September 14th, 2009

Sage dresses SoSaaS in cloud clothing

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 2:53 pm

Categories: CRM, SFA, Utility computing

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

The software industry’s equivalent of ‘mutton dressed as lamb‘ is a phenomenon I tagged in the early days of this blog as SoSaaS: Same old Software, as a Service (SoSaaS). This is when established software vendors “take any old software package, run it up on a server in a data center, do a bit of financial engineering so customers can pay on a monthly plan, and hey presto!” They imagine they’ve introduced a competitive SaaS offering, but all they’ve really done is demonstrate their complete failure to understand what SaaS and cloud computing is all about.

Rather than fading away, this kind of self-delusion has been given a second wind by the advent of cloud computing, and is now more prevalent than ever. People seem to imagine that implementing a conventional software package on Amazon EC2 or some other cloud platform magically transforms it into a state-of-the-art SaaS stack. I’m afraid not.

Unfortunately, some vendors are so backwards in their comprehension of the SaaS model, they actually believe there’s some advantage for customers in perpetuating the long-winded implementations, painful upgrade paths and orphaned customizations of conventionally licensed packaged software. Here’s Sage CRM chief Joe Bergera talking up his company’s announcement today that “it is piloting a cloud computing edition of the Sage SalesLogix CRM suite for commercial availability in early 2010.” He enthuses:

“While first generation Software-as-a-Service generated a lot of interest, people will look back on this era as a period of big-iron, centralized operations that restrict the ability to customize the solutions … The next wave of Cloud Computing will benefit customers by providing a highly distributed and flexible deployment model that shifts control of the service to their favor, rather than SaaS vendors, so they can better tailor their CRM experience in a way that optimally suits their business.”

The press release goes on to reveal that what he is actually describing is nothing more than a “full-featured, single-tenant cloud edition of Sage SalesLogix using Amazon’s EC2.” Yes, this revolutionary new proposition is just a sorry pile of SoSaaS, dumped in the cloud. Go figure.

December 19th, 2008

SaaS delivers return *before* investment

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 2:18 pm

Categories: Business models, SFA

Tags: Software-as-a-service, Investment, CRM, LucidEra, Sales Strategy, Sales Force Management, Sales, Phil Wainewright

For customers, there’s a welcome quid-pro-quo for all the hefty upfront investment SaaS providers have to make before earning any revenue. It’s an effect that I long ago termed ‘return before investment’ (rBi):

“With on-demand applications, customers don’t start paying until they begin using the application, and they typically pay on a per-user, per-month basis. So it’s quite easy to imagine deploying a procurement application, for example, which achieves enough savings per user in the first month to more than repay the monthly fee. If the fee is billed on net 30 day terms, then the customer achieves the return before the investment has even been made. That’s the essence of rBi.”

I recently discovered that on-demand BI provider LucidEra is putting this principle to work in an innovative sales approach that co-founder Ken Rudin and CEO Rob Reid (pictured below) tell me has helped ramp the company’s prospect conversion rate.

LucidEra’s application analyzes sales pipeline data and is a popular complement to Salesforce.com (as well as other CRM apps). But unlike others in the Salesforce.com ecosystem, LucidEra doesn’t offer a 30-day trial of its software. It’s figured out that letting people try it out before they recognise what it can do is counter-productive. Most sales managers just use BI to see who in the team is missing quota, whereas a more detailed analysis can tell you why they’re missing it. “Trials can’t be effective,” explained Reid (who used to head up Siebel CRM On Demand, and prior to that CRM SaaS pioneer UpShot), “because it’s something new and people don’t understand how to make best use of it.”

Instead, when LucidEra arranges a sales call, it asks the prospect to provide data from its sales pipeline for the provider to analyze 48 hours ahead of the meeting. It then performs 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 »

December 7th, 2007

Salesforce to Salesforce, the anti-viral network

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 7:42 am

Categories: CRM, Ecosystems, ID management, Integration, On-demand, SFA, Salesforce.com, Web 2.0

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Network, Organization, Sales Force Management, Sales, Phil Wainewright

When I heard the details of Salesforce.com’s newly announced feature that allows subscribing companies to link data and processes with each other, my first reaction was very favorable. My second reaction — when I heard the price — was, “How much? You must be kidding.”

Salesforce to Salesforce (S2S) is a new feature that allows users in an organisation to invite Salesforce.com users in a different organization to share and synchronize data, custom objects and processes. As some have said, this is a potentially game-changing new capability that taps into the unique nature of a truly multi-tenant hosted application architecture. I would add that it’s a great validation of service-oriented architecture and the role that identity management plays within it.

Organizations and their users have complete control over what’s shared, right down to deciding which organizations and individual users can access each distinct record and field. So for example a human resources manager could share a recruitment process with staff at an external recruitment agency, but limit each agency contact to a separate list of job openings and candidates. A manufacturer might divide up its leads between its partners, while holding back more sensitive data about where the prospects originated and what they’ve previously bought. There’s complete granularity of control by organization and user, and by record, field, object and process. And because this is all defined in metadata, it automatically migrates to the next version whenever the application is upgraded.

