SaaS
Beware the Kodak Moment: 5 Ways the Cloud Keeps You Clicking
Feb 6th
Bill Loumpouridis
I was genuinely saddened by the news of Kodak’s latest moment: filing for bankruptcy. The good news is that for every Kodak there are literally hundreds of new start-ups doing what Kodak should have been doing: filling the void to provide socially-enabled photo-sharing, video-sharing, the latest digital image capture/manipulation, and other digital technology ad infinitum. These startups are able to do what they are doing on shoestring budgets, largely because Cloud technology provides inexpensive, production-ready environments that foster innovation and scale effortlessly.
Innovation and risk go hand-in-hand. In my experience, cloud technologies substantially reduce key risk elements – time and cost – and thereby enable the innovation required for long-term sustainability. Specifically, the Cloud enables you to practice behaviors that keep you clicking in the startup economy.
1. Fail Fast. Cloud technologies provide the fastest path to go-live. The faster you go live, the faster you can determine your level of success. There’s no greater lesson than failure, so if it’s inevitable, better to get there sooner rather than later.
2. Cannibalize yourself before others do it for you. Part of failing fast means trying things that might cannibalize your existing customer base. A classic example of this is the software industry, where the shift to subscription-based models is cannibalizing once-lucrative software upgrade cycles.
3. Focus on business models vs. infrastructure. Because the move to cloud essentially outsources your infrastructure needs, you can focus your organizational energy and resources on fine-tuning your business model vs. keeping the lights on.
4. Leverage the power of the ecosystem. There are hundreds of startups out there creating the building blocks for your next business model. Why invent when you can assemble, innovate and out-maneuver?
5. Stay lean and hungry. No matter how big an organization becomes, maintaining a “startup mentality” is key to energizing and motivating your workforce. Cloud allows you to keep the conversation focused vs. maintenance of the status quo because so much of your operational requirements have been shifted to third parties.
It is now painfully obvious that the inventors of digital photography failed to cannibalize themselves quickly enough to survive. A Kodak moment to be remembered, but not repeated. Looking ahead, there is certainly no shortage of start-ups looking to fulfill the maxim, “capitalism abhors a vacuum” and the Cloud is ready to help them.
Cloud platforms : Force.com v/s Google app engine v/s Amazon
Jan 5th
Whenever I read about the future and current trends in technology, the word “cloud” is always there. Being a cloud computing and SaaS consultant I tried to compare the top three well known platforms on the basis of the top two critical issues which may be considered by an IT manager working to carry out a pilot application project in the “Cloud”. More >
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.
When it comes to security, don’t forget the basics
Sep 21st
Browser technology advances continue to raise the bar on the richness and interactivity of the end user experience. What is often being left behind are the basic security fundamentals. Embarrassing security breaches are occurring on major sites with an increasingly frequent basis. This week Twitter allowed malicious posts that contained links that when rolled over presented the unsuspecting users with content that was unsuitable for most eyes. Recently YouTube plugged a hole in their commenting system where a carefully crafted comment could take a user to any site the commenter desired. Many of those sites were hosting malicious downloads that, when combined with an insufficiently patched system, allowed attackers full access to use that system in any way they desired. More >
The Cloud Integration Challenge to Software Vendors
Jul 29th
Bill Loumpouridis
While our industry continues to froth over the potential of the cloud, for those of us deploying cloud applications elegantly, surmounting integration challenges continue to be the gauge of our success.
As summer kicks into gear EDL Consulting finds itself in the midst of several large-scale eCommerce initiatives, all of them with varying degrees of cloud-based components (for the purposes of this article, I am purposely using a watered-down definition of “cloud” to include managed services, hosting and platform-as-a-service). What strikes me about these projects as I listen to our clients and deployment teams is the increasing complexity of the integration landscape for deploying these solutions. More >
That’s Why They Call It Disruptive Technology
Jun 14th
Bill Loumpouridis
Both Microsoft and IBM continue to carve out identities for themselves in Cloud Computing. Time will tell whether they can bridge their customers before their unwieldy platforms are abandoned. For the time being, at least, Amazon’s EC2 and salesforce.com’s force.com platform are setting standards in the same way Facebook displaced AOL’s chat rooms.The last decade has indeed seen a tremendous wave of innovation, and the coming one will determine the next wave of IT standards.
Microsoft and IBM are continuing their efforts to try to achieve parity with salesforce.com and Amazon, respectively. Who would of predicted that IBM’s biggest challenger in the new era of computing would be a bookseller? And who would have predicted that an upstart CRM vendor would challenge the world’s preeminent software company for setting the next corporate standard for custom application development?
Force.com Sites and the hidden Profile
Apr 9th
Salesforce.com has been a leader in the SaaS and PaaS markets since those buzzwords were coined, though as a web developer my interest was piqued with the advent of Force.com Sites. For the uninitiated, Sites is a feature of the Force.com cloud computing platform that allows a developer to create a publicly available web site or application with a completely custom UI. The native look-and-feel of Salesforce.com is great for a broad category of business applications, but Sites allows you to shoot for the moon with your user experience.
Sites builds on Force.com’s native capabilities, allowing developers to use powerful technologies like workflow and fine-grain security controls without building them from scratch. Since most organizations will need to enforce some level of data security, it’s worth exploring how that intersects with making information available to the public.
Custom look-and-feel with Force.com Sites and Blueprint CSS
Mar 15th
At the core of Force.com Sites is an extremely simple, yet powerful concept: the ability to address a set of related Visualforce pages with a publicly accessible URL. Anyone with a web browser can access your application’s Visualforce pages, which in turn can incorporate a completely custom look-and-feel.
The sky is the limit…but where do you begin? Most developers investigating the Force.com platform will have a background in programming rather than visual design, and may be intimidated when building a UI from scratch.