Today’s business Neanderthals

Many businesses are hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with today’s realities and are doomed to extinction

“Bringing a knife to a gunfight” describes showing up hopelessly ill-equipped for the task at hand.

Two recent conferences, the massive Dreamforce in San Francisco and the smaller, but still fascinating, Australian Xerocon in Melbourne illustrate just how radically the commercial world is changing and how many business leaders are poorly equipped for today’s times.

In July, the Melbourne Xero Convention bought together 400 Australian partners of the cloud accounting service which showed how how one New Zealand based company is building it’s business through engaging other suppliers who add features to the basic service.

Vend, a Point Of Sale cloud service provider, was one of the companies exhibiting at XeroCon. In the past POS systems have been a pain for retail businesses with most suppliers’ business models being about locking customers into expensive contracts.

With cloud services, the old vendor lock in model dies as stores can use any device they like such as a PC, tablet computer or a smartphone so a business is no longer locked into using an overpriced and often antiquated piece of equipment.

Making the cloud offering even more attractive is that Vend, and many of their competitors, also take advantage of APIs – Application Program Interfaces – built into other services so they can seamlessly change records.

So a shop can make a sale in their physical store and inventory levels will automatically change in the online stores and on services like eBay. If an item is now of stock, the websites are automatically updated to reflect this.

This business automation makes it easier and cheaper to run a business. It’s everything that computer have promised for the last thirty years and is now being delivered through cloud computing services.

At Dreamforce in San Francisco last week, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff showed the 90,000 attendees how these services work on a corporate level with demonstrations from companies as diverse as General Electricski company Rossignol, and Australia’s own Commonwealth Bank.

What really stood out with all of these presentations was how each business had made major technology investments that in turn allowed them to deploy modern tools.

The Virgin America Dreamforce presentation was particularly telling. Having just endured a 13 hour United Airlines flight in a plane that had been barely refurbished since 1988 it was clear that the older airline simply didn’t have the hardware to compete with the upstart even if management and staff wanted to.

From both Dreamforce and XeroCon the message has been clear, those legacy managers who won’t invest in new technologies or re-organise their businesses to meet the realities of the 21st Century are simply doomed.

In Australia this sense of doom in the business community is confirmed when MYOB and Google missed their target of giving away 50,000 free business websites as part of their Getting Aussie Business Online program.

Depending on whose figures you use, between 50 and 65 percent of Australia’s 1.7 million small businesses don’t have a website – and websites are last decade’s technology.

Business has moved onto mobile and social platforms, those 800,000 businesses who are yet to move into the new century are roadkill – the competition are just going to run over them.

If you are still struggling with the idea of a website – let alone a mobile site, mobile phone app or social media strategy – then you haven’t bought a knife to a gunfight, you’ve bought a sharpened stick. It’s time to figure out whether you still want to be in business.

Disclaimer: Paul travelled to XeroCon in Melbourne courtesy of Xero and to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.com

Similar posts:

Meeting the solid state Woz

The fast talking Steve Wozniak surfs into town on a wave of enthusiasm.

When the opportunity comes to meet co-founder of Apple computer Steve Wozniak you jump at it, despite being jet lagged from the previous day’s flight.

One of the tough things when writing about Steve Wozniak is that he is a fast talker. You have to be quick to keep up with his ideas and words.

Steve was in town to show off the range of solid state computer memory cards manufactured by Fusion-iO, a company based in Salt Lake City.

Wozniak liked the idea so much he became Fusion-iO’s chief scientist in 2009. “When I first saw the iO drive, it was so beautiful I had to buy one from the company and put it in a frame just to frame it at home.”

What enthused Woz were Fusion-iO‘s range of NAND flash memory cards that speed up servers while reducing their power and cooling requirements.

Those power savings are important for data centres when hundreds of thousands of servers might be in one building, Fusion-iO’s CEO and co-founder David Flynn estimates this could save up the industry a $250 billion a year in operating costs.

