across sales, marketing, and customer service. Built on the Force.com platform, Salesforce CRM is the fastest, most flexible CRM service on the market today.