Last month Salesforce.com was named one of Ethisphere Institute’s 2008 ‘World’s Most Ethical Companies’.
While the fuss around the company’s alliance with Google creating a formidable competition against Microsoft is on, SFDC keeps steadily securing its position as a company that is not only successful in business, but also quite popualar for its community approach. No wonder, considering the way Salesforce.com allows its community to regulate the direction the company goes. Their ideas.salesforce.com resource allows users to share recommendations and suggestions around the company’s products and services and thus provies SFDC with a much needed future vision.
That’s on the community. Business-wise too, they have a powerful partner in face of Google and a perfect spokeman in face of Beinoff, who has “proven to get under the skin of the competition and seems to drive them crazy.” The future? Let’s see more powerful players join this coalition against Microsoft. Who’s next? Adobe? Apple?
The quote is from an interview with Parker Harris from Salesforce.com. Continuing to follow SFDC’s progress, I came across this interview with him and here’re some highlights that I thought sounded quite fresh.
According to Harris, in the consumer world, everyone must think not only on one level, but on several. Salesforce.com thought about software, scale and the Internet; questioning what it would take to build this ‘thing’ they were thinking about.
“When we met Marc [Benioff], he had a vision and had written a two page e-mail detailing that we need to make this as easy as buying a book on Amazon,’ Harris says. At the time, there was Amazon, Google and E-bay.
It turns out Salesforce.com was not first concieved as a platform, rather as a number of abstract layers to help sales people.
…we quickly realized the need to unify them. We continued adding layers in response to our customers; columns, end user interface. At that point we realized it could be a platform; we didn’t consciously do that.
The future of platforms like SFDC?
Databases have evolved. Today you don’t really go into business to write it, you find one. I see platforms heading in the same direction.
Mr. Harris is rather frank in admitting to the mistakes the company has made:
We made two big mistakes: we changed everything all at once, which is a big risk for any business, and moved onto large scale systems. Pushing scale in a vertical sense created a complexity that was just too hard. Then we hired the guy from eBay to make sure it never happened again.
You can read the full interview here.
Salesforce.com’s latest announcement of its “global strategic alliance” with Google…what does that mean for the world?
In “global” terms, aside from integration between Salesforce.com’s cloud-based development platform with data from Google services, it’s a quest to outlive on-premises software and replace it with web-based applications. A perspective that doesn’t look too promising for Microsoft and the smaller on-premises software vendors.
Behold and despair, the era of SaaS is starting right here right now. =)
In the world of customer data quality problems, simply solving the problem, which is exactly what most vendors are trying to do, is not the best option. The thing is, most problems arise as a result of a whole bunch of issues that too need to be adressed. When the data you get from your sources is dirty, for instance, it’s not your CRM system that needs to be cleansed and checked fot data quality regularly, but rather it’s your the sources that need to be altered to provide a better quality data in the first place.
CRMBuyer has an insignful article by Denis Pombriant, the managing principal of the Beagle Research Group, discussing why the original issues don’t get addressed and the way some turnkey technologies try to deal with it.
“We need to think more about the process than we think about solving the point problem,” Pombriant says.
Salesforce.com with its AppExchange and on-demand platform seems to have the best approach solution.
By far, Salesforce has demonstrated this understanding best. With the AppExchange and Force.com, the company has brought forth a logical platform that supports whole business processes by bringing applications together.
SalesForce has news on their summer release.
The release will contain new editing capabilities enabling users to edit a single record, or multiple - up to 200 - records, directly from a list, never leaving the page. The new navigation features (displaying the record count (up to 2000), specifying number of records displayed per page, jump to a specific page, and first & last page links) should simplify the process of finding the right information and significantly speed up the search itself.
But more on the practical side, SalesForce will remember selections across multiple pages! You won’t have to select records on a single page and click the action button before being able to go to the next page, select more records, etc.
And what I like the most, design-wise, is that the coming release will enable drag-and-drop for moving columns around and changing a column’s width.
I’m looking forward to seeing this, are you?
SalesForce will be shortly making another release with new and enhanced features.
You can take a sneak peak at the new features in the Summer ‘08 Admin Preview.
Here are some highlights from the coming release as singled out in the official SalesForce blog.
- Visualforce -With Visualforce now generally available in every edition, it’s easy to build custom user interfaces using Visualforce and new custom components from the Force.com developer community.
- Salesforce for Google Apps, a simple, yet powerful combination of your applications that work together and make it incredibly easy for users to communicate, collaborate, and share business information.
Also, the latest release schedule is available at trust.salesforce.com!
And a quick reminder for those who still doubt whether they can/should integrate non-SalesForce contact data (from various databases like Oracle, MySQL etc. and/or applications like Excel, QuickBooks etc.) into SalesForce account, just one word: Apatar.
Did you know Salesforce.com has a LinkedIn group that you can join? The group already has over 1,000 members and only continues to grow. You can join Salesforce Professional Network over here. LinkedIn is after all THE proven old-school professional social network. =)
The Salesforce.com Professional Network connects former and present salesforce.com users, administrators and employees, allowing them to expand their professional development, exchange ideas, network and continue to be a part of the Salesforce.com community.
As a group member, you’ll have the option to make your profile available to other group members. You’ll also have a Salesforce Professional Network badge on your LinkedIn profile.
