Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: salesforce

  • Living the Salesforce dream

    Living the Salesforce dream

    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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  • Channel blues

    Channel blues

    “We do the pre-sales work then they come along and steal the customers. It’s wrong, just wrong” growled the sales manager of an IT integrator while talking about one of the leading cloud computing services.

    The business model of systems integrators is to be a company’s, or home’s, trusted advisor on IT and make money from charging for their services and the profit in selling software and equipment.

    In the last few years that model has become tough – the collapsing price of hardware has made the profits on selling systems leaner while the increased life of systems has meant the big lucrative upgrades have become scarcer.

    At the same time services have become less lucrative as more participants have entered the market, many using offshored cheap labour to provide remote support. It hasn’t helped that computers have become vastly more reliable, particularly since Microsoft have largely solved Windows’ gaping security holes.

    The icing on the cake has been the end of boxed software and corporate licenses. These were extremely profitable for the systems integrator – a big sale of Microsoft Office or Oracle licenses to a government department could see an IT salesperson pay for a holiday home or cover the kids’ school and college fees.

    Cloud computing has largely been the driver of all of these factors’ decline and now it is really hurting those integrators and their salesfolk who were used to a very profitable existence.

    While that’s good news for computer consumers – and even better news for hapless shareholder and taxpayers who’ve been largely dudded by big IT sales pitches to gullible directors and ministers – it does beg the question of how customers now get advice and support.

    Largely cloud based services rely upon customer self service and many of the providers would struggle to include user support in their list of core competencies.

    There’s a business model there for systems integrators, but it’s difficult to see how many those used to fat profits in the past can, or will, adapt to the new environment.

    An interesting side effect of this change is how it affects companies like Microsoft where their channel partners – largely those big and small systems integrators – are one of the most important distribution networks for their products and probably their best defense against competitors like Google and Apple. That strength is being steadily eroded.

    It’s tempting to think that change affects just “old” industries like retail, publishing or car manufacturing; in reality it affects all sectors and sometimes the most modern might be hurt more than the established players.

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