Decoding the new economy

Towards the social media enabled jet engine

General Electric’s GEnx engine illustrates how social media is changing business

“What if my jet engine could talk to me and what would it say?” Asked Beth Comstock, General Electric’s Chief Marketing Officer, at the Dreamforce 2012 conference.

The idea of social media connected jet engine is strange, but the idea that a key piece of technology can talk to engineers, pilots, salespeople and management makes sense.

At the Dreamforce conference, Salesforce.com were showing how their Chatter social communications tool can be applied to more than just salesteams, in GE’s case by giving their new GEnx engine the opportunity to talk to its support teams.

In flight telemetry is nothing new to the aviation industry, ACARS – Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting Systems – have allowed airlines to monitor the performance of their aircraft over high frequency radio or satellite links during flight since 1978.

The difference today is the sheer amount of data that can be collected and who it can be shared with. If relevant data is being shared with the right people it makes managing these complex systems far easier.

More importantly, it helps teams collaborate. The GEnx engine is a new design that’s fitted to Boeing’s latest airlines including the troubled and late Dreamliner 787 so streamlining the design process of a new, high performance piece of technology pays dividends quickly.

Although things can still go wrong – one wonders what the final tweet from this engine would have been.

We’ve been talking for a long time about how social media and cloud computing services improve collaboration in a work place, the GEnx jet engine illustrates just how fundamental the changes these technologies are bringing to organisations.

If an industrial jet engine can be using social media it begs the question why service based companies and workforces aren’t. It’s where the customers and staff are.

These tools are radically changing the way we work right now – the question is are we, and the organisations we work for, prepared for these changes?

Paul travelled to Dreamforce 2012 courtesy of Salesforce.com

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Category: cloud computing

Salesforce’s place in the web’s walled gardens

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