THINK IT Services

THINKstrategies announced today that VFA, Inc. has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.
 
The BoSS Awards program was announced in January 2009 as the latest initiative by THINKstrategies to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.
 
VFA is a leading provider of end-to-end solutions for facilities capital planning and spend management. Organizations in a wide range of industries rely on VFA solutions to help them optimize their capital spend management process.

Click here to read more about the business benefits of VFA’s award-winning SaaS capabilities.

Click here to read more about the BoSS Awards program or to apply for an award.

As I recover from yesterday’s Thanksgiving festivities, I’ve been struck by two thoughts regarding last week’s Dreamforce conference,

• Salesforce.com’s new Chatter social computing functionality may be a defensive as well as proactive move.
• An acquisition of Salesforce.com by Oracle may be a friendly maneuver rather than a hostile takeover.

As I reported in my previous blogpost, Salesforce.com’s introduction of Chatter last week at Dreamforce was met with mixed reviews. Many customers, partners, analysts, press and even internal staff and salespeople were uncertain about the company’s goals and capabilities in this new area.

I believe that building an ‘enterprise-class’ social networking component makes sense and adds a timely new dimension to salesforce.com’s fundamental functionality.

Marc Benioff justified salesforce.com’s move by claiming in his keynote address at Dreamforce that neither Facebook nor Twitter were willing to fortify their services to meet the needs of enterprise users.

But, what if this isn’t true? What if Facebook and Twitter could add a contact database, tracking mechanisms and other features to their services in the future to meet the needs of enterprises? Would today’s consumer-oriented, social networking sites become tomorrow’s corporate customer relationship management (CRM) systems?

Changing the focus of a consumer-oriented online service is possible. Apple is quickly converting its consumer-oriented iTouch into a powerful business-oriented iPhone with thousands of add-on apps from a widening array of third-party developers.

And, IBM is also moving in this direction with LotusLive, transforming the company’s pioneering but dorment on-premise collaboration application into a viable on-demand business service.

So, salesforce.com may not only be responding to growing demand for social networking tools among corporate end-users, but also demonstrating its astute competitive instincts by quickly strengthening its defensive position against future attack from Facebook, Twitter or others in this realm.

On the acquisition front, I’ve been predicting for a couple of years that Oracle would make a hostile bid to takeover salesforce.com to capitalize on the company’s rapid growth and commandeer the growing SaaS movement. I also predicted that Google would be the ‘white knight’ who would come to salesforce.com’s rescue to preserve this important path to the enterprise market.

However, my views have changed over the past month with Marc Benioff’s invitation to speak at Oracle OpenWorld and the publication of his new book, “Behind the Cloud”.

Having Benioff speak at OpenWorld clearly showed that Oracle doesn’t view salesforce.com as a simple competitor. Instead, it illustrated the more complex relationship between the companies.

While Larry Ellison has enjoyed making disparaging remarks about the long-term profitability and viability of the SaaS business model, he has also been very happy to accept salesforce.com’s money as one of Oracle’s biggest database customers.

At the sametime, Benioff is recognizing that he no longer has to play the role of revolutionary to evangelize about the business benefits of SaaS and ‘cloud computing’. Instead, he now knows that it is more important to convince a broader cross-section of enterprise decision-makers – both IT and executive – that SaaS and cloud computing services are not radical ideas and can easily integrate into their legacy environments and enhance their current operations.

This tact exponentially increases salesforce.com’s addressable market opportunity by appealing to a broader array of organizations who may have been too risk-adverse to accept SaaS and cloud computing alternatives if they viewed them as an ‘either-or’ proposition.

With Oracle on the cusp of acquiring Sun Microsystems (depending on the disposition of various regulatory hurdles), it may be ready to make a more aggressive move to consolidate its position in the SaaS and cloud computing marketplace by moving ahead with a salesforce.com acquisition.

I no longer believe Benioff would resist such a move. Throughout his new book, Benioff repeatedly gives Ellison credit for his personal success and the success of salesforce.com. He refers to Ellison as his personal mentor and describes instances in which Ellison’s decisions helped salesforce.com overcome critical challenges.

So, if Benioff doesn’t view Ellison as an adversary will he be willing to risk the future success of salesforce.com by accepting an Oracle acquisition. It won’t be his decision. If Oracle offers a good enough price, Benioff is obligated to accept it.

The question is now whether Google, Cisco Systems or another company will try to outbid an Oracle offer to enhance their own position in the SaaS and cloud computing market.

