Really Cool Things

I recently attended the CloudForce 2011 event in Boston.  Marc Benioff spoke for slightly more than an hour with minimal slideware and no notes.  Marc is an amazing speaker and I suspect much of what we saw in Boston will get re-used at the Dreamforce keynote in August.  Clouldforce was a great opportunity for me to piece together in my mind the Salesforce.com (SFDC) story.

Salesforce now has a very interesting collection of technologies – 4 families if you will:

• Tools for Sales– “Sales Cloud” – pipeline management and Jigsaw – leads
• Tools for the supporting Customers – “Remedyforce” – generic customer support and “Service Cloud” – help desk in the cloud
• Social – Chatter – Twitter for business and Radian6 – social network monitoring
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) – Force.com – applications for extending SFDC, Database.com – database in the cloud, Heroku – Ruby on Rails in the cloud

The tools for Sales and Support evolved organically from SFDC’s roots as a CRM company.  The PaaS applications, less Heroku, evolved from the platform that Salesforce built to support the CRM business.  The social stuff is all new and was the focus of much of Marc’s talk.

Social Enterprise

My sense is that it’s the social networking pieces that really excite Benioff personally.  Benioff paints a compelling vision of Salesforce.com (the company) becoming the engine of the social enterprise.  The argument in favor of becoming a social enterprise is based on how dominant social networking (read Facebook) has become to the consumer.  Indeed he asserted that more people are using social networks than email.  He used Facebook as an opportunity to cite McKinsey research on the consumerization of IT.  The key point is for the first time the technology consumers use in their personal lives is now driving enterprise IT strategy.  Today’s consumers expect to be able to interact with brands on their iPhones and via social networks.  Companies ignore this dynamic at their peril.  Indeed as seen in this video he is positioning his companyas the defacto expert in B-to-B social networks.  Chatter (enterprise Twitter) and Radian6 (social network monitoring) are Salesforce.com’s beachheads into the world of the Social Enterprise.

Platform as a Service

Using SFDC as a PaaS provider makes a ton of sense if your organization already has (or will have) a significant investment in their CRM products.  Its logical that Salesforce would make their PaaS offerings available for anyone to use, however, this is a crowded space with strong established offerings available from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.  I am not sure I fully appreciate the Heroku tie in.

Disclaimer: I am a basically a Microsoft .Net guy but am a very big fan of Ruby on Rails.  I’ve written force.com applications and have done more than the prototypal hello world application in a bunch of languages including PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Java.  I’ve never been wild about the tools (Apex Code and Visualforce) that Salesforce gives you as a developer to natively integrate with their platform.  Apex code essentially allows developers to write stored procedures for the Salesforce.com database where Visualforce is a presentation layer language for their system.  Both of these languages have roots in Java and are based on the model view controller (MVC) design pattern.  My basic problem with the SFDC languages is that they are SFDC specific and there is a learning curve with any new language.  (There is amazing developer support for just about any language you can imagine to interface with SFDC but only applications written in Visualforce or Apex can run on the SFDC servers.)  If you talk to the CRM folks they will tell you that this specialization was needed to achieve the kind of performance and deep integration they wanted.  At the time that these tools were announced I wondered why they couldn’t do what they wanted with Java.  Now SFDC buys Heroku which allows you to run Ruby on Rails in the Cloud.  Ruby on Rails is another MVC-based application and is the “hot” open source language.  How amazing would it be if you could write a force.com application that would run on the SFDC servers in RoR.

Some amusing quips from Cloudforce

• Beware of the false cloud – a cloud is not real if it is not public
• SharePoint is like your grandfather’s attic – what I put in I can never find

Netflix is in the process of moving to the Amazon cloud. There are a couple of really good blog posts by John Ciancutti who is Netflix’s VP of Personalization Technology. I find it very interesting that an operation as big as Netflix would be investing as much as they are into AWS. Thjs is how I read it.

This is a huge leap of faith. While I am not an investment analyst and haven’t studied Netflix’s proxy statements I am a customer. From what I can see Netflix is slowly walking away from the DVD in the mail business and moving to the video on demand model. The old way of doing business would have said that ‘our web presence is too core to our business to outsource to a third party’.

This is a tremendous vote of confidence for Amazon. I am sure that Netflix did not go into this partnership with Amazon without thorough due diligence. In this business there is no one-size fits all model and “your mileage will vary,” however, I interpret Netflix’s decision as a statement that the Amazon cloud is ready for primetime. I’ve heard this same message from other people that I know as well.

There was a Window of opportunity. According to the Netflix post they “needed to re-architect” anyhow so the timing apparently worked out to optimize their software to integrate into AWS.

The cost equation is starting to make sense. Every time I’ve looked at AWS I’ve come away thinking that it’s really expensive. A friend of mine observed the following: “they (Netflix) are large enough that they could probably save millions by building it themselves.  However, there would be opportunity cost of putting some of their best people onto scalability instead of feature development.”

AWS is no silver bullet. There are stories out there like Instagram which over night explodes to 1M users. The only way a product like that could have possibly scaled to accommodate that much traffic is with a solution like AWS/EC2. That said, committing an existing business to a cloud-based solution is very much a strategic decision and requires management commitment.

I think about AWS as the established incumbent in the space. They aren’t by any means the only serious player.  I’ve heard good things about Rackspace’s CloudServer offering, and that Windows Azure is an increasingly interesting technology that will be very meaningful – particularly to folks that write code using the Microsoft stack.