Category: Collaboration
November 24th, 2009
EuroCloud UK and a lesson in SaaS marketing
In the midst of a busy schedule the past couple of weeks I’ve been preparing for the launch meeting in London of EuroCloud UK, the British instance of the Europe-wide SaaS and cloud industry community network that was first unveiled last month. Any readers from UK SaaS or cloud ventures who will be in London this Wednesday are welcome to come along, by the way — there will be quite a few people there from some of the country’s key players — but please make sure you register online (using the link above) before you come to make sure your name is on the guest list.
Acting as EuroCloud UK co-ordinator, I’ve found myself in the past few weeks making some snap buying decisions about online services that I imagine are similar to the decisions many SaaS prospects in start-ups and small businesses are making every day. Trade associations, like government organisations, have to be conscious of the need to be economical in how they spend the funds entrusted to them, so I’ve been wary of incurring commitments. Furthermore, the organisation is as cash-constrained as any start-up — until we start signing up members, we’re decidedly pre-revenue. We’re time-constrained too, since none of us involved in the start-up team are getting paid for our time.
Short of time, short of cash, unwilling to make big upfront commitments: how do such customers make their buying decisions? I thought it might be instructive to share some of the thought processes I’ve gone through with readers of this blog.
The need to promote the launch and track registrations for the event created the first really crucial ‘crunch moment’ when a buying decision had to be made. Read the rest of this entry »
November 21st, 2009
Taming the Chatter cloud
Not attending Dreamforce, it appears I missed a telling moment, the irony of which I would have enjoyed had I been there to witness it in person. It seems Salesforce.com has announced a new feature named after that most social of activities, Chatter, which aims to bring to the enterprise the functionality seen in social network tools such as Twitter and Facebook. But as Marc Benioff later told a gathering of press and analysts, it’s not a social network, oh no.
As I wasn’t there I can only go from what’s been reported. But it seems Benioff (no doubt guided by his marketing advisors) has decided to follow the advice promulgated at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco — by no less a figure than Enterprise 2.0 guru Andrew McAfee — not to overuse the word social in front of business software buyers when talking about, erm, social computing. “I have rarely come across a word that has more negative connotations to managers in enterprise organizations,” McAfee warned his audience two weeks ago.
Benioff this week was devastatingly forthright about why social isn’t going to figure in his sales team’s lexicon when they tell customers about Chatter. According to VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha (my emphasis added):
“Salesforce was careful to position Chatter as a collaboration tool, not a ’social this or social that’ because there’s such a glut of social networking tools, he said, and customers are more willing to pay for collaboration software. ‘We really want to talk about collaboration, because that really is a budget item for our customers,’ Benioff said.”
So there we have it. Chatter’s going to be positioned as a collaboration tool, because that’s what customers are willing to pay for. I can still see problems ahead for this product, on three fronts, but let’s deal with that positioning question first, because I have quite strong views about it.
Interestingly, Microsoft seems to share no such qualms Read the rest of this entry »
November 5th, 2009
Microsoft cuts BPOS price to squeeze Lotus
While most observers portray Microsoft’s sortie into online email and collaboration services as a titanic battle to keep Google off its productivity applications turf, the real target of this week’s price reductions is IBM’s Lotus unit. In a briefing earlier this week, Ron Markezich, corporate VP, Microsoft Online Services told me that most of his team’s customer wins are at the expense of the IBM division: “Seventy-five percent of our enterprise customers are coming from a non-Microsoft platform — predominantly [Lotus] Notes.”
The half-price reduction for hosted Exchange seats (from $10 to $5 per month) and a one-third cut in the cost of the full BPOS suite (from $15 to $10) is designed to keep those deals flowing through. IBM earlier this year introduced its own hosted LotusLive iNotes service at an aggressive $36 per user per year. Microsoft’s old pricing was at a level destined to give prospects pause for thought. At $60 per year, it’s close enough to raise fewer objections. The lower pricing will surely help, too, in those cases where Google’s $50-a-year service is the competition.