Probably the biggest benefits though are in the corporate space, one Flynn’s boasts is how one movie studio used Fusion-iO’s products to reduce transcoding between formats from two hours to 39 seconds.

Another case study they show off is how grocery chain Woolworths were able to reduce the 17 hours to run their weekly trading reports to three hours meaning they were able to capture weekend figures for their weekly Monday morning board meetings.

For smaller businesses, the biggest benefit is these products can turn fairly basic desktop computers into workstations with the $2,500 ioFX card promising some serious post production capabilities for a system although one would expect an entry level box wouldn’t have the data connection, hard drive or – most importantly – power supply to cope with the demands of such a device would put on the typical cheap components in a basic desktop system.

All of these changes though are heralding some pretty big changes for big and small businesses.

Where Steve Wozniak sees the greatest application of moving data faster is in Artificial Intelligence applications like voice recognition. Apple’s Siri is a good example of this.

The barrier to effective voice recognition is the sheer amount of data processing required to effectively understand voice commands. Doing this on cloud services is a far more efficient and effective way of doing this.

As we saw at Dreamforce last week, the sheer amount of data pouring into companies is changing how they manage information. Getting access quickly to relevant information is an important part of managing it.

“I’ve never gotten so excited about or fell in love with a technology like this since Apple.” Says Wozniak.

Having a chance to speak to Steve Wozniak up close shows that fast talking enthusiasm is for real. The Woz is a real geek.

Like all true geeks Wozniak is passionate about what he believes in – whether it’s about NAND flash cards or becoming an Australian resident he bubbles with enthusiasm. Just don’t try writing notes down while he’s in full flight.

Similar posts:

Legacy people

Virgin America shows how quickly legacy operations are falling behind their younger competitors

“The problem with legacy businesses is legacy people” said David Cush, the CEO of Virgin America at the Dreamforce conference.

For many organisations this is indeed the problem; that managements, workforces and shareholders are locked into a way of doing business that has worked for them in the past, so when change arrives they are ill-equipped to deal with it.

One of the key take aways from the Dreamforce conference is that the rate of business change is accelerating as technologies like cloud computing and the Internet mature.

For the legacy businesses locked into old ways this means they are going backwards faster than they could imagine.

A good example of this is when Virgin America showed their vision of how customer service works in a connected, social world.

The problem for companies like United and the other legacy carriers with their older aircraft and lumbering IT systems is they simply don’t have the infrastructure to provide these services if they wanted to.

One of the characteristics of 1980s management thinking is under-investing in equipment. ‘working your assets’ by flogging them way past their replacement dates is a handy way to increase profits and management bonuses, but it leaves a business exposed when newer technologies come along.

That’s the problem the legacy businesses, whether they are airlines, banks, telcos or in any other sector. Those who are nimble and those who have invested in new systems can take advantage of the change.

For some of these businesses even if they had the wits, and cash, to make those investments it’s dubious whether they could make the tools work properly.

‘Getting it’ is more than just understanding how to turn on an iPhone or send a tweet, it’s about how these tools can be used in a business.

If you don’t know how to use these tools, or understand the consequences of using them, then the investment is wasted.

For those organisations who are falling behind, they have to start moving quickly or their legacy is the only trace there will be of their existence.

Similar posts:

Live Blogging from the Dreamforce keynote

A live commentary of the Dreamforce keynote session

01.29

So the session begins with some case studies and interviews with happy Salesforce customers including Comcast, Deliottes and a not-for-profit.

At the front of the bloggers section, things are pretty civilised but that will change in a few minutes as the doors are about to open for delegates.

Similar posts:

11.55

Now we’re into the final run, Marc revisits the Touch mobile plaform and starts the final ‘vignette’ which is Burberry.

The thrust of the Burberry video is how the company is using all of the various Salesforce tools.

“It sounds like Minority Report” Marc asks, “it is” says Angela Ahrendts the CEO of Burberry.

Similar posts:

11.44

George and Dan demonstrate a smart QR-code enabled Coke vending machine. One should worry if the Daleks get this technology.

Now Marc talks with Coca-Cola on integrating an SAP back end with a Salesforce social platform before winding up.

Similar posts:

11.40

George gives a big thank you to those who’ve contributed to the Ideas Exchange and then introduces Salesforce Identity to manage the enterprise social media indentity.

Is this a direct competitor to Google+ or to Microsoft?

The single point of user management was a selling point for the various Microsoft services shown at last week’s Australian TechEd.

Should Salesforce be able to get traction with a corporate identity service then it creates a real threat to Eric Schmidt’s concept of Google+ being the identity management service of choice.

George shows off how the cloud services can be bought together with intelligent vending machines that can even track who scarfed all the diet coke.

 

Similar posts:

11.28

Now we have a look at Coca-Cola with a historical look at their advertising.

50,000 tweets a day about Coca-Cola and they try to answer every one that is a question.

The concept Coca-Cola putting forward of personalised drink dispensers linked to reward programs and social media is interesting. While it may not work for soda, this is something we will see.

Now George Hu, COO of Salesforce takes the stage. George has a good story himself as he started at the company as an intern.

Similar posts:

11.19

So the work.com system works around awarding badges. Do we get a drink if the word ‘gamification’ is used?

The integration into Amazon allows managers to create incentive prizes.

Tim Campos the CIO of Facebook is introduced by Marc. Applause from part of the audience – not sure if that’s fanbois or Facebook employees.

Similar posts:

11.10

Now we get the demonstration of how Salesforce are looking to change the HR department with Work.com

In many ways the social angle makes sense for HR, one of the failures in the modern corporation is how the employee management has become depersonalised. Even the term “HR” illustrates the industrial machine mindset.

Joh Wookey, EVP work.com and social applications, show off their HR software.

Facebook was one of Work.com’s first customers. This is an interesting alliance.

Similar posts:

11.01

Wow! Marc Benioff is almost as tall as Tony Robbins. I wouldn’t like to meet those two in a dark alley.

Similar posts:

10.59

Harris announces a secure, Salesforce integrated version of Dropbox, Chatterbox.

This is an interesting product as one of the concerns of CIOs and IT folk is the potential security risks of staff sharing documents on public cloud services.

Harris demonstrates how Virgin can use Chatter to expedite customer support. It would have been interesting to how Virgin Australia would have used this feature during their reservations system implosion two years ago.

Notable during Harris’ presentation is how integral iPads are in the demonstration.

Another aspect of the support demonstration is real time advice to passengers through inflight wireless networks and personal IFE systems.  It would be hard to see how this could work on airlines like United.

Similar posts:

10.50

Virgin America’s turn arrives. The fastest growing airline in the US using Chatter.

Thirty percent of communication in Virgin happens through tablet devices.

A big call for Chatter and now Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris takes over the presentation from Mark Benioff.

Similar posts:

10.46

Now HP. Now this is a company that needs help both with customers and internally.

George Zimmer, Mens Warehouse CEO now joins Mark and makes the point that his business was built on a billion dollars worth of advertising to baby boomers, marketing to Millennials requires selling through social media.

Similar posts:

10.41

The reskinned Radian6 control panels are shown for the CBAs social presence.

Andy Lark of the CBA joins Mark Benioff, “banking has always been a social business,” Andy says.

 

Similar posts:

10.30

“By 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs” quotes Benioff

Brett Queener EVP of Salesforce’s marketing cloud.

“Social is the biggest change to marketing in sixty years” says Brett. It’s interesting that marketing ceased being social.

Similar posts:

10.28

And now the Aussie contingent. I’m not sure if I’d call the Commonwealth Bank an “amazing company”.

Kaching appears as the CBA first product being showcased which isn’t surprising.

CBA claim Facebook and Radian6 are one of their most effective marketing platforms.

“It’s not about technology, it’s about meeting customers’ needs better.” Is this the same Commonwealth Bank we know in Australia?