Even better, the functionality has been implemented in a way that fosters viral adoption. Salesforce.com users can look up potential targets for data sharing much like a LinkedIn or Skype user Read the rest of this entry »

November 11th, 2007

Oracle goes for the CRM jugular

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 6:38 pm

Categories: CRM, Oracle, SFA, Salesforce.com, Web 2.0

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Application, Oracle Corp., CRM, Web 2.0, Sales Force Management, Advertising & Promotion, Business Structures, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Sales Strategy

Oracle tomorrow will unveil a new generation of CRM OnDemand applications designed both to propel Oracle to the forefront of CRM innovation and at the same time bring a halt to Salesforce.com’s expansion into the enterprise market.

Attendees at SIIA’s OnDemand Summit on Friday were given a sneak preview of some of the new applications being unveiled tomorrow at the Oracle OpenWorld conference. Let me tell you frankly, I was seriously impressed. Oracle has evidently done some hard thinking about how Web 2.0 technologies and ideas can be adapted to practical enterprise use. The next time a C-level executive asks you how Web 2.0 affects the enterprise, you’ll be able to point to Oracle’s new CRM OnDemand applications. They are a powerful demonstration of how Web 2.0 can be applied in an enterprise environment.

Anthony Lye (pictured), senior vice president of Oracle CRM OnDemand, demonstrated three applications:

• An application that predicts sales opportunities — it mashes up information about orders and territories from internal systems, along with external information such as financials data from Reuters (in a sideswipe at mashups that link to Google Maps, Lye commented: “Sales people will tell you that directions is very much secondary to commissions.”) It then evaluates the information and makes recommendations on who the most likely prospects are, what products they’re most likely interested in and even who are the best potential references to direct them to from among the existing customer base.
• A campaign creation and management application — one of the most powerful Web 2.0 aspects of this application is that campaigns can be shared with others — including external partners — without exposing the specific contact details and orders associated with the campaign. This gives it a highly viral nature.
• A document sharing and rating library application — this allows salespeople to access and share presentations, rfps and other documents in a way that helps them identify the best content for their needs. It has all the usual Web 2.0 goodness, such as tag clouds, rating and comments, and it’s searchable down to individual slide or page level. “I just wanted to build a social library, that when salespeople saw it, they just wanted to have it,” said Lye. Like the other applications, it can be shared across the firewall with partners and others, but subject to access rights and privileges that protect confidential information.

Other applications will be unveiled tomorrow, making up a suite of mini-applications that, says Lye, were designed Read the rest of this entry »

March 12th, 2007

Xactly stakes claim on emerging sales performance market

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 4:58 pm

Categories: SFA, Xactly

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Sales Force, On-demand, Sales Performance, Xactly, Fulfilment, Sales Strategy, Sales Force Management, Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing

On-demand sales incentive management vendor Xactly is spreading its wings today and laying claim to the wider “sales performance” market which, citing market research from Ventana, the company claims is far bigger than salesforce automation alone. Does that mean Xactly aspires to become bigger than Salesforce.com, I asked Xactly’s CEO Chris Cabrera in a briefing call on Friday. Cabrera and his colleagues laughed off the suggestion, not least because Salesforce.com is itself a marquee customer for Xactly, as well as a major partner. Nevertheless this is a company that, like Salesforce.com before it, is punching above its weight for its size and has targeted a market that looks set to expand dramatically over the next few years.

One of the most impressive facets of Xactly’s strategy is that it’s defining its own market, rather than aiming to seize an existing application category from incumbents. After a period of intensive analysis of the market opportunity ahead of it, Xactly believes it can expand into a number of related application categories (see diagram) that are poorly served by current vendors — especially in the high end of the mid-market, which is the sweet spot for Xactly and its on-demand offerings.

“It is the high end of the mid-market that really is adopting on-demand because of the economics,” Cabrera told me. The appeal of Xactly, he added, is that it gives them the information and tools to get the best out of their salesforce. “They will absolutely sell more stuff, and they’ll sell more of the right stuff.”

Today’s announcements extend Xactly’s offerings in several directions: Read the rest of this entry »

March 11th, 2007

Are on-demand users safe from the DST debacle?

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 5:48 am

Categories: Collaboration, Google, SFA, Salesforce.com

Tags:

Unfortunately, on-demand users may also be affected by today's early switch to daylight saving time — although some are safer than others, it seems. At least they don't have to run around patching servers — thankfully, that's the vendors' problem. But not all vendors can be relied on to do that. And even if they do, their customers still have to cope with the consequences of synchronization mismatches.

There are two factors that determine whether you're going to have either a lot of problems or few to none.

#1 Does your vendor normally do all-in-one updates? An on-demand vendor that runs its software as a single, multi-tenant instance is the safest option of all, because there's very little to go wrong, so long as it has remembered to adjust for DST. That's why Salesforce.com's SVP of product marketing Kendall Collins was bullishly confident about this weekend's change when I spoke to him earlier in the week:

"The time on Salesforce.com is always going to be correct," he told me. Although the company actually runs several separate instances, its policy is always to upgrade them simultaneously. "We make that change and it's instantly effective across all our customers." Coincidentally, Salesforce.com was scheduled to implement a major upgrade across all its servers on Friday, although not for the DST update, which has already been done.

