October 22nd, 2009

Box.net wants to be the Switzerland of data

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 6:41 am

Categories: Collaboration, Integration, On-demand, Salesforce.com

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Storage, Box.net, Sales Force Management, Security, Sales, Phil Wainewright

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.

April 2nd, 2009

SaaS channel models morph into shape

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 11:08 am

Categories: CRM, ERP, Ecosystems, Integration, NetSuite, Salesforce.com

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Software-as-a-service, NetSuite Inc., Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Sales Force Management, Emerging Technologies, Sales, Phil Wainewright

Mark down NetSuite’s announcement today of SuiteCloud Connect for Salesforce.com (all Techmeme coverage) as a victory for the cloud over individual vendors. Sure, this is still about who owns the biggest slice of the cloud (did you notice the resemblance between NetSuite’s SuiteCloud diagram and a pie-chart? Guess who got the lion’s share). But it represents a blow for Salesforce.com’s own-the-whole-ecosystem AppExchange model, just as much as it’s a step back from NetSuite’s former rhetoric about standardizing on a single vendor’s suite for all your needs. [Disclosure: NetSuite is a current client and I've also done work recently for Salesforce.com and Intacct].

It signals that intermediaries are going to have more power in the cloud and we’re not going to end up having to choose between just a handful of mega-vendors. Instead, interoperability (dictated by the cloud, not a self-appointed elite) is going to be the dominant meme and vendors will have to empower third parties to link their application platforms wherever customers can find the most value. The open cloud wins the day.

There’s a strong message emerging too about the importance of channels in delivering cloud and SaaS solutions to customers. While NetSuite is clearly motivated by being able to market its ERP and ecommerce platform to Salesforce.com’s SaaS-savvy customer base (and who in this market doesn’t covet a slice of that action?), it’s increasingly relying on a number of different kinds of channel partners to reach the market. At first glance, the partner ecosystem for SaaS doesn’t look that much different from the channel partners that traditional software vendors have worked with. But the detail of how they execute is much changed. Read the rest of this entry »

October 16th, 2008

Integration migrates to the cloud

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 7:11 am

Categories: Ecosystems, Integration, Mashups

Tags: Hardware, Integration, Phil Wainewright, Software-as-a-service, Cast Iron, Cloud Service, SaaS Customer, Software As A Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Emerging Technologies

Integration vendor Cast Iron, which for years has offered its product packaged as a hardware appliance, this week unveiled a cloud-native integration service. The introduction of Cast Iron Cloud is the culmination of a transition begun earlier this year when Cast Iron began offering cloud hosting of its upgraded appliance product. Customers can now choose between an on-premise appliance, a dedicated cloud-hosted appliance or the multi-tenant cloud service.

Organizations that still have a lot of their own server infrastructure will continue to opt for the on-premise appliance, VP of product marketing Chandar Pattabhiram told me in a briefing last week. The cloud service has been created to serve what Cast Iron sees as a growing market of ‘SaaS-centric’ organizations — mostly smaller businesses — that use several different cloud services and have little or no servers in-house. “If you’re a SaaS-centric enterprise, you’ll probably want to choose integration-as-a-service in the cloud,” he said.

Cast Iron is also betting that SaaS vendors will increasingly be under pressure to show they can offer integration from the get-go. It has simultaneously unveiled a partner program that encourages SaaS vendors to pre-integrate their products and earn a Powered By Cast Iron accreditation. The program is open to ISVs, system integrators and VARs.

“The aim is to take integration off the table for them,” said Pattabhiram. SaaS customers are wising up to the likelihood that they’ll want to integrate cloud-based applications to each other and to on-premise systems, and they want to know the vendors are ready to support that, he explained. “They’re saying, show us how you can integrate into my environment.” If vendors can’t readily answer that question, then it makes it a whole lot harder to close the sale, he added.

Cast Iron is offering a sophisticated range of partner support services under its program. Read the rest of this entry »

September 18th, 2008

BT bundles up SaaS for SMBs

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 11:21 am

Categories: Business applications, Ecosystems, Europe, Integration

Tags: Software-as-a-service, British Telecommunications, Sales, Small And Medium Business, Software As A Service (SaaS), Smb/Sme, Cloud Computing, Emerging Technologies, Phil Wainewright

For many years, a number of people have predicted that telecoms providers would become a key channel for SaaS providers, putting their wares in front of the small and mid-size businesses to whom they already provide telecoms and Internet access. It has always seemed like a no-brainer, but the telcos have singularly failed to make a reality of the vision — indeed, several failed spectacularly in the midst of the collective bust in 2001-03 that brought down dot-coms, telcos and ASPs (the forerunners of SaaS). Since then, few have dared to tangle with SaaS and their progress has been nothing to write home about.

