The current Economist debates is:

Cloud Computing: This house believes that the cloud can’t be entirely trusted.

With Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, surprise-surprise being Against the motion.

So a brief resume of Marc Benioff, and his poster child salesforce.com:

Intrigued by web sites like Amazon.com Marc started salesforce.com in the mid-1990s whilst still working part-time at ORACLE (which then employed 200 people).  Larry Ellison, CEO of ORACLE, was his mentor and provided some $2 million seed money to Marc’s and his “software on the web, on-demand” company (though this phrase is currently out of favour, with Marc prefering real-time, SaaS and multitenant).  In this short history salesforce.com has received many business awards: The Wired 40 three years in a row: 2005-2007 (No. 7 in 2007), Forbes Top Ten Disrupters (2006-2007), Forbes 25 Fastest-growing Tech Companies (2007, No. 3), and  BusinessWeek Top 100 Most Innovative Companies (2006, No. 79).  Essentially, salesforce.com continues to be a disruptive success.

Salesforce.com reported in July 2009, at its earnings conference Q2 2010: 2 million users, a customer base of 63,200, and a net-profit of $21.2 million.  It’s moving up market with customers like CNN, Motorola, and Starbucks.   It’s moving vertically with investments in the financial and healthcare industry.  A threat?  Well Microsoft and ORACLE are expanding their offerings to compete in the SaaS arena. At the Q2 conference Benioff boasted scoring wins against Microsoft (much in love with their own CRM) and ORACLE (busy building it’s own CRM).  Then, in October, Microsoft offers customers of salesforce.com, and ORACLE CRM, the equivalent of 7 months free switch subscription until the end of 2009 (however, after the trial the standard twelve months contract would apply – compare this with salesforce.com rolling monthly contract …)

But salesforce.com, with its Cloud suite, is very much tied to success of it’s customers with Applications, then Platform, then tools to build applications

• Sales Cloud: SFA and CRM applications
• Service Cloud: customer services, call centres, and web-portals
• Custom Cloud: the Force.com platform for custom applications

The latter two being more than 25% of new business.

Contra to the scale of the Google kingdom Salesforce.com relies on only two data centres – and, the main one in California has only 500 servers and handles 200 million transactions per day.

The Economist debate ends with a Post Debate follow-up on Friday 20th November – so go there soon …

Gartner Group top 10 trends for 2010

Last month the Gartner Group analysts highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends for 2010. Number one is Cloud Computing – up from third position last year.

So for a small to medium sized charities what are the benefits of Cloud Computing?

Firstly, there is an acronyms you’ve most likely heard in connection with Cloud Computing: SAAS.

SAAS (Software-as-a-Service) is where a service provider gives access to their software via the Internet. All you need is a PC, a browser, and Internet access. All the back end hardware and software is managed for you.  So let us consider the SaaS aspect of Cloud Computing – what are the opportunities of SaaS for small to medium sized charities:

• No support costs – though there may be an annual license
• No need for in-house IT support staff – all installations, upgrades, back-ups, and on-going maintenance are handled for you
• No server – so no purchase, maintenance, or support issues. You don’t need to worry about installing the latest patch, replacing ailing hard-drives, the replacement funding strategy.  They’ll be no annual license, or support contract
• Access: staff, and volunteers, can access your application from almost anywhere. Just a PC, web browser, and Internet access
• No urgency to upgrade in-house computers – less powerful PCs will do fine

But there are risks:

• You are dependent on Internet access – but you could always access the system from home, a library, or even the local coffee shop …
• The up time and response time – see for example the System Status page at trust.salesforce.com
• Backups – you still must take back-up copies of your data!
• And maybe, depending on the size and nature of your charity, Security and Regulatory compliance issues

Garner Group Hype Cycle 2008

In the Gartner Group’s Hype Cycle special report of 2008 Cloud Computing was highlighted as “the latest super-hyped concept in IT”, with 2 to 5 years before main steam adoption.  It’s already main stream!

For small to medium sized charities, then, with limited capital, limited space, limited access to technical staff, do consider choosing SaaS and reduce your dependence on hardware.

Salesforce.com is the poster child of SaaS. It can be used for SFA (Sales Force Automation), or as a CRM (Contact Relationship Management) tool.

Consider fund raising as an example.  Salesforce.com has created a special configuration of it’s SaaS for non-profit organisations, and charities.  This Non-profit edition of Salesforce.com provides:

• Tighter communication with your donors
• Stratification of donors
• Collaboration between staff – fully manageable by Salesforce.com.  Merge all those disparate spreadsheets, databases, and notes into one easily accessible system …
• Creating and managing a donor development pipe line
• Manage contacts, accounts, and communication sequence: you can also richly manage the relationships between contacts and accounts such as affiliation, board member, reporting relationship, …
• And, with Salesforce.com you can always add new screens, adjust the layouts, add extra fields, include relationships between records, install new applications from AppExchange (“… the complete marketplace for cloud computing“, many of which are free for non-profit/charities) – essentially fully adapt their software to your organisational needs

Obviously, much of this can be handled by a custom built database – but the long-run costs of developing and maintaining such an application can become prohibitive.  Using a SaaS CRM like Salesforce.com to deploy a streamlined application is almost always going to be faster, and more flexible.

Finally, keeping the theme of fund raising, using Salesforce.com is about gaining and retaining donors; not about “managing” them – it’s more about managing the increasingly rich information you gather about them.  But ultimately it’s not about “donor” strategy, process, or the technology.  It’s people – and this includes your staff.

Another Social Media webinar for you to view. This one is from Customer Think Corp, and is called “Showcase: Social CRM” – tagline “harvesting the power of Social Media and CRM systems.”

