“Cloud computing platforms are transforming the way apps are built and run.
Your apps. Our Cloud”
Force.com is a mature platform as a service. Its a multitenant architecture that provide a boundary between the platform and the applications that run on it, making it possible to create applications whose logic is independent of the data they control.
It provides a full range of development as a service tools: from a point-and-click customization tool, toolkits for the most popular development environments, and the Force.com programming language, Apex.
Apex is a propietary language very similar, in its syntax, to Java. Because Apex runs natively on the server, it can interact with the user interface via buttons and events, so that developers can manipulate data, channel transactions, and implement flow controls on the server side. That allows them to do everything from creating custom components, customizing and modifying existing Salesforce code, creating triggers and stored procedures, all the way to building and executing complex business applications.
This is probably a weak point compared to other PAAS models that supports well known languages, but it is also due to the fact that ensure unlimited scalability, reliability and painless upgrades for the apps built upon it.
What differentiate Force.com to other players is that as a PAAS is really oriented to enterprise application building rather that any kind of web application building. So you’ll have, within the offering, the ERP connectors for SAP R3 and Oracle EBS 11i and obviously Salesforce, and a lot of middleware and desktop connectors too.
The pricing model of Force.com is a subscription fee per user per month. Obviously open for any discussion for apps involving a large number of users.
Archive for April, 2009
Expo - the force cloud
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009Day 2 - Keynote - Stephen Elop President of the Microsoft Business Division
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009A web lightweight version of Microsoft Office shall be finally released “next calendar year” announced Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division (the first announcement dates back to October 2008) during his keynote speech at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. It will offer a subset of feature of the packaged version of Office and it will run on an undisclose set of web browsers. It will allow functionalities thought for content production and sharing over the Net, with a feature set comparable to Google Apps.
The full fledge packaged Office applications will have all the features designed for a Corporate environment, integrated with SharePoint Server, Unified Communication etc. Microsoft will not change its license based scheme for Office Application Suite.
Day 2: O’Reilly Keynote Speech
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009O’Really is outlinining some of the key IT innovations that will change how people deal with application and on line services
Keywords are:
The power of less. Or Digital Commonwealth. Sharing users’ efforts in producing content and in developing software. Common wealth.
Evolutionary Key concepts are: less and less content will be typed in by people on a keyboards an more will be gathered by network of sensors and computed and used on different devices. There are many fields of applications of this kind of IT
How to apply Moore’s law to world’s problems. Current Power Grids are the same as in the 19th century. Imagine a network connecting sensors energy grid, recognizing appