Shortly before Salesforce.com's Dreamforce seminar started
last Wednesday, the San Francisco Fire Department had locked the
doors to Moscone Center to let the crush of bodies entering it
disperse before letting in more course attendees. I thought, are
you kidding me? All this for a mid-size software company? But as
I talked to workshop attendees over the next few days, I began
to understand what was stoking such enthusiasm I haven't seen in
years in the marketing automation enterprise software industry.
I suppose some of the seminar attendees came to witness the
curiosity that is CEO Marc Benioff, who channeled an odd
combination Anthony Robbins, Bob Barker and Yogi Bear as he
paced the Dreamforce stage for hours last week, more marketing
character than person. But the real enthusiasm wasn't about
Benioff, and to some degree, wasn't even about Salesforce CRM,
which, ironically, is where the company makes most of its money.
The enthusiasm was about Force.com, Salesforce.com's cloud
computing sales force automation platform: developers write
sales automation apps using Salesforce.com's programming
language and tools, courses and workshops, and those apps run in
Salesforce.com sales CRM data centers. Force.com is the leading
example of the next phase of sales force management
software-as-a-service, where the best opportunities lay not in
the SaaS apps you can subscribe to, but in what you can build to
run on hosted platforms.
Now, Force.com is still more about opportunity than
reality—among the 15,000 Dreamforce attendees at the classes, at
least as many were hoping to make money off of it, by writing
apps and selling subscriptions to them to other businesses, than
there was those serious about building apps for their own
companies. But so what. Although most of the world still thinks
of Salesforce.com as a CRM management company, what's important
about the crush of people pushing into Moscone is that most were
there because they had discovered, or had others tell them, how
easily and quickly one could build apps on Force.com. I heard
this over and over from class attendees.
Salesforce.com likes to tout that over 100,000 custom CRM
services apps have been built on Force.com and 200,000
developers are members of its community, but those numbers are
difficult to substantiate—they could mean anything. What's more
important are the stories--people explaining how fast and
cheaply they or their staffers built an CRM management app on
Force.com. In most cases these were fairly simple,
function-specific apps and not "business critical" ones, but
those are exactly the kinds of apps businesses want to build
sales automation apps and courses cheaply and quickly, with no
or little infrastructure investments.
I've been around the software industry long enough to know that
when you see that sort of enthusiasm around seminars and
conferences, there's something to pay attention to. It's wise to
be wary about Salesforce.com's healthy market machine, and
Force.com isn't the only option for what's sometimes called a
platform-as-a-service, and more are coming. (Microsoft's Azure
is set to go live in January.) It's also unclear how much money
Salesforce.com is making off of Force.com, but who cares; that's
an issue between Marc Benioff and his investors.
What's important is that people are very enthusiastic over this
idea of a cloud computing platform, and a crush of 15,000 people
at the Moscone Center last week proves it.
Source: Mary Hayes Weier
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Related: Salesforce.com CRM
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