MDM Summit – Fall 2008 is for IT professionals at any level. Newly formatted to better suit your business needs, this event will host both thought-leading speakers and attendees you want to hear from. Learn the best practice evaluation and implementation strategies from early adopters of customer data integration (CDI) and master data management (MDM) solutions. You’ll also network with fellow CDI and MDM technologists project leads that will share their success secrets.

Too bad there’s no agenda yet, but I’m sure it’ll be there soon. Keep in mind, early registration is available until august. =)

(image from here)

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?

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.

Oracle Corporation is leading with 44.3 % of the market and a revenue growth of 13.3 percent.

This is a lot due to the release of their 11g, with a large majority of ursers upgrading to it in the recent year. This and their Real Application Clusters is what really contributed to the company’s continued growth throughout the year.

Intuit research studies show a huge paper overload in the accounting industry. Around 65 % of accountants’ time is spent on documents, filing, retrieving, and sharing files. On average, a four-drawer filing cabinet can cost $25,000 to fill and $2,000 a year to maintain – 80 percent of which is cost for labor. Plus, misfiled documents can cost up to $120 to replace.

With the Intuit Document Management System (DMS) for QuickBooks Accounting, accounting professionals and small business owners using QuickBooks can store files electronically and access them instantly from their PCs. By moving to a “less paper” office, they can help reduce operating costs, improve service, and help protect their firms from risk and drastically increase productivity.

Well, I found this video on IntelligEntenterpris website that reminded me of survey respondents. So as it turns out, the fear of new (SaaS in our case) is nothing new

So, if you look closely, the two are considerably different, not even parts of the same process.

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. =)

* Budget (obviously, first make up your mind on how much you wanna spend)

*Size and scalability

*Speed and optimization capacities

*Performance and reliability

*Security (access rights)

*Integration possibilities

If totally lost, you could check out Oracle Database 11g and IBM DB2 for starters.