Salesforce.com has a philanthropic 1:1:1 model.

In his book “Behind the Cloud“, Marc Benioff’s (co-founder 1999, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com), Part 6: The Corporate Philanthropy Playbook, starts with Play#64: “The Business of Business is more than Business” – a quote widely attributed to the American economist, statistician, and a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics; Milton Friedman (and here).  In the book Marc states that the co-founders of salesforce.com shared his philosophy that “the value of a corporation should be distributed not only to its leadership but also to the communities in which it operates and to the world.”  Suzanne DiBianca (Executive Director and co-founder of the Salesforce.com Foundation) officially joined salesforce.com in 2000 to establish the Foundation – now a decade ago!  So what is the 1:1:1 model?

1% time, 1% product, 1% equity

• 1% time: salesforce.com employees spend six paid volunteer days per year responding to community needs around the globe – employees have, so far, donated 178,000 hours
• 1% product: Salesforce donate CRM licenses to non-profits organisations – to 8,000 non-profits, in some 70 countries.  The Foundation offer 10 subscriptions for free, and the rest at 80 percent discounts
• 1% equity: Founding stock from salesforce.com provides funds for grants, with a specific focus on  supporting youth, technology innovation and employee-inspired volunteer projects – including some $20 million in grants to non-profit organisations

The case presented by Marc for Corporate Philanthropy (Play #68:  Share the Model) is:

1. It’s the right thing to do – for the community and the company
2. It builds your brand
3. It attracts and retains employees – a competitive advantage
4. It’s fun – honest

The model has also been adopted by many of salesforce.com’s third-party suppliers.  Most of the suppliers listed in salesforce.com’s AppExchange (the marketplace of 1000+ applications and services that extend Salesforce’s CRM) offer free, or significantly discount applications, or services to non-profit organisations.

I acknowledge that I have an interest in salesforce.com – I am a qualified salesforce.com administrator, and I have supported a number of charities, some pro bono, with their implementation and configuration of the non-profit instance of saleforce.com (Brian Green Consultancy CIC).

This week in GOOGLE #23, “What Should Google Do?“

This week in GOOGLE, or TWig, is a podcast covering Google and all thing cloud computing.  Hosted by Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani, and Jeff Jarvis.  Jeff Jarvis, in particular, is the author of What Would Google Do?, blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com, and is associate professor and director of the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism.

This being the first TWig episode of 2010 the discussion is about the future and “what should Google do?”

The team agree that Google doesn’t yet feel professional enough, yet it must expand into the Enterprise area in 2010 as there’s nothing left for it to do but create an Enterprise revenue stream.  But is Google ready for the Enterprise?  The team compare Google with Amazon, and salesforce.com, and decide Google is not as trustworthy (Marc Benioff, CEO salesforce.com, will be absolutely delighted to know he’s being compared with Amazon – Amazon being Marc’s inspiration when formulating salesforce.com …)  Jeff  then celebrates salesforce.com, “salesforce really knows how to serve business … ,” and “knows what a business needs.”  So, Google is going to have to prove that it’s more than merely search and advertising in 2010.

Another programme on worth tracking down is CNBCs “Inside The Mind of Google”

In the foreword to Clara Shih book The Facebook Era … (Mar 2009), Marc Benioff (Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com) states “more than ever before, the lines are blurring between the consumer and enterprise worlds … bringing together social networking and enterprise applications represents the next phase in this evolution”

Email is failing.  It was never envisaged to do what we now expect of it.  Email messages grow too long, too difficult to follow, too difficult to track, get lost, and attachments go backwards and forwards with no version control.  Should I read the email where I’m only cc’d?  Can I remember which internal group I’ve just emailed that grumble to? Why do we still use it?  Is there no alternative?

Let’s take a blank page.  Take the best of Facebook.  The best of Twitter.  The number of users of these communication tools,  after all, is growing astronomically.  Something must be right.  Merge all that functionality into one place, sprinkle in filters, user controlled groups, and let it inherit all the robust and proven user control and security of an enterprise system.  Then give it away – free!

This is what salesforce.com’s Chatter is all about.  Expect it to be disruptive.  Expect to see it cloned … every organisation is going to need it to stay competitive.  Everybody in the enterprise is going to use it – it will enable networking, it will encourage collaboration, and, be warned, it will ignore the existing hierarchy.  All you need do is Activate it, nurture it, and wait until it reaches that critical mass of users …

Salesforce.com’s User Profiles (a collection of settings and permissions that defines a user) will be extended to include the users Chatter settings – including a current photo (user controlled, of course), and status: “Working on major marketing campaign, anybody have any experience of using VerticalResponse?”.  Twitter like status updates will appear on the users home page – in real-time: “there’s a new vacancy in the London office“,  “the printer on third floor is now working“, – but also, from salesforce.com Workflow triggers, and alerts: “Major donor not been contacted for 90 days!“, and “Large donation made by Corporate Sponsor“.  The user will have full control over the feeds (however, there’s some ambiguity from what I’ve read and seen as to whether email will be included in this – it aught to be), groups (small, and large – added instantly by the user; both public and private; and even secret groups: where that discussion on the “up and coming merger” can continue with confidence), the display can be filtered to show just Object (a salesforce.com term!  Think of Record), a team, Tweets on that competitor you’re following,  …

Better still, when it’s made available in Spring 2010 to all salesforce.com editions for free, all existing applications including those developed by third parties (or, downloaded from the AppExchange), will automatically acquire all this Chatter functionality.  And, of course, it will be on your mobile.  And, of course, it will come with a Desktop app (for when your not logged in to salesforce.com).  And, of course, it comes with a full set of APIs. And, …

Oh, these are interesting times

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 …