Jordan Bartow
I am a recent college graduate who has been employed with EDL Consulting for 6 moths.
Homepage: http://edlconsulting.com
Posts by Jordan Bartow
Our heads are in the cloud: Dreamforce 2010
Dec 21st
Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference was held in San Francisco the week of December 6-9, 2010. EDL, a gold sponsor for the second year. The booth included contortionists dressed in cloud morph suits which drew continuous large crowds. At the booth, EDL representatives were discucssing and demonstrating the new CloudCraze 2.0 and Service Cloud 2 integration for prospective customers. We attracted many conference attendees to our booth and had the opportunity to “WOW”them with our eCommerce and customer service offerings.
The energy of the event was immense and intense and the convention center was packed with both current salesforce.com customers and prospects who were eager to learn more about taking full advantage of their CRM system and learning about the power of saleforce.com’s Force.com development platform. The attendees at this conference were truly eager to learn all that there was to know about salesforce.com and cloud computing. While talking to and observing many of the attendees, I found that there were basically two types of attendees at this event:
Group A: This group represents the customers who view saleforce.com solely as a CRM system, with their company utilizing it strictly to communicate and manage their customer information. After speaking with numerous customers in this group, I found that many of them still shared a common need – to have visibility between their leads and their sales and support centers.
Group B: These are the customers who truly want understand all that salesforce.com offers and are excitedly looking for what they can “DO next” in terms of applications and sales force optimization.
When people from Group B approached the booth and I would demonstrate CloudCraze 2.0 or Service Cloud 2 integration for them, they were in awe. They truly understood the benefit of having one “repository” for all pertinent aspects for their company from lead generation to order fulfillment and then onto the service center, with the Service Cloud 2 offering. The enterprise-class customers were shocked with the short time required to build, having experienced how long it took to build solutions this robust with an on-premise solution.
As I dive deeper into solution architecture, it is easy to understand why one would want a single portal to control all of a company’s information since the integration of information is often difficult and trying. It is also problematic to maintain so many moving parts, which must all be working together toward a common end goal. It becomes apparent that it is also quite costly and inefficient to train employees on so many different platforms.
Another common theme that I noticed as I began to truly ponder CloudCraze, EDL Consulting’s eCommerce solution built natively on Force.com, was that many companies which are product companies by nature, were beginning to develop “light” versions of their own product on Force.com as well. However, they were not prepared to take the plunge and holistically develop their product on the platform in its entirety, but instead were developing smaller versions for the AppExchange. What this suggests is customer interest in native Force.com applications. Each company that I spoke with who had developed this lighter version of their product, discussed the road map for their AppExchange product and in essence, how it would/could become as robust as an enterprise-class product.
It seems most logical to me that a consulting company with ten years of deep eCommerce experience be the ones to develop a product to derive the benefits in both development and implementation. The need for natively built applications is continuing to grow and as other eCommerce solutions begin to develop their “shopping carts” into more robust solutions, CloudCraze will continue to develop strategically, remaining ahead of the curve.
What’s the “Big Idea”?
Nov 2nd
Last week, as many people in our ecosystem are aware, was the BigIdeas Conference at the Swissotel in downtown Chicago. BigIdeas has become one of the nation’s largest SaaS innovation conferences where attendees are invited to attend workshops and to hear outstanding and renowned speakers on the SaaS solutions and best practices.
Godard Abel, one of the co-founders of Big Machines, delivered the opening keynote speech and spoke of the industry’s past and where it is going from here. He made a similar analogy to that of Marc Benioff of salesforce.com at a conference that I recently attended in San Jose. In summary, the two agreed that our industry has long ago moved from the days of time-consuming, expensive solutions and on to the days of rapidly deployed, cost-effective, and easily up-gradable and highly adaptable SaaS solutions.
Godard also spoke of BigMachines’ efforts to be visionary and move with the changing times and in so doing, he introduced their latest product, Big Machines ‘11. This new product has the capacity to enable B2B sales to cross multiple channels for virtually any vertical market and in so doing, will permit companies to certainly “Sell more. Sell faster.”
At the conference, I attended several of the Big Machines ‘11 training courses which permitted an in-depth look into the latest features, UI changes, and a look at the newest configurator. This permitted some hands-on training for me on my own laptop along with some excellent customer interaction where customers were assessing when to upgrade and prospective customers were able to more thoroughly research the product. In so doing, this permitted me to better define my role as a project manager within Big Machines along with EDL’s strategic partnership with Big Machines. There were numerous and valuable networking opportunities at this event for everyone!
Craig Traxler, along with Leslie Kleitman from BigMachines and Mike Milburn from salesforce.com, led a session on using the Service Cloud 2 which is the latest offering on the Salesforce.com platform enabling world class service and support. The discussion in this session affirmed how important the on-demand customer support has become and will continue to be in satisfying and retaining customers and all the while, continuing to develop a very professional and successful image. Craig Traxler was able to demonstrate many of the unique capabilities of Service Cloud 2 and how it can be closely integrated with a product configurator, CRM, and even social networks. BigMachines utilizes salesforce.com’s support platform and as evidenced in this successful union, was awarded a Gartner Award in 2008 for its customer service.
The conference was very worthwhile in offering learning experiences concerning the latest trends in SaaS innovations with a forward and future look as to where and how our industry is moving. As the BigMachines/salesforce.com relationship continues to grow and strengthen, EDL will also growth with it and will continue to be the “go-to” consultants and all the while, continue to grow our expertise in eCommerce, systems integration and SaaS implementation.