I’ve always been an admirer of the marketing prowess of salesforce.com…although it always drives me crazy to comply with the lower-case spelling of their name because it seems to genericize their value in my eyes.

One of the specific aspects of the company’s marketing tactics which I’ve particularly liked is the way in which it continuously extends its brand identity by incrementally broadening and redefining its functional capabilities. This is a technique which I call “iterative marketing”.

Some people use this term to describe a marketing approach in which a company continuously tests its marketing messages and lead generation tactics to see which works best. I’m using the term differently to refer to the way a company can continuously evolve, extend and expand their marketing messages to gain greater mindshare and ultimately marketshare as well. 

The simplest example of this marketing technique is salesforce.com’s seasonal releases which routinely include a set of functional enhancements which consistently add value to its existing capabilities.

The company also maintains a related marketing discipline which I like. It always previews its seasonal releases a few months before their actual market availability, then announces their general availability, and then reports the results of the rollout of the release when the next seasonal release is unveiled. This means the company gets three rounds of headlines for each seasonal release.

This marketing trick is one of the few which Marc Benioff overlooked in his new book, “Behind the Cloud”, which includes a wide array of tips and anectodes about the tactics and events which have helped to foster salesforce.com’s success.

In addition to reiterating its capabilities and accomplishments over and over, salesforce.com has also been able to continuously rebrand its offerings as they evolve to make them look even more timely and newsworthy. Here are a few examples,

• The company’s SFA application has evolved into the ‘Sales Cloud’.
• Its CRM application has evolved into the ‘Service Cloud’.
• The Apex source code has evolved into the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or ‘Custom Cloud’.
• The AppExchange has evolved into the company’s new VAR program.

The most recent example of this marketing technique was last week’s unveiling of Chatter at Dreamforce, which was previously referred to as ‘Social CRM’.

This is not to say that salesforce.com is simply renaming its existing capabilities to grab additional headlines. In each of these cases, the company has genuinely enhanced its offerings and expanded its capabilities.

However, in some cases salesforce.com has also succeeded in confusing its customers, partners, analysts and the press, as well as its own salespeople, who are trying to keep up with the latest iterations and keep them all straight.

This was clearly true at last week’s Dreamforce conference where many of the attendees I interviewed were confused about Chatter and unclear about what was really new in its Winter 2010 release.

As one attendee said to me, “After a long string of seasonal successes, I guess salesforce.com deserves a ‘mulligan’ on this one.”

I guess that’s the risk you take when you’re trying to juggle a broadening portfolio of services and messages, like salesforce.com.

The question is whether it is time to change its marketing tactics and slowdown the iterative process so everyone can catch up and get on the same page, or should I say ‘cloud’.

[Disclosure: Salesforce.com paid my airfare to Dreamforce and has hired me to produce whitepapers on its behalf in the past.]

THINKstrategies announced today that Task Performance Group, Inc. has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.
 
The BoSS Awards program is a THINKstrategies initiative aimed at bringing attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies that are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations and greater profitability.
 
Task Performance Group is a leading provider of business-to-business (B2B) E-commerce automation solutions that facilitates the effective management of collaborative commerce for retail, manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, transportation, financial and other industries. The company’s SaaS-based MegaXML solution accepts any type of input and delivers output in any format, making front-end and back-end systems more flexible and adaptable to meet users’ unique requirements. MegaXML improves any EDI business transaction, including purchasing, invoicing, planning, logistics and financials.

Click here to read more about the measurable business benefits of Task Performance Group’s award-winning capabilities.

Click here to read more about the BoSS Awards or to apply for an award.

Day 2 of Dreamforce came with a little less enthusiasm than yesterday’s kickoff as many of the attendees recovered from the previous night’s parties. Today’s focus was on the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) which salesforce.com calls “Custom Cloud 2″.

Unlike yesterday’s meandering keynote regarding the Sales Cloud 2, Services Cloud 2 and new Chatter social computing capabilities, Marc Benioff immediately went to work at convincing the Dreamforce audience of the power and growing adoption of salesforce.com’s PaaS capabilities by quickly introducing the CEO of BMC, Bob Beauchamp, who unveiled its new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) IT service desk application developed on the Force.com in a couple of months.