Similar posts:

10.24

Now Jeremy Stoppelman from Yelp! joins Benioff.

“Mobile is the core” says Stoppleman which is obvious.

“Monetizing mobile” – is Yelp making a profit?

Similar posts:

10.20

Some screenshots of the control panel for Service Cloud tracking customer issues through social media.

The demo continues in showing the call centre and service desk applications in bringing up a customer’s social media activity along with their service history.

Now we see how customers can use Facetime or any onboard video to diagnose service problems.

Similar posts:

10.11

Now a case study from gaming company Activision. Salesforce’s videos are definately more interesting than a boring IBM style whitepaper.

Fergus Griffin, SVP of Solutions Marketing at salesforce.com shows off the small business aspects of the Servicecloud product.

I wish people would find an alternative to saying “I’m thrilled to announce….”

 

Similar posts:

10.03

One could say Powerpoint free sales presentations could be one of mankind’s greatest achievements and concludes Hilary’s product demo.

Marc now interviews the CEO of Rossignol, Bruno Cercley before moving onto a Charles Schwab executive.

Similar posts:

09.56

Hilary Koplow-McAdams, President of Salesforce’s Commercial/SMB Business Unit takes the stage to announce the new products announced this morning which we covered earlier today

The audience seems a little underwhelmed by the new Touch iPhone app.

Hilary takes the hall through how the various products integrate through a demo around Rossignol who were showcased in the previous segment.

Similar posts:

09.48

The production values in the videos are exquisite. Salesforce don’t cut corners when it comes to making a promotional clip.

Similar posts:

09.46

And now the business case studies start. It might be worth slowing down the live blog for a while.

Similar posts:

09.44

And so ends the GE segment. As @evanshrugged says on Twitter;

Loving #Dreamforce, but since they’re interviewing GE employees I must say #RememberTesla. GE sucks.

 

Similar posts:

09.40

Beth Comstock from GE claims her sales team are 100% digitised.

Demonstrating using Chatter for customer,  maintenance and design teams working on the early Boeing Dreamliner GEnx engines.

Similar posts:

09.37

“The social revolution is a trust revolution.”

Benioff asks “are you and your company going through a social revolution?’

And now the story of GE and Marc Benioff’s 30 minute conversation on the future of GE with Jeff Immelt.

“I believe the future of GE is the man-machine interface” said Immelt, “we  believe the revenue future is becoming a customer centric business.”

GE Share: Jet engines with APIs – a social network around an aircraft turbines or CT scanners that structures customer information and service details.

And now a promo video on GE proclaiming itself to be a social company.

Similar posts:

09.30

“It’s a customer revolution” states Benioff as he prowls the aisles of the hall.

Social is “a fundamental change in business. We  saw that to be really successful in this time we had to be a company customers could trust. We’d have to have a level of transparency that has never been seen.”

Similar posts:

09.24

We’re in a social revolution — “you only have to see the news this morning to see how a video can change the world.”

“How many companies here today use social computing in your business in some way?” Most people put up their hands.

“Business is social”.

Similar posts:

09.21

“We are standing on the shoulders of giants” — Watson, Gates, Ellison, Sergei Page all get a mention as building the tech industry with a special shout out to Steve Jobs.

Similar posts:

09.19

For the last decade, Marc has been travelling the world saying “the cloud is coming”.

Putting 1% of equity into charity is “the best decision we have every made” creating million of grants, donations to 16,000 non-profits and 350,000 hours in hours donated by Salesforce staff.

Similar posts:

09.15

Now Marc Benioff takes the stage and thanks the audience for making Salesforce the success it has been.

 

Marc Benioff onstage at dreamforce

Similar posts:

09.12

The clip now goes through some of the applications for mobile commerce; aircraft engineers using their iPads to service planes, ordering hot dogs from your stadium seat and, most unlikely of all, making flying a pleasure.

 

Similar posts:

09.09

Impressive promotional clip to kick off the keynote. A big emphasis on the mobile phone and social.

Too many stats to recount, it’s like a social media expert’s dream.

“Everything is social, everything is in the cloud.”

Similar posts:

09.06

And now MC Hammer takes the stage. Sadly he’s lip synching most of it except for the last rap.

Similar posts:

09.01

Excitement grips the room as the safe harbour investment statement is read out.

Similar posts:

08.59

Now Evan Trent from the School of Rock comes onto the stage to discuss how franchisees use Salesforce’s small business tools like Do.

I had a beer with Evan last night at the media reception, School of Rock has a big operation and they’ve streamlined what was the typical ad-hoc small business mess onto the cloud with Google Apps and Salesforce.

Similar posts:

08.49

So Do.com is kind of a competitor to Basecamp that plugs into Facebook and Google+

Sean announces a Do app for Android and open APIs for developers. We’ll probably hear about many more APIs and app releases.

Similar posts:

08.46

Sean Whitely from Salesforce’s Do.com is now up to give a demo of the business social media platform

Similar posts:

08.44

The San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee now joins the event. He’d be pretty happy with 90,000 attendees today.

Ed makes the case for San Francisco as a technology hub – “San Francisco; innovation capital of the world” and he’s declaring October to be Innovation Month.

“Vote Early and Vote Often” for city Proposition E that gives tax breaks to technology companies based in San Francisco.

Similar posts:

08.37

The customer interviews continue with a small business story in local business Carlos’ Bakery and multinationals in Schneider Electric and Accenture.

Similar posts:

08.34

Whoops! The time settings on the blog were set to Sydney time, so the initial date stamp was 17 hours out. All fixed now.

Similar posts:

Similar posts:

Redefining the social business

Salesforce.com announce a range of new products at Dreamforce 2012

Over the last two years Salesforce.com have been one of the more aggressive buyers of cloud computing and social media startups with acquistions of companies like Rypple, Desk.com, Buddy Media and Radian6.

Today, ahead of the company’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce.com announced a revamped product range that brings together the social media and big data tools from these acquisitions along with some in house innovations.

Salesforce expect nearly a hundred million enterprise tablet computer users and smartphones by 2016, so like all web based services, they have to make their platform available as an app. Salesforce’s new Touch iOS App allows users to use Salesforce.com as an app on the iPhone.

Despite Mark Zuckerburg’s disavowal of HTML5 last week, Salesforce remains committed to the standard despite developing an app for the iPhone.

“Initially we’re rolling out Touch in a way we’ve made sure works the way people want it to work on an iPad,” Peter Coffee, Vice President of Platform Research at Salesforce.com, says.

“We are reiterating our commitment to HTML 5 as a device and platform neutral cluster of standards.

“As HTML5 begins to clearly coalesce we’re making a major commitment to that and we’re going to lead the way while the opposition is still trying to work on one browser.”

Salesforce continues their focus on social media with their Chatter service becoming a key part of their Force.com cloud applications platform. Chatter itself is being extended with a new feature to enable companies to create their own branded communities.

That social integration continues as the company rolls out Social Key, an application which, as Andy MacMillan, senior vice president and general manager of Data.com says “will empower companies to derive value from social data for the first time.”

If Social Key does achieve a real measure of value from retweets and Facebook posts it may well mean many social media experts will have to return to multi-level marketing or real estate sales. This in itself is not a bad thing.

The new Salescloud platform uses Chatter to build business intelligence on customers, bringing data across a business to help sales teams target their efforts more effectively.

While sales is by definition the focus of Salesforce they are also launching a similar Chatter service for support teams. This compliments the acquisition of Assist.ly at the beginning of the year.

Marketing too is being targeted by Salesforce with the launch of Marketing Cloud that combines the Buddy Media Facebook marketing service and the Radian6 social media monitoring platform.

While already the leader in business cloud applications, Salesforce are making a strong bid to dominate the sector in a way that Microsoft did in the desktop computer industry twenty years ago.

Browsing through the 400 partner stands at the Dreamforce Expo shows Cloudforce  are building a deep ecosystem around their products that will make it hard for competitors to break into the space.

Whether Salesforce achieve this dominance remains to be seen, but they are certainly giving a new set of tools for businesses to understand their customers.

Pricing and Availability
Salesforce Touch is generally available today on iOS devices, and included in all Salesforce editions.

Sales Cloud Partner Communities is currently scheduled to be available in limited pilot in Fall 2012.

Sales Cloud Partner Communities is currently scheduled to be generally available the second half of 2013.

Data.com Social Key is currently scheduled to be generally available the second half of 2013.

Pricing of Sales Cloud Partner Communities and Data.com Social Key will be announced at general availability.

Similar posts:

Living the Salesforce dream

Dreamforce showcases Salesforce.com’s vision of cloud computing, big data and social media’s future.

The history of Salesforce.com tracks the evolution of cloud computing. Founded by Marc Benioff and Parker Harris in a San Francisco apartment at the 1999 peak of the dot com boom, today the company has over 100,000 customers with a market capitalisation of 21 billion dollars.

While founded as a sales Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) service, Salesforce’s range of products has extended across a number of other business functions such as business intelligence and customer support.

Dreamforce is the company’s international major conference which in 2012 is expected to attract 90,000 attendees to hear what is planned for the platform as they expand into new fields.

Along with Salesforce are 350 partners exhibiting their services that plug into Salesforce’s system. As we saw at the Xero conference, the community of developers and support companies are as important to a software company’s success as its products.

One of the notable things about Salesforce is the company’s hunger for acquisitions having taken over twenty-four companies in the last few years. It will be interesting to see how Salesforce are integrating those startups.

Salesforce are probably the company at the forefront at adopting social media into their products as seen with the acquisitions of companies like Facebook advertising platform Buddy Media and the Rypple  social performance review service.

The move to mobile is changing how businesses interacts with customers, this is one of the challenges for Salesforce.

Just as Salesforce has tracked the rise of cloud computing, the company is now tracking the evolution of Big Data and social media.

The Dreamforce 2012 conference should give some insight into how the company, and other industries, are adapting to the challenges presented by the mobile web, big data and the social workplace.

Paul travelled to the Dreamforce conference courtesy of Cloudforce.

Similar posts:

Microsoft TechEd Australia 2012

Microsoft’s Australian TechEd in 2012 comes at an important time for the software giant.

2012 is the year that will define Microsoft as the market place they have dominated moves to tablet computers and smart phones.

The challenge for Microsoft is how they migrate their desktop and server products to the platforms dominated by Amazon, Google and Apple.

At this year’s TechEd Australian conference the pressure is on Microsoft to present how they will deal with this challenge from tablet computers, mobile phones and cloud computing.

The big ticket item is the Windows phone. After the disastrous launch of the Nokia Lumia 920, Microsoft has to convince the market place they have a viable competitor to the iPhone and the plethora of Google Android devices.

Microsoft have taken the opposite strategy to Apple in trying to offer the same operating system on all their devices. If Windows 8 can run on all systems then they have a chance of locking high margin corporate users onto their platforms.

Windows 8 itself has to have a compelling story to tell. Much of Microsoft’s future relies upon a successful rollout of the new operating system that meets the demands of both consumers and businesses. Users increasingly expect social media and cloud computing services to be integrating into their systems.

Cloud computing is an important part of Microsoft’s corporate strategy and how the new version of Windows Server delivers on the business requirements of using cloud services will be an important factor in the product’s success.

One of Microsoft’s most profitable product lines has been their Office suite of applications. Margins on Office have been under pressure since the release of the free Google Docs suite and the corporate Google Apps product.

The advantage Microsoft have in the office productivity market is their products have the full range of feature business users need and Google, and Apple, have struggled to include these tools in their products.

With new versions of Office, Server, Phone and Windows all being released Microsoft have a lot of stories to tell and the stakes for the software giant are huge. It’s going to be an interesting few days at the Gold Coast Convention Centre.

Similar posts: