Salesforce Chatter and Faceforce

While searching for a piece that I had written about the concept of visual apps, "The Future of Software? Think Visual Apps," I found that I had written about a potential precursor to Salesforce Chatter back in October 2007.

In order for the Faceforce piece to make sense, you would have had to have read the previous paragraph on Twitter. Here’s an excerpt:

“Do you Twitter? When I first read about it, I thought the last thing the world needs is another time-wasting tool ... I already have Freecell for that. If this is the first time you’re reading about it, Twitter may be the best known of all of the microblogs, with people posting what appears to be only a series of random thoughts or activities (for example, one entry this morning read, “Friday morning and time for laundry.”).

After Mr. Martine and I talked about Fantastic Voyage, he asked me if I had ever used Twittervision, and when I said no, he showed it to me. This takes the Twitter posts and plots them on a map of the world. Every few microseconds, he would get posts from friends and strangers from across the globe.

As soon as I saw it, I had an Aha! moment. Could Procter & Gamble use a private version of Twittervision to track the success of a new product launch? Rather than e-mailing back to corporate, field representatives could log into a private site and post their findings after visiting a store. They can enter the early sales successes, note any competitive responses, and suggest ideas for improvement in real time. This would also be visible across the entire organization.”

OK, here’s the Faceforce piece:

Salesforce.com: Should we look for Faceforce next?

“I recently met with two executives from salesforce.com and opened the meeting with talk about the P&G idea. In addition to new product launches or campaigns, microblogs would also make great tools for either the start or end of a quarter. For example, at the beginning, reps could post their goals or targets, which could be text, voice, or even video. Throughout the quarter, they could provide updates on the status. Microblogs, which would be far more visually appealing and interactive than a portal or e-mail string, would be good tools for global account teams too.

We segued into a discussion of Facebook, the privately-held social networking site with the $15B valuation, thanks to Microsoft’s investment of $240M for a 1.6% stake. Last month, I had written that salesforce.com was not-so-quietly attempting to become the Facebook of the business world: a social network hub for collaboration.

If you haven’t joined, Facebook is a free service that allows you to stay in touch with classmates, coworkers, clients, and friends. The company makes its money by selling advertising on your page. While salesforce.com has attracted 35,300 companies and 900,000 users, Facebook has 60 million people signed up.

Where salesforce.com has 725 third-party applications on AppExchange, Facebook has more than 5,000 applications. Okay, we’re not comparing the same kinds of apples here, but, nonetheless, Facebook adds over 100 new applications every day, with more than 80% of Facebook clients having used at least one Facebook Platform application.
I could envision a salesforce.com community on Facebook. What if salesforce.com offered Faceforce, a social network for top sales and/or marketing people? It’s possible. After all, the salesforce.com execs had come to my office to talk about the new microedition for the wealth management industry, which are microvertical offerings for politics, venture capitalists, human services, insurance agency management, economic development, and microfinance.”

OK, so my idea was not exactly the same thing as Chatter. I hope you might find it interesting nonetheless.

Rethinking Twitter

To date, I have ignored all of the inbound e-mails from friends/readers/strangers offering to follow me on Twitter. My only reason is that I can’t possibly manage any additional e-mails. Every day I’m greeted with the dreaded “Your mailbox is over its size limit message.” Why would I want to know that I have a surplus of unread tweets?

Yet, I can see the business value of the 140-character messaging service. A few years ago I wrote about the value of a private Twitter-like service that would allow sales reps to post the results of a new product promotion in near real-time. Imagine these in a mashup with Google maps to show how well that promotion is doing in various geographical markets. This would eliminate the latency that often comes from the collection and scrubbing of field information.

This week at the salesforce.com event I talked with executives from Ariba and Eloqua about their use of Twitter. Both described using it as an early warning system about customers who were stymied by their software. Rather than calling for help, they tweeted about their frustrations. By tracking tweets about their companies, these alerts allowed the vendors to be proactive. As a result of their interventions, the customer went on to tweet about the vendors’ strong support.

On the flight back from San Francisco, I read a day-old article in The New York Times about how the United Students Against Sweatshops organization had managed to win back 1,200 jobs for unionized employees in a Russell Athletic manufacturing plant in Honduras. One of the tactics involved the use of Twitter to send messages to shoppers at Dick’s Sporting Goods urging them to boycott Russell athletic wear.

While I can see the business value, one of the things that bugs me about Twitter (and Facebook) are the inane posts: “I’m really sleepy … My kids have a soccer game and it’s raining … I did 1,000 push-ups and sit-ups instead of going to karate class.” Get a life.

But, I bet it would be good for our business if I let you know the highlights from a briefing with Vendor A (Vendor A would love it) or insights gained from a discussion with a well-known CIO (Vendor A might like that, too).

Maybe I’ll tweet when I get Outlook under control. Don’t hold your breath … unless you look good in blue.

Will Salesforce Chatter Neuter Microsoft Office and SharePoint?

On the Friday before Dreamforce, I read an interesting article in MIT Technology Review, entitled “Fixing E-Mail” that offered insights from the recently completed Defrag 2009 conference.

As I read it, I was struck by two comments attributed to Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft’s future social experiences labs. The first is a direct quote while the other is comes directly from the article.

• “E-mail is kind of this giant, endless task list, and you're really the slave to a lot of stuff that comes to you.” The article goes on to add that Ms. Cheng “believes that incoming messages need to be organized and sorted in a more automated fashion.”
• “Cheng said her group found that about 70 percent of the e-mail people receive is information they don't actually need to read, though many like to have it on file. Her group built a prototype that created a different section of the in-box for this type of e-mail and extracted a daily summary of it that could be displayed to the user.”

After reading this, here’s my visceral reaction:

• Thanks to its success with Outlook, Microsoft is largely responsible for e-mail enslaving us to “giant, endless task list(s).”
• E-mail is not a collaboration platform. Because I sent you an e-mail asking for help or requesting that you perform a specific activity or set of tasks, that doesn’t guarantee that you’re even going to read my message. That’s not collaboration. In the old days that would be called “shifting the monkey.” My burden is now yours … or vice versa.
• If Marc Benioff is right about Chatter adoption, I’ll bet that a large percentage of internal e-mails will shift from Outlook to his new cloud offering. The ease of using Facebook and Twitter will make it a preferred collaboration platform compared to SharePoint, and an alternative to dead intranet sites. This could easily result in a tighter relationship with Google Apps … and possibly IBM’s Lotus group, too. I hope Marc’s budgeted for a lot of new storage.

I don’t know about you, but I’m eager to lose the shackles of Outlook.

Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and 100,000 Missed Sales Opportunities

On a third-quarter earnings call last Tuesday, salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff announced that his company had reached 67,900 net paying cloud customers. Presumably, this doesn’t include the 7,500 nonprofits and non-government organizations that are using it for free.

The updated tally represents an addition of 4,700 net new customers in the quarter, and an increase of 16,100 customers over the last four quarters. The new business helped fuel a 20% revenue jump over the year earlier period. This is a nice contrast to the weak application license results reported by Oracle and SAP in their latest earnings calls.

If you take the 67,900 figure and add Concur’s 9,000 customers, NetSuite’s 5,000 or so, Taleo’s 4,200, and SuccessFactors’s 2,850, you end up close to 90,000. If you add Ariba, Kenaxa, Intuit, RightNow, Saba, and all of the others who are busy crafting e-mails to admonish me for excluding them, we might end up with a universe of 100,000 unique companies using SaaS or cloud applications.

While not all of these companies would make good Oracle or SAP customers because of their size or software needs, my point is that their lack of a strong cloud offering has caused them to miss out on  a lot of sales opportunities and seats. At the Dreamforce luncheon, Marc mentioned that his company currently supports 2 million subscribers. On its website, SuccessFactors brags about touching 5.4 million users.

It’s worse for Microsoft. In addition to missing out on CRM and ERP licenses, the delay of the long-promised Azure offering has allowed Google to attract more than 2 million companies to Google Apps. Some 3,000 businesses sign up for Google Apps every day.

And these aren’t just startups. The roster of Office and/or Outlook defectors include Avago (5,600 users), City of Los Angeles (30,000), District of Columbia (38,000), Genentech (17,000) Mead Westvaco (17,000), and Valeo (32,000).

If you believe the old adage that “the trend is your friend,” salesforce.com’s strong results in a crappy economy prove that people will find money for software they value. If you talk to CIOs who are salesforce.com customers, they are shifting more of their current/future applications to the cloud.

Maybe there’s no one left in Redmond that remembers the impact that Microsoft (and Lotus indirectly) had on Wang and the other word processing companies. Wang refused to be commoditized by being in the software-only business. Instead, it hung on too long to the high margin hardware business until lower cost PCs killed that market.

Microsoft is scheduled to have Azure offerings ready early in the new year. Oracle has CRM On Demand, but little else. The new Fusion applications are at least a year, maybe two, from shipping. SAP has a smorgasbord of offerings—including single-tenant CRM, the multi-tenant Frictionless Commerce platform, and the third-party HCM software from NorthgateArinso. If I’m Marc Benioff or the CEOs of the cloud/SaaS companies mentioned above, I continue to be thankful for the head start that Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP keep extending.

Comments?

Clarification on My Coverage of Dow’s Sustainability Achievements

Early this morning I received an e-mail from Henry Ward, Global Supply Chain Director, Security, Sustainability & Public Policy at The Dow Chemical Company. Mr. Ward was one of the featured speakers at the Sustainability Exchange that we hosted last week in Boston. I wrote about some of the highlights from his presentation in today’s First Thing Monday. As it turns out, I did not get all of the details right.

In the interest of accuracy, I have reprinted his e-mail here:

Thanks for the great coverage.  Just to clarify, however --
 
1.  In the first bullet regarding Dow's accomplishments, the noted savings were achieved between 1996 and 2005 -- and were noted in my presentation as accomplishments against our 2005 Sustainability Goals (which were set in 1996). We have achieved additional milestones since that time against our 2015 Sustainability Goals (which were set in 2005). Apologies for the confusion.

2.  In the second bullet regarding Dow's chlorine reductions, although pipelines (especially between plants located at the same geographic location) have played a role in reducing our chlorine transportation, that was just one of several listed methods we employed to reduce shipments. It would not be accurate to say that we shifted "most" of our distribution to pipelines. Further, the equivalent energy savings of 200,000 gallons of diesel fuel reported in the article was actually an annual savings -- it was not just a one time or total reduction since 1999.
 
No need for further action, I just wanted to set the record straight. Thank you. Henry

Ready To Trust Google as Your Keys and Wallet?

As I write this it is 66 degrees on a sunny afternoon. One can really get used to a very rare Indian-Summer-in-November streak. That said, it will be dark in just a few hours, and the cold weather won’t be far behind.

I recently received an e-mail from Calvin Fine sent from his office in Melbourne, Australia. Even though we’re enjoying great fall weather, I was envious that it was spring Down Under. In a follow-on email he mentioned that the Melbourne citizenry was buzzing about beaches and BBQs while we will soon be worrying about shovels and boots.

Maybe we need to go visit Calvin for a closer look at Melbourne. In the meantime, here are some of his ideas on a set of products that he thinks we could see from Google in the not-too-distant-future:

Hi Bruce,
 
Thanks for the always entertaining First Thing Monday e-mails, and hello from a cloudy afternoon in Melbourne, Australia.
 
I’ve been thinking about Google in the context of simplifying, since reading about the Google disruption play of including free turn-by-turn navigation directions with each and every Android mobile (see abovethecrowd). I imagine a lot of people have similar habits to mine. The 3 things in my pocket when I leave the house each and every time are keys, wallet and phone. Music is on the phone these days. So is e-mail. If I’m driving some place, there’s a sat-nav and a CD player in the car.
 
In the future we’re likely to only carry one “device.” Your phone has already integrated voice communication, diary, watch, walkman, TV, maps, and more. And with cloud computing to augment process-intensive mobile computing, the phone will likely replace your laptop too.
 
But, what about keys? What about wallet?
 
Cars already run on proximity keys, most new Lexus’ unlock doors on proximity. It wouldn’t be a stretch to wire your house, car, and office into your phone. And we already happily run small value transactions on wireless devices: NTT DoCoMo's Edy mobile wallet in Japan is a prime example, as are London’s Oyster card and Hong Kong’s Octopus card.
 
The largest consumer issue with ‘contactless payment’ and proximity key systems is typically security; and one of Google’s key attributes is that people trust them. With Android running the world's mobile operating system, Google is in a tremendous position to create a global mobile, contactless payment and security system. And they could do it 'for free', at least in the sense that as a consumer you wouldn't have to pay for it. In much the same way as 'free' maps can integrate localised advertising, Google could match up buyers and sellers at the moment of truth better than anyone.
 
It’s "better than the competition" AND "cheaper than the competition," too. No AmEx service charge. No wallet to carry. No train ticket. No hassles. That’s Finance 2.0: Instant, personal, and always on your person.
 
Would people trust it? Would they use it? And who could compete with that as an offering?
 
I hope this finds you well (and not too stressed about the Yankees).

Warm regards,
Calvin

Kudos to Manhattan Associates’ Clever Marketing Promo

This morning I walked out of Starbucks without realizing that the design on my cup was that of a Christmas tree. To think that I still have my golf clubs in my trunk...

When I got to my office there was a small box waiting on my desk that had been delivered via priority mail. I opened it up and inside was another box that was just a shade or two away from the classic Tiffany Blue and wrapped in a white ribbon.

As I slipped the ribbon off, I guessed that inside was a keychain or something of similar size. Instead, I got a jarring note proclaiming, “Sorry Bruce, Out of Stock.” The note unfolded to four panels. The first two panels featured “Disappointed?” in bright red. As I read the rest of the text, it led to a custom website.

Yes, I typed in the URL and saw the website for Manhattan Associates’ new “Zero Disappointment Retail” initiative and the offer for the free ROI calculator to help me justify buying software. 

We’ll be in Atlanta in early December to visit Manhattan. One of my first questions will be about the effectiveness of the campaign. I found it to be eye-catching and clever. We’ll let you know how buyers reacted.

In the meantime, the box is on my desk. I’m waiting to see how many people ask what I got from Tiffany’s.