BMC’s use of Force.com to ‘SaaSify’ its application is another important endorsement of salesforce.com’s PaaS by an established independent software vendor (ISV). It is particularly compelling for other ISVs who have grappled with the technological and operational challenges of migrating their applications to a SaaS architecture. Interestingly, BMC won’t make the new application available until Q2 2010. My guess is that the company will face far more challenges developing and executing the go-to-market strategy for the new app than it had developing and delivering the app itself.

Benioff later introduced John Swainson, the CEO of CA, who also demo’ed a new app built on Force.com and talked about the economic implications of cloud computing which he called “the most profound change in the history of the IT industry…changing the economics exponentially.”

Both CA and BMC are significant because their applications are aimed at IT professionals, and their enlistment in the SaaS movement will help reduce lingering resistance within the IT community.

The focus on Force.com was an opportunity for Benioff to evangelize about the virtues of cloud computing,

• Eliminate the costs and hassles of hardware
• Accelerated deployment and time-to-value
• Greater agility and analytics

Benioff’s views were reinforced by an Accenture guest as well.

He also introduced the CEO of Vetrazzo, a manufacturer of countertops using recycled glass, who talked about how he runs his entire business on Force.com. He was previously a SAP suite user and wanted to leverage a similar suite from salesforce.com. Using  an independent Force.com consultant, he was able to develop a full suite to meet his needs in a few weeks, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), order management, inventory management, and document management, in addition to salesforce.com’s CRM and SFA capabilities. Although the Vetrazzo success story was published a year ago, the company has continued to create additional apps via Force.com. His talk was not only a swipe at SAP, but NetSuite as well which often attempts to position its SaaS solutions as more significant because they are aimed at helping business run their operations not ‘just’ CRM.

Benioff also carved out time at the end of his keynote to revisit the importance of the company’s new Chatter social networking solutions and to reiterate that it is also a ’social platform’ that can be customized to meet the unique needs of individual companies.

Yesterday’s Chatter announcement met with mixed reviews from the customers, partners and analysts I met. Most didn’t understand why salesforce.com is moving in this direction. They didn’t expect their employees or customers to replace any of the social networking tools they are already using or add another to the list.

This was clearly illustrated when Benioff asked for a show of hands from the keynote audience regarding how many would adopt Chatter and only a small proportion raised their hands despite the fact that nearly everyone in the audience raised their hands when Benioff asked them how many understood what salesforce.com was offering.

I think there is a solid argument for a more robust and secure social networking tool that is more ‘enterprise-ready’ and more easily integrated into an enterprise application portfolio than Facebook and Twitter. But, salesforce.com will face serious challenges convincing customers, and will have to make a significant technological and marketing investment to successfully deliver and sell this new dimension of salesforce.com’s corporate portfolio.

Ultimately, the company will need more customer success stories and ‘use cases’ to convince current and potential customers to adopt this new capability.

Despite these concerns, the overwhelming mood at Dreamforce has been very upbeat, providing another promising sign of the potential growth of the SaaS and cloud computing market.

[Disclosure: Salesforce.com paid my travel expenses to attend Dreamforce.]

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing movements have converged on the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week for the latest salesforce.com lovefest—Dreamforce.

[Disclosure: Salesforce.com paid my travel expenses to attend this event.]

Despite the downturn in the economy, or maybe because of it, this year’s Dreamforce has attracted over 19,000 registrants, up from around 10k a year ago. The opening keynote session was bursting at the seams with people and energy.

The event comes a day after the company announced its latest quarterly results, during which the company added 4700 net new customers, bringing its total user count up to approximately 67,900, up 31% from a year ago.

This growth is especially impressive given that one of the company’s primary growth engines in years past was the financial services sector which imploded over the past year. Despite these potential setbacks, salesforce.com is on a run-rate to exceed $1.2 billion for the fiscal year, and reporting greater earnings/share and net income.

Salesforce.com is using the Dreamforce event to showcase its new Sales Cloud 2 and Sevice Cloud 2 capabilities, and introduce its new Chatter real-time social computing model and collaboration tool that will be available in 2010. Chatter is being positioned to complement Facebook and Twitter in the enterprise, and potentially compete with IBM LotusLive and Cisco’s expanding collaboration tools.

Salesforce.com was conceived a decade ago to bring the ease of use of the consumer web into the corporate world, and it is now setting out to apply the power of social networking to the enterprise. Given that the first idea has produced a billion dollar plus powerhouse, it will be interesting to see if this new concept will fuel its continued growth and dispel the skepticism among some industry and financial analysts who have questioned whether salesforce.com can sustain its past success.

The company also revealed its new report-builder and user interface with a lot of fanfare. However, the changes were too subtle for the audience to fully appreciate. On the other hand, the attendees were pleased to hear that salesforce.com is offering its new knowledgebase feature for free.

Marc Benioff also used the occasion to poll the 10,000 attendees in the main hall of the Moscone Center about the size of their organizations to demonstrate how salesforce.com’s SaaS/cloud computing solutions are being used by small- and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large-scale enterprises alike.

Approximately 1000 representatives of the non-profit sector were also in attendance. Benioff used the opportunity to have one of the non-profits demonstrate how they are not only using salesforce.com’s application to track clients, but how it has used the Force.com to build a financial tracking system as well. It was a subtle, but clear message that salesforce.com wants to be perceived as more than a CRM, customer service and collaboration app vendor. This comes a few weeks after salesforce.com’s investment in FinancialForce.com.

Because I started my career after college in the non-profit sector, I’ve always admired salesforce.com’s policy of giving its applications away for free to non-profits. The brillance of this policy is that it gives the company another way of exposing corporate executives to its capabilities, because many of these executives serve on the boards of directors of these organizations.

While salesforce.com has proven to be a brilliant marketing company, it tested the patience of the Dreamforce audience when its opening keynote session ran more than an hour longer than scheduled, setting back the breakout session and attendee schedules.

The next 48 hours will be packed with one-on-one briefings, group meetings and various parties. It’s like the good old days but celebrating the future.

THINKstrategies announced today that Cast Iron Systems has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards program was announced in January 2009 by THINKstrategies to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies which are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations, and greater profitability.

Cast Iron provides integration solutions and Integration-as-a-Service which allows providers and consumers of SaaS and cloud computing solutions to more quickly and economically connect their on-demand and on-premise applications and systems. Cast Iron offers its customers unmatched deployment flexibility – they can choose a completely cloud-based integration service called Cast Iron Cloud or on-premise integration appliances (physical or virtual) as an organization’s application ecosystem expands and diversifies.

Click here to read more about Cast Iron’s award winning capabilities.

Click here to read more about the BoSS Award program and apply for an award.

I was invited to participate in a panel discussion regarding cloud computing at the Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference in Phoenix this past week.

The event attracted a cross-section of young people seeking to build careers as entrepreneurs, older people hoping to restart their careers as entrepreneurs and current entrepreneurs looking for new ideas to accelerate their success.

The topics ranged from new market opportunities such as eHealth and clean technology to management best practices for building successful businesses.

My panel was moderated by Bob LaLoggia, CEO of StormSource, a Scottsdale-based company which offers an assortment of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, including Appointment-Plus, MessageRover, ZipLine, and Virtual Assistant Manager.

The other panelists represented various perspectives of the cloud computing world– Kimbro Staken, CEO, JumpBox; Dave Rice, CEO, TrueCloud; Marc Chesley, VP of Development and Technology, InfusionSoft; Sam Pietrofeso, Senior VP of Product Development, GoDaddy; and Dave Wallace, Director of Product Management, CRM Solutions, Sage Software.

If you’re keeping score, the panelists offered the following points of view respectively–open source applications; channel opportunities; sales & marketing automation SaaS apps; hosting services; and legacy vendor moving to a SaaS model.

But, what we also represented was a plethora of powerful web-based tools and resources that are increasingly available at incredibly low costs for budding entrepreneurs, as well as established companies, seeking to build their businesses quickly and more effectively.

When I started THINKstrategies in 2001, a couple of months after 9/11, I was able to find a handful of inexpensive online resources to get me started–my web hosting, website design and email marketing services were the key pieces to getting THINKstrategies started.

Creating the SaaS Showplace, as well as the Managed Services Showplace, has enabled me to see many more valuable online services emerge that are perfectly suited to helping people start and grow their businesses. In fact, there are now over 1200 companies offering thousands of SaaS alternatives across 80 different application, industry and enabling technology areas. The Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program has been highlighting the business benefits of these services since January, 2009.

The Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference panel clearly illustrated that there has never been a better time for someone to build and grow their business leveraging today’s cloud computing alternatives. Not only are there an endless array of powerful online applications and resources at their disposal, but there are also limitless opportunities to build cloud-based or cloud-oriented businesses.

However, one of the challenges remains clearly defining the meaning of the ‘cloud’ and cloud computing. This was the first question we tried to answer and continued to be a question that arose from the audience.

THINKstrategies announced today that Intuition has been named the latest winner of the Best of SaaS Showplace (BoSS) Awards program, which is aimed at promoting the measurable business benefits being delivered by today’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

The BoSS Awards program was initiated by THINKstrategies in January 2009 to bring attention to SaaS and cloud computing companies which are producing tangible business benefits for specific user organizations. These benefits include increased sales, lower costs, higher customer satisfaction, faster operations, and greater profitability.

Intuition provides a web-based learning management system (LMS) as a truly net-native, multi-tenant application. The SaaS solution has been designed to facilitate the delivery of learning at a fraction of the cost of traditional learning platforms. It is simple to deploy, intuitive to use, flexible by design, and fully customizable to meet an organization’s needs. It also enables organizations to perform sophisticated tracking, monitoring, and reporting of all learning to deliver tangible business results. The SaaS LMS is delivered to over one million users globally.

Click here to read today’s announcement regarding the business benefits of Intuition’s award-winning SaaS capabilities.

Click here to learn more about the BoSS Awards and to apply for an award.

I was invited to attend the fifth annual ConnectWise Partner Summit in Orlando this past week and was surprised to discover that it has become one of the premier meeting places for aspiring Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and industry enablers.

I was also impressed with the amount of attention ConnectWise’s executives, other event speakers and sponsors, and the conference attendees gave to the convergence of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), managed services and cloud computing.

ConnectWise may not be a household name in the SaaS or cloud computing markets, but it is a key player in the managed services arena. Although ConnectWise calls itself a professional services automation (PSA) provider for IT professionals, its software also helps them manage their helpdesk operations and sales processes. 

ConnectWise’s solutions are typically used by IT service providers, including VARs and MSPs, and it has built its success on a highly leveraged partner strategy. Its software is enhanced by and embedded with nearly 3000 third-party developers, vendors and service providers. In fact, the company’s partner strategy has succeeded in permitting ConnectWise’s solutions to support over 32,000 organizations via these partners, with a staff of less than 200. Approximately 40 companies were on display at the Partner Summit, ranging from small, niche players to Cisco, Intel, Xerox and Google.

Google’s presence at this event was particularly interesting. Although the Google representatives were primarily promoting its current Apps capabilities, it was obvious that they were also laying the groundwork for a broader array of cloud-services aimed at MSPs in the future. The attendees I spoke with already see Google affecting their businesses, most notably the organic growth of Gmail which is threatening to commoditize their managed email services.

The treat of commoditization was high on everyone’s agenda and to ConnectWise’s credit they scheduled Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and the author of the Long Tail and Free, as one of the keynote speakers to discuss the strategies to survive the ‘freemium’ phenomenon.

The company’s co-founder and CEO, Arnie Bellini, has also become an evangelist for the power of the ‘cloud’ and opportunity to leverage SaaS solutions to permit VARs to migrate their businesses to managed services and enable MSPs to survive in an increasingly competitive market. He gave a convincing opening presentation about how rapidly changing customer needs are dictating a migration to the cloud and driving ConnectWise’s SaaS strategy.

He has not only positioned ConnectWise as a partner-friendly vendor, but as a facilitator of industry best practices via a combination of online resources and regional user groups.

He also demonstrated during his opening talk the company’s willingness to admit to its shortcomings by showing the results of a recent customer satisfaction survey which identified areas where it could clearly improve.

It was obvious that his candor and the company’s efforts to improve the quality of its products and services, along with its partnership approach, have won it tremendous good-will in the industry.

As a result, ConnectWise has succeeded in putting itself at the epicenter of the managed services industry and its Partner Summit has become the ‘go-to’ event for many of the attendees I met.

The energy at the Summit reminded me of Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference. And like Salesforce.com, ConnectWise is rapidly increasing its partner network by opening up its application program interfaces (APIs) to third-parties. The importance of the partner network as an influential channel to market was reiterated by the company executives who I met from HTG Peer Group, CoreConnex, SonicWall and Reflexion Networks.

Both companies also have bold and candid evangelistic CEOs who see themselves leading a revolution. Marc Benioff has become the poster-child for SaaS and the Cloud. In ConnectWise’s case, Arnie Bellini is becoming the spiritual leader of the “IT Nation” and MSP community.

For me, this event represented the convergence of the SaaS, cloud computing and managed services worlds. The Summit was also further proof that the world is moving rapidly in this direction because these on-demand alternatives are increasingly generating tangible and measurable business benefits for customers and providers alike.