After an introduction by Bob Thomson (CEO of CustomerThink), three companies make presentations: Lithium (“the leading Social CRM solutions“), HelpStream (“the first company in the world to deliver a truly social customer service and relationship management system”), and SAP (“the world’s leading provider of business software“).  Of the three Lithium made the most valuable contribution to the webinar – the remaining two appear to have not fully appreciated the implication of the new marketing paradigm …

Bob’s introduction to the webinar included reference to a venn diagram showing the intersection of the external Social Media cloud, and the internal Business CRM system.  It’s the intersection where the interesting conversations exist – real message of the show.

The Lithium’s contribution to the webinar captured my attention: the crucial dependence on Super Users for successful on-line support forums.  Essentially, it’s not possible to create a customer network, it must be allowed to grow.  These super users will promote you wares on your behalf; it’s not merely a matter of “if you build it, [they] will come.”  The excellent example in the webinar is from a Logitech (“… designs personal peripherals to help people enjoy a better experience with the digital world”) support forum – where the super user like KachiWachi appears to spend the majority of each day resolving Logitech’s customers problems for free … and, in doing so, converts many potential leads into sales.  But there is a price to pay: these super users must be rewarded – and their reward takes the form of expert ratings – an acknowledgement of the expertise and collaboration with other users of the forum.

This on-line support forum community will even address the risk of competitors seeding the forum with misinformation.  Your on-line advocates will quickly pounce on the perpetrators and expose them …

Earlier this week, 30th September 2009, Google opened up their Wave preview to about 100,000 people.  Salesforce.com, with their interest in the service cloud , are naturally one of the first to demo Wave integrated with their CRM.  In a Salesforce Force.com Blog entry called “Getting in Front of the Wave” you will find background details on Google’s Wave and a YouTube video  (see below) on how the Wave platform might be integrated with Salesforce.com …

Just come across an interesting Blog post by Lauren Ingram, a software QA engineer at Salesforce.com.  The full title of the post is “The Digital Age: Reading in Reverse: How to make a profit.“  It’s well worth a read …

In Lauren’s Post there’s a reference to a Gartner research note (G00168995, 22 July 2009).  In this research note Gartner state that despite a decline in sales due to the economy they have not seen a drop-off in their customers requesting vendor evaluations related to Sales Force Automation (SFA).  The note includes, of course, one of Gartner’s classic magic quadrants.  The magic quadrant, a square (shown here on the right – click to enlarge) divided into four “quadrants”, is essentially a visual aid for comparative discussions of vendors attributes.  Of course, the placement of vendors in the square needs careful interpretation.  All the SFA vendors in the square offer Software as a Service (SaaS – read as service in the cloud), one of Salesforce.com’s key marketing attributes – and, Salesforce.com is in the prestigious top right-hand corner of the magic quadrant.

Lauren summarises the theme of his Post in the final sentences, “… Salesforce is betting on the service cloud.  Today, we’re reading in reverse, making our customers available to their clients.  And it’s all because you, the reader, insist on using that Twitter account.”

I couldn’t resist this Post – after all, it is a cloud!

Go to Wired for some more weird clouds …

Earlier this week Google acquired reCAPTCHA (16th September 2009).

CAPTCHA tests are those squiggly letters that are displayed when you are buying items online, or accessing some sites.  Already more than 100,000 sites use reCAPTCHA, but Google is more likely interested in reCAPTCHAs experience in OCR (Optical Character Recognition)  -  a process “that converts scanned images into plain text [and] powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search.”  For more on Google’s once again contentious book-scanning programme see this article by Reuters.

Salesforce uses reCAPTCHA, and you may have already experienced it when accessing some Salesforce resources.  There’s also a brief introduction to understanding CAPTCHA on the Salesforce developerforce site, some of which is copied from the reCAPTCHA site.

So, what’s all this to do with salesforce leads?

Salesforce allow you to very easily generate the code for capturing lead contact data entered into a web site form.  The so called Web2Lead functionality.  But there’s a problem with the default code.  Essentially your organisation Id is exposed and unscrupulous coders could easily use you Web2Lead details to propagate SPAM (see the Salesforce Ideas entry).

reCAPTCHA to the rescue!  As a proof of concept I have created a web page to capture lead details.  I’ve extended it to include extra custom fields (e.g. a picklist: prefered method of contact), immediate (a fully configurable) validation of the data entered, and reCAPTCHA to prove your human …

You can test all this functionality on my other site: http://www.bdgreen.it …

Note: The web page also makes use of the another reCAPTCHA function that enable you to obscure (again to prevent SPAMMERS) your contact email address.

I’ve been listening to several of Leo’s podcasts over many years now.  His TWiT podcast has proven to be essential listening for me at the gym.  So when Leo started TWig – This week in Google (and the Cloud) – I new it would be worth downloading.

Take for example This Week In Google 4: Filers vs. Pilers, it’s probably one of the most accessible of the current series.  The cast is usual suspects: Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani, Jeff Jarvis and the guest, for this session, Kevin Marks (Google: Open Social, and now BT).  It’s talking heads at its best.

Kevin introduces the word phatic, a social scientist term, in relationship to much that is Social Media.  According to Kevin, Social Media is “full of social gestures that are like apes grooming each other.”  That is, full of expressions that only function to perform a social task, rather than to conveying information.

Other nuggets from TWig#4 are that:

• there is a limit (i.e. accessible by API) of 3200 tweets on Twitter
• Google Wave, is best viewed as tool that will support collaborative editing of a stored document – rather than a new email paradigm (Kevin)
• TWig’s has a friendfeed at http://friendfeed.com/twit-twig