UK telecoms giant BT, to its credit, has never given up on its longstanding quest to find the right formula to bring SaaS to the SMB masses, and it is now beginning to fill out a range of offerings that put SaaS into a practical context for its SMB customers in the UK.

I’m encouraged by this because it seems to me that telcos are ideally placed to aggregate services for SMBs. Unfortunately, however, most have failed to understand that they must do more than simply add SaaS to their price lists. Business applications and services are bought in a more interactive sales mode than commodity utilities like bandwidth, and SMBs want them packaged up into a ready-made solution rather than sold as tickbox components. Back in February, I speculated that SMBs might react more warmly to SaaS aggregators who have already shown that they themselves understand the online environment:

“The SaaS channel to SMBs, then will consist of companies that already offer business services to SMBs online. They’ll be competent at using the Web for prospecting, selling, closing and after-sales support (all of which will help keep their costs low, which they’ll need because of the lower price points and the subscription billing model). They’ll also have to be good at aggregating and integrating a number of different services and products into an all-round solution.”

Although BT has a much bigger offline than online presence, its SaaS pitch to SMBs is couched in the context of succeeding online, and therefore targets exactly those small enterprises who are keenest to exploit the potential of online working to cut costs and create new opportunities for themselves. This seems like a winning formula, if BT can deliver on it.

For example, last week, BT announced the fruits of a partnership Read the rest of this entry »

August 29th, 2008

Mashing up the client to the cloud

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 7:36 am

Categories: Architecture, CRM, Customer experience, Development, Integration, Mashups, On-demand, Rich Internet Applications, RightNow, Web 2.0

Tags: Client, Web Browser, RightNow Technologies, Office 2.0, Mashup, Framework, Collaboration, Phil Wainewright

Next week, I’ll fulfil a long-running ambition when I attend the Office 2.0 conference for the first time — I’m moderating a panel on Platform as a Service, with speakers from LongJump, Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors and Zoho.

The event is now in its third year and is one of those events that brings together everyone of significance in its field — in this case, the fast-growing category of business applications served from the cloud. Naturally, that makes it a key event in the SaaS calendar, although many of the participants are a little wary of the SaaS label, which they feel is too closely associated with old-school vendors and other players who don’t fully ‘get’ the new cloud paradigm. This is definitely an event where you have to be unambiguously multitenant and cloud-centric — there’s no room for hybrids here. Like many of us, be there or be square.

One point on which I personally differ from Office 2.0 orthodoxy, however, is on the matter of client software. Organizer Ismael Ghalimi has walked the talk, having begun using (and documenting his use of) browser-based Office 2.0 applications more than two and a half years ago. His Rules for Office 2.0 are adamant: “No client application other than a web browser … No files on personal computer … No browser extension or plugin …” not even Java or Flash, if they can avoided.

My own take is that many applications work better when they can take advantage of the compute resources of powerful clients, and that cloud-serviced client platforms such as Adobe’s AIR, Microsoft Silverlight and Google Gears are the way of the future (albeit with some caveats, which I’ll come back to later). I say ‘cloud-serviced’ because it’s important that the software for these client platforms should be managed from the cloud. I’m not advocating a return to the bad old days of leaving users struggling with shrinkwrapped software installs.

But I do think that there are many occasions when users want to be delighted and supported by a client experience that the browser alone simply can’t deliver (and sometimes they want or need to work offline, too). I’ve written about several vendors that exemplify this approach: SlideRocket, Entellium (see disclosure), DreamFactory (see disclosure) and RightNow.

This week, CRM vendor RightNow has brought out a new release of its software and several of the new features impinge on this question of whether smart clients have a role in the Office 2.0 landscape. Mashups are also an important part of this release, and the way RightNow has implemented mashups cast some additional light on the smart client issue. Read the rest of this entry »

August 20th, 2008

SaaS mashups shape up

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:38 am

Categories: Development, Ecosystems, Integration, Mashups, Platform as a service, SFA

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Software-as-a-service, Amazon.com Inc., PayPal, Mashup, Xactly, Appirio, Collaboration, Phil Wainewright

Much has been written about the promise of mashups to become serious business tools — as well as the obstacles and challenges they must overcome along the way. It’s only now, more than six years since the notion of mashups first came to the fore (they acquired the name a little later), that SaaS vendors and integrators are beginning to realize the full potential of the mashup for enterprise applications. As this first wave of commercial enterprise mashups comes to maturity, it is making clear once and for all the mashup’s seminal role as the disruptive motor at the heart of the on-demand model.