Interestingly, we now have a market price established for online corporate email services in the $35 to $60 per year range (indicative of a new price range for all categories of enterprise software?). As Microsoft VP Chris Capossela told CNET’s Ina Fried, “it’s the price that customers are really excited to buy our suite at … We’re pretty excited about the price and not so much focused on free services or the price Google or others might charge.” You bet.
Microsoft execs were happy enough to focus on Google when it came to throwing brickbats this week. Every briefing seems to have included a drive-by shooting directed at Google. “It takes more than a few billboards to win enterprise accounts,” Markezich told me, in a reference to his rival’s current ‘Going Google’ ad campaign. “There’s been a lot of investment in billboards. I question how much investment there’s been in enterprise capabilities.”
There’s also been a concerted effort to question the size of Google’s paying customer base. While Gmail is hitting the volume mass market, Microsoft currently has the edge in large enterprise accounts. Google spent a lot of PR dollars to promote its recent win of a 35,000-seat account at Rentokil Initial, along with its 30,000-seat contract with City of Los Angeles. Microsoft Online Services is currently scoring much larger wins, including a 110,000-seat implementation at pharma giant GSK, a “large number” of which are already deployed, Markezich told me. He also disclosed the existence of a much larger, as yet unnamed customer, currently “in the midst of deployment” to more than 300,000 users.
October 22nd, 2009
Box.net wants to be the Switzerland of data
Today, online file storage and collaboration provider Box.net launches integration with Salesforce.com. As TechCrunch explains:
“… businesses will be able to add a Box.net app to their Salesforce accounts, allowing them to quickly access their documents, media, and other files from directly within their CRM … businesses need to sign up for Box.net’s enterprise plan, which includes free access to the Salesforce app. As an added bonus, any businesses using the new Salesforce integration will be eligible for unlimited storage on Box.net …”
The move is a first step in a strategic direction for the company, its VP of marketing Jen Grant told me on Tuesday: “We’re moving towards a broader look at how the cloud can help a business. Now we really want to start connecting clouds together,” she explained. “Today, we’re connecting the Box.net cloud with the Salesforce.com cloud. In the future, we’re looking at partnering with many other services.”
The unlimited storage is a key part of this offering, which is designed to act as a single, permanent home for users’ data as they move between online applications. If Box.net succeeds in its ambitions, it will become the “Switzerland” of online data storage — the one neutral location where everyone feels their online valuables are safest.
Of course one vital component in winning that role will be the trustworthiness and reliability of Box.net as a cloud repository (especially in light of recent failures elsewhere). With $14.6 million venture funding to date (almost half of it in a round announced last month), Box.net is not yet in the topmost league of cloud providers so may need to continue its expansion before it can afford a fully redundant architecture. But convenience and competitive pricing are also important considerations in the small-to-mid-size business market that produces most of the customers of this service. Here’s what Grant told me in an email when I followed up our conversation on Tuesday with a question about security and disaster recovery at Box.net:
“Here is a detailed outline of our current security measures in place: https://enterprise.box.net/features/security
“In the short term, we’re adding encryption on files at rest (among other initiatives) in addition to the encryption in transit that we already have; you can expect this to be complete in the next few weeks.
“For the long term, we’re currently undergoing the SAS 70 certification process within the company, which will ‘officially’ endorse our standards regarding both security and privacy. This is above and beyond security implementations that most companies have on an internal server or collaboration tool.
“… keeping our customers’ data safe and secure IS the core of what we do, and we know that our very business depends on us maintaining that level of security. Because of that, we spend a great deal of time thinking through how to implement and maintain the highest level and latest advances in security technology.”
Box.net has produced a useful YouTube video explaining how the new Salesforce.com integration works.
September 24th, 2009
Why you should be glad about Gmail failures
Gmail is having problems again today and some users are squirming while others aren’t worried.
Of course it’s a hassle when Gmail’s not there any more — I found my work rhythm was interrupted and instead of writing and sending some emails as I’d planned, I had to switch to another task and they’re still sitting on my to-do list now. But the way I look at it, every Gmail outage is a small investment I’m willing to make towards a future when I’ll be able to take its reliability utterly for granted.
With every Gmail fail, Google learns more about operating a cloud-scale, enterprise-class email infrastructure. While it may be true that Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail have more registered users and traffic, neither of them are trying to attract enterprise customers as Google is with its Google Apps suite (of which Gmail is the flagship application). That means no one has ever attempted what Gmail is now doing, and with each slip-up along the way, it learns how to do it better.
Remember the big outage that affected the Gmail web interface on the 1st of this month? Read the rest of this entry »
September 21st, 2009
Computing by the people, for the people
Sometimes you’re too close to the wood to see the forest. Across several different sectors of computing, participants are talking about a trend to add social, collaborative or self-service features to certain application categories. Perhaps it’s now time to join the dots. As I wrote last week, these are all facets of a broad trend across computing towards the democratization of IT — the people that actually use computing, as opposed to those that make or manage it, are taking control.
For those who haven’t seen it yet, here’s a roll-call of the different categories of business computing where this is in evidence.
Social CRM is the term for a new trend in customer relationship management software that acknowledges (in Paul Greenberg’s words) “the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”
Enterprise 2.0 is (in Andrew McAfee’s words) “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers” to allow user-driven sharing of knowledge and information.
People management is another application category where social computing and user participation is creeping into various aspects of HR and talent management, from social recruiting to performance management.
Ad hoc customization is becoming a staple offering in SaaS applications and is an integral component of platform as a service. Meanwhile, cloud computing is making compute power available on demand to anyone who needs it.
What have I missed out? Add your examples in Talkback below.
August 26th, 2009
WebEx chief quits Cisco for Salesforce.com
Doug Dennerline, a long-serving Cisco insider who took the reins at web conferencing leader WebEx several months after Cisco acquired it, has quit his job as senior VP and general manager of Cisco’s Collaboration Software Group to become executive VP, enterprise sales Americas at Salesforce.com [disclosure: both WebEx and Salesforce.com are former clients].
I interviewed Dennerline in January last year, just weeks after he took up the collaboration software role at Cisco, and he outlined four priorities for that year:
- Get Cisco’s sales team selling the WebEx service
- Finish preparations for a production launch of WebEx Connect, the company’s on-demand collaboration and composite applications platform
- Harness Cisco’s partner channel to sell WebEx
- Tap Cisco’s resources to bolster research and development of new WebEx services
Although WebEx has continued to grow and has brought out some Cisco-inspired enhancements to its offerings, progress on all four points has been lukewarm and it’s no surprise Dennerline found himself tempted by the more vibrant pastures at salesforce.com. (As an aside, I’m also intrigued to see Salesforce.com hiring again at that level after cutting some senior sales management roles just six months ago — as well as wondering what Cisco, one of Salesforce.com’s banner customers, thinks about its supplier poaching one of its top executives).
To see Dennerline jump ship no doubt compounds the demoralization Read the rest of this entry »
July 15th, 2009
Users have to wise up to cloud security
Several observers have noted that the theft of confidential Twitter documents (which ended up in the hands of TechCrunch) took place by accessing a Twitter employee’s Google Apps account. Cue a chorus of commentary alleging how this shows that if you want to keep stuff private, don’t put it on the web, period, because cloud security is not ready for prime time and nothing is secure on the net.
OK, so let’s go back to storing confidential company documents on laptops that people leave in cars or forget on trains, or transferring them on computer tape and CD-ROMs that couriers deliver to the wrong address, or backing them up to USB sticks that go missing, or forgetting to wipe them off the hard disks of office servers when we dispose of them (UPDATE: see Michael Krigsman’s post on the same topic for a catalog of examples). Cloud security is no different from real-world security. It’s just a matter of identifying the risks and containing them.
Users really like the convenience of the cloud — far too much for them to give it up — but the trouble is, they also like the convenience of authentication using a simple username-password pair. They haven’t yet figured out that’s far too little to separate your confidential data from a nefarious interloper, especially when the Web means that authentication will work from anywhere, which dramatically increases the threat level. In the Twitter case, as my ZDNet colleague Sam Diaz points out, the security breach exploited “an easy-to-guess password and recovery question,” which is one of the simplest ways to make a username and password combination really insecure. Unfortunately, users they won’t wise up until the cloud providers force them to.
