Becoming an all mobile executive

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says he’s gone completely mobile, will other executives follow?

“I don’t want to use a laptop again,” Marc Benioff told the closing Dreamforce 2013 customer Q&A. “The desktop remains the biggest security threat to corporations — it’s a nightmare. The PC and laptop we never designed to be connected to a network.”

Benioff was walking his talk in promoting his company’s Salesforce One mobile platform, claiming at the Dreamforce conference opening that he hadn’t used a PC or laptop or nine months as he’s moved over to tablet and smartphone apps.

That push to move the company and its customers onto mobile services was emphasised by Peter Coffee, Salesforce’s Vice President for Strategic Research.

“Your mobile device is no longer an accessory,” says Coffee. “It’s the first thing you reach for in the morning and it’s the last thing you touch at night.”

Salesforce’s push into into the post-PC market follows Google and Apple’s lead, much to the distress of Microsoft and its partners.

“We saw the phenomenal engineering work of Scott Forstall at Apple and the visionary work of the late, great Steve Jobs,”  Benioff told his cutomers at the final Dreamforce Q&A. “When we saw the iPhone we sat up and thought ‘wow, what are we going to do about this?'”

“This is a paradigm shift, we’re moving from the desktop world to the mobile phone world and then of course we saw the iPad world emerge and that amplified it.”

Salesforce’s impressions were shared by much of the business community as senior executives, board members and company founders quickly embraced the first version of the iPad, which on its own triggered the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend in enterprise computing.

In a mobile age, Benioff now sees three key priorities for Salesforce; “we want to be feed first, we want to be mobile first and we want to be social first.”

Regardless of Benioff’s vision, not everyone will go mobile which is something that Peter Coffee acknowledges.

“The laptop will occasionally be used to author creative work like a presentation or to deal with something that needs a large screen like pipeline analysis,” says Coffee.

Marc Benioff though is adamant. “Honestly I don’t ever want to use a laptop again,” he told his audience.

It will be interesting to see how many business leaders follow him in abandoning their desktops and portable computers as the post-PC era of computing develops.

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Salesforce’s place in the web’s walled gardens

Can Salesforce take a place alongside Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google?

“Did he just say we’re at the half-way mark?” Whispered the ashen faced journalist beside me as Mark Benioff’s Dreamforce keynote reached the 90 minute mark.

Benioff did and the presentation did indeed go three hours because Salesforce.com had a lot to announce with launches of new mobile apps, customer service programs and HR services.

At the press conference later in the day, Benioff said “we are interested in collaboration and the customer. the reason we’re in marketing is because our customers want us to be in marketing.”

An interesting part of this is the Facebook relationship, with the Buddy Media acquisition 10% of Facebook’s advertising revenue comes through  Salesforce. This in itself makes Salesforce a key Facebook partner.

Facebook’s relationship goes deeper with Salesforce, at the media conference Marc Benioff mentioned that the company’s purchase of Rypple came about because of urging from Tim Capos, Facebook’s CIO.

That deep relationship was on show in the opening keynote where Facebook were one of the strategic partners showcased by Benioff.

Of the products showcased, one of the important points that kept being raised was Salesforce’s role as the enterprise social media identity service.

A partnership between Salesforce and Facebook to provide online identity validation would effectively kill  Eric Schmidt’s aim of Google being the Internet’s identity service although Benioff was at pains in the media conference to emphasise there was room for more than one player.

Google are also being challenged by Benioff’s announcement of Chatterbox, a secure online file storage and sharing service.

While the focus with the Chatterbox announcement was on the threat this presents to Dropbox and Box.net, the bigger targets are Google Drive, Apple iCloud and Microsoft’s SkyDrive.

Salesforce’s move into the various fields of HR, marketing, file storage and collaboration are part of the company staking its own position among the various web empires.

With a strong enterprise position, it’s quite possible Salesforce could establish itself as the fifth of the Internet’s great empires.

Every empire needs an army and a particularly strong claim Salesforce would have are the ranks of developers and supporters gathering around the service’s open APIs.

The move to establish an independent position on the web would also explain Benioff’s commitment to HTML5 as this avoids locking the company into an Apple, Google or Microsoft dominated app environment.

We’ll see over time how Salesforce establishes their position among the internet empires, right now though their range of services, customer base and partner ecosystem means they are well placed to compete with the big four currently dominating the web.

Paul travelled to the San Francisco Dreamforce conference courtesy of Salesforce.com

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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11.01

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

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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.

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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….”

 

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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.

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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.

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09.48

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

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09.46

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

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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.

 

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

 

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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.”

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09.06

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

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09.01

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

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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.

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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.

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08.46

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

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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.

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08.37

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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