As a case in point, take Xactly’s 5-way mashup, announced Monday (image courtesy of Xactly). Using Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform as the foundation, the SaaS vendor has mashed up its own sales compensation application with Amazon.com’s retail catalog, the Paypal payment system and an iGoogle gadget. The mashup creates an enterprise-class incentive rewards management and fulfilment application that at the same time is economical enough to be affordable for smaller businesses — subscriptions will be $10 per user per month, at the end of a 90-day free-of-charge launch window that ends December 1st.

Using the application, an organization can set up award targets to incentivize its sales, marketing or contact center teams, with points instantly convertible to retail purchases from Amazon’s online catalog. The awards are paid for out of a Paypal account, which the organization maintains in credit to match its awards budget. Users can view their incentive targets and tallies from within Salesforce.com, or using the iGoogle gadget.

This five-way mashup is a substantive proof point for applying mashups to enterprise applications. It pools the disruptive economics of at least three separate giants of on-demand: Amazon, PayPal and Salesforce.com. Will any ZDNet reader dare argue with me that you could/should do this in-house and do it better and cheaper? It’s simply not tenable. Nor is it any more practical to think of implementing a similar mashup to Amazon, Paypal and the rest from an on-premise application — leaving each individual customer to negotiate their own gateway access to Amazon, Paypal and the rest, along with the necessary security precautions. It’s a recipe for multiple implementation disasters.

In this respect, the Xactly mashup makes the case for multitenancy more convincingly than any other example I’ve come across. It’s crystal clear that making any one of these five components single-tenant instead of multi-tenant would instantly destroy Read the rest of this entry »

August 4th, 2008

SuccessFactors plugs Google Apps into HCM

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 12:40 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Google, HRM, Integration, Mashups, SuccessFactors

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, SuccessFactors Inc., Integration, Human Capital, Cloud Computing, Human Resources, Workforce Management, Phil Wainewright

Google has teamed up with SaaS vendor SuccessFactors to bring its cloud-based collaboration suite into the human capital management (HCM) arena. In a low-key announcement today, SuccessFactors launched five separate Google integrations that customers can choose to activate in its talent management software, including integrations with Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Talk. Also linked are Google Maps and Google Book Search.

Earlier this year, Google teamed up with Salesforce.com, the leading SaaS CRM vendor, for the launch of Google Apps for Salesforce. Although the integration to SuccessFactors is not as deeply embedded as in Salesforce (there’s no link to Gmail, for example), it has the potential to touch even more users. If early adopters find value in tapping the Google integrations, SuccessFactors claims a 4-million-plus user base that would have a new reason for accessing Google Apps. At the same time, SuccessFactors, which had its IPO last November, stands to gain from becoming the first HCM application to link to Google Apps, which, as BusinessWeek reports today, has already signed up more than 500,000 organizations.

Rob Bernshteyn, VP of global product marketing and management at SuccessFactors, said that SuccessFactors views the integration with Google as a differentiation from competitors that don’t have the same shared services architecture. “We’re the only vendor in HCM that’s truly multitenant. We’re the only one that has one code base,” he said. “The huge advantage this gives us — that we’ve only just started to realize — is the opportunity to take advantage of web services out in the Internet cloud.”

The Google integrations are just the first of many with other providers, he continued: Read the rest of this entry »

July 25th, 2008

Cast Iron's lifecycle SaaS integration play

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:36 pm

Categories: Integration

Tags: Software-as-a-service, Integration, Software As A Service (SaaS), Cloud Computing, Emerging Technologies, Phil Wainewright

Integration appliance vendor Cast Iron Systems showed great foresight a few years back when it decided to target its business development energies at the SaaS market. It had always targeted its products at midmarket businesses (I first came into contact with the company when I was covering the SOA market and British American Tobacco was one of its early users). So when it saw midmarket companies starting to adopt SaaS it realized there was an opportunity to fulfil an emerging need for SaaS integration. Back in 2005, “SaaS was growing, but 99% of the world was on-premise,” Cast Iron’s VP of product marketing Chandar Pattabhiram told me in a briefing last week. Inevitably, those midmarket early adopters were going to need a accessible means of exchanging data between their SaaS applications and their on-premise legacy systems.

Cast Iron’s decision coincided with Salesforce.com realizing that it needed to offer its customers effective integration solutions and the appliance vendor became an early partner. The move paid off, as Ariel Kelman, senior director of platform product marketing at Salesforce.com told me last week:

“Cast Iron has been very successful in the Salesforce.com customer base with both small/midsized companies and large enterprises,” he wrote in an email. “[It] has numerous integration references with the largest ERP applications including SAP and Oracle as well as multiple examples of integration with other web based services and legacy/custom applications.

“Our customers tell us that Cast Iron gives them great time to value for their integration projects,” he added. “This stems from rapid implementation and intuitive toolsets. Most Cast Iron implementations take only a few weeks (some in only days) with minimal configuration and resource requirements.”

This week the vendor brought out the iA4000 series, a new generation of its SaaS integration appliance, adding functionality that now addresses Read the rest of this entry »

July 21st, 2008

Sequoia bets on enterprise apps in the cloud

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 3:27 pm

Categories: Ecosystems, Google, Integration, Venture capital

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Professional Services, Sequoia Capital, Appirio, Cloud Computing, Phil Wainewright

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia Capital is well known for making smart bets on big opportunities (its track record of mega-exits includes Google, Yahoo!, PayPal and YouTube). So what are we to make of today’s news that it has led a $5.6 million series B investment round in SaaS pureplay integrator Appirio? Especially when, as The Industry Standard notes, it’s only a few months since Appirio raised a $1.1 million series A round from Salesforce.com and angels.

Sequoia’s bet is that Appirio will prove to have been an early mover in bringing the cloud to the enterprise, in the process carving a substantial slice of the $300 billion currently spent each year on traditional on-premise computing solutions. Appirio is a leader in cloud integration in three core ways:

• A strong focus on Google Apps projects alongside Salesforce.com
• Specialization in ’serverless’ (ie cloud-to-cloud) projects (more on that below, plus a controversial prediction on Exchange)
• Its combination of ‘trusted advisor’ professional services with productized on-demand services

The combination of professional services with productized offerings was a key part of the proposition that Sequoia has backed, co-founder Narinder Singh told me on Friday, as opposed to other potential funders that wanted to focus on either one or the other. “The Sequoia investment doesn’t change our business model, it just accelerates it,” said Singh.

The combination means that in addition to Appirio’s current 60+ enterprise customers for its professional services, there are another 1100 using the products. It’s effectively Read the rest of this entry »

February 6th, 2008

Another ERP vendor buys into middleware

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 11:46 am

Categories: ERP, Integration, Oracle, Workday

Tags: Acquisition, Cape Clear Software, Oracle Corp., ERP, Workday, Integration, Mergers & Acquisitions, Corporate Law, Software As A Service (SaaS), Middleware

The scale may be different, but the same market forces that fueled Oracle’s acquisition of BEA have sealed another acquisition announced today: that of SOA middleware vendor Cape Clear Software by on-demand enterprise applications vendor Workday (also covered today here on ZDNet by Dan Farber and Dana Gardner). Increasingly, customers want their middleware bundled with the application stack. The less integration work they have to do themselves, the more they like it. Middleware is disappearing as a standalone software category.

Workday’s acquisition sends many other messages too, but the rest of them offer far less comfort to Oracle [disclosure: Cape Clear and Oracle are both recent clients]. I recently visited Workday and learned that most (though far from all) of the company’s account wins are PeopleSoft customers who have fallen behind with upgrades and can’t stomach the cost and upheaval of moving to the latest version to get the functionality they need. They turn to Workday because implementation is rapid, the upfront cost is low and the on-demand model takes them off the upgrade treadmill for ever. (Read previous coverage of Workday).

Packaging integration into the proposition can only make the appeal even stronger. It reinforces that get-off-the-treadmill message, transferring responsibility from the customer to the vendor for implementing and maintaining integration as well as the application itself. In fact this always was the case — Workday has worked with Cape Clear as its integration partner since launch, so merging the two companies is merely a cementing of that working arrangement. But consummating the arrangement in an acquisition removes any ambiguity.

Just like a SaaS deployment, this private transaction will be complete in around a month’s time. The contrast with Oracle’s mega-bid for BEA couldn’t be more stark. Read the rest of this entry »