The banks figured this out long ago, and they knew they had to sort it because customers were losing money and blaming them. As a result, I now have to answer ‘challenge questions’ before I can access any of my online banking services. I have to remember a user ID and two passwords to access my personal current account, and to authorise a bill payment I have to insert my chip-and-pin debit card into a special reader, type in the pin number plus some other data and then copy a code that the reader generates into the payment authorization page. My business bank account requires a user ID, a password and a code generated by a separate security device. All this is a pain but I put up with it because I don’t want my bank to make it easy for other people to defraud me of my money. Nor do I want to go back to the days of having to write out checks and put them in the mail or waiting till my statement arrives at the end of the month to find out how much money I have left.
Now it’s up to cloud providers to inflict the same pain on their users — for their own sake — to protect their data. We won’t like it, but we’ll put up with it because at the end of the day we’d rather jump through all those hoops than give up all the convenience the cloud brings us.
July 1st, 2009
WebEx augurs ill for Cisco's cloud ambitions
Color me skeptical, but I feel the detail behind yesterday and today’s Cisco Live event hasn’t matched the aspirations set out in executive keynotes. I like the vision set out by CEO John Chambers of providing a technology infrastructure that (as Oliver Marks puts it) does a better job of connecting people. I’m highly supportive when CTO Padmasree Warrior looks ahead to a future fabric of ‘intercloud’ interoperability standards — ending lock-in by individual cloud providers — and talks about ‘federation’ between cloud and on-premise. But when I look at the map of where Cisco claims to play in the cloud, I’m struck by how feeble its tenure is at each level, from the underlying foundation all the way up to both Paas and SaaS, where WebEx is its undernourished poster child, as I’ll discuss below.
First, there’s what Cisco calls the ‘IT Foundation layer’ — the underlying hardware and virtualization platforms on which cloud services run. Cisco expects to play a big role here with its Unified Computing System (UCS). I’m sure there’s a huge potential market for UCS among enterprises, telcos, IT services providers and many other established data center operators that want to transition their existing enterprise infrastructure into more of a quasi-cloud environment. But I can’t help thinking that most of them are missing the point when they try to scale up familiar enterprise technology instead of scaling out to a more web-scale architecture.
I’m also suspicious that Cisco is falling into the trap of over-engineering UCS so that it ends up too-clever-by-half to really deliver the promise of cloud computing. I would be more convinced if Cisco had productized the existing web-scale infrastructure that it acquired with WebEx. But just as Microsoft has developed its Azure cloud platform with a whole new set of design objectives rather than productizing the existing web-scale infrastructure it had already built for its Live properties, so Cisco is shoe-horning UCS Read the rest of this entry »
June 17th, 2009
Adobe morphs the online spreadsheet
One thing I found especially interesting about Adobe’s new Acrobat.com announcements this week (Techmeme coverage here) is its hybrid spreadsheet/database application called Tables.
I already discussed Adobe’s subscription model in another post earlier this month, What your bank can teach you about freemium, so I won’t elaborate on that aspect of the announcement beyond mentioning that we can now start to make a judgement whether Adobe has followed my fourth guideline, “Price for value.” Here’s the verdict from CloudAve’s Krishnan Subramanian: “The frugal minded SaaS user in me thinks that this price is steep compared to Adobe’s competitors but there may be others who would like the user interface and may be willing to pay big money for it.” That suggests, given there are still a set of services available for no charge, that Adobe has got the pricing more or less at the right level. I suspect we’ll see some more developments as the offering matures, too, which may add to the perceived value of the subscription plans.
I’ve called Tables a hybrid because, although its user interface is that of a spreadsheet, its function set is focused on tabular manipulation of rows and columns, which makes it more like a database than a financial modeling tool. Briefing me about the announcement, Erik Larson, director of marketing and product management, told me: “We’re not going to build a big financial analysis engine. It’s much more about collaborating on data with other people.”
Adobe has developed the application this way, Larson explained, because its research found that the most common form of data in shared spreadsheets is tabular. Financial models are more likely to be an individual undertaking — someone sits down in front of the spreadsheet and then builds the model. Read the rest of this entry »
Phil Wainewright is a commentator and strategist on emerging software industry trends. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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