Problems come if a vendor runs multiple instances on multiple servers and doesn't make sure of ugrading them all at the same time. Surprisingly (and damningly, for a company that wants to show how serious a player it is in the on-demand market), Google falls into this category, as Spanning Partners' Charlie Wood reported on his blog last week (with my emphasis added): Read the rest of this entry »

January 8th, 2007

Collaborative selling in the on-demand era

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 5:17 pm

Categories: Business models, CRM, Collaboration, SFA, Web 2.0

Tags:

Is collaboration an essential component of customer relationship management (CRM)? In the Internet era, it seems ridiculous even to have to ask. Any vendor that ignores the new-found voice of their customers — expressed through blogs and discussion forums and then amplified through powerful echo-chambers such as Technorati, Digg and Techmeme — does so at their peril.

Yet conventional CRM applications include only rudimentary collaborative capabilities.Central Desktop is best known for picking a fight with Google They are designed on the assumption that the enterprise uses a separate application stack to orchestrate communications with its customers. Perhaps the imposition of this unnatural demarcation between communications and relationships is one of the reasons why conventional CRM has so frequently harmed vendor-customer relationships instead of making them better.

Leading on-demand CRM vendor salesforce.com does no better in this respect than the established conventional vendors, mainly because it has modeled its functionality (although emphatically not its architecture) on what went before. However one of the reasons for introducing its extensible Apex architecture and AppExchange marketplace is to make it easy for others to extend functionality in innovative ways. It was perhaps significant that the most successful of the first wave of third-party applications on AppExchange was DreamFactory's DreamTeam, a project management application. Today, the collaborative capabilities of the platform are extended further with the announcement of Central Desktop's arrival on AppExchange.

Central Desktop — best known for picking a fight with Google (and apparently winning, at least for the time being) after its CEO Isaac Garcia blogged that Google's own Web applications were consistently winning the top AdWords spots — is a wiki-style enterprise collaboration suite. I say 'wiki-style' because although it has all the functionality of a wiki it dresses it up in business-friendly templates so that even people who've never heard of a wiki can quickly get productive with its collaborative capabilities.

Its pitch to AppExchange users is the ability to add 'collaborative extranets' to Salesforce.com. Although the formal announcement is today, Read the rest of this entry »

November 17th, 2006

Pushing the envelope of consumerization

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 12:42 pm

Categories: Rich Internet Applications, SFA

Tags:

On-demand vendors are at the forefront of the trend towards consumerization of enterprise applications, redesigning their software to emulate the look-and-feel of popular consumer-oriented Web sites such as Amazon.com, eBay, Google and MySpace. Their pay-as-you-go business model motivates on-demand vendors to maximize user uptake and return on investment. Therefore they have a vested interest in making it as easy and appealing as possible for users to become productive with their applications.

But why stop at copying existing best practice on the Web? Why not push the envelope even further? All of a sudden, those familiar tabbed interfaces look old-fashioned That's what CRM provider Entellium is aiming to do with Rave CRM, a new sales automation product that uses smart client technology to deliver what the company calls a 'visually immersive' user experience. [Disclosure: Entellium is a client and, because of a historic relationship, I hold a small equity stake in the company. See disclosure page. By sheer fluke, Entellium and Rearden Commerce, another client, each independently chose Nov 14th as the date to make landmark announcements, so this week's blog is exceptionally client-heavy.]

Thanks to my special relationship with Entellium, I've had early previews of Rave, and I've been looking forward to the time when I could publicly write about it. Whereas traditional sales automation software is designed to serve sales managers — and therefore is often used only reluctantly by the sales people on their teams — Rave's core design point is to engage the individual sales person. Recognizing that this is a demographic that's typically mid- to late twenties, highly attuned to the Web and more often male than female, it goes out of its way Read the rest of this entry »

September 16th, 2006

Salesforce.com, the new gorilla on the block

Posted by Phil Wainewright @ 1:09 pm

Categories: Ecosystems, SFA, Salesforce.com

Tags:

Never one to hide his company's light under a bushel, Marc Benioff has been taking pains to make absolutely sure everyone understands what it means to pass the half-billion-dollar threshold, which Salesforce.com is set to do this financial year if it maintains its current growth rate.

There are only 40 software companies in the world in that league, he points out — and he has his sights firmly set on punching through the billion-dollar barrier too, which would put salesforce.com into the top 25. With little sign of any slowing in the company's rapid growth rate, the figures suggest that could happen in less than two years' time.

There was a time when CEO Benioff's ability to rouse headlines helped Salesforce.com punch above its weight. It certainly helped get the company noticed at a time it was just another brash young startup, struggling to persuade customers to sign up to its new-fangled alternative to traditional software.

But in the past eighteen months or so the company has been through a transformation. Read the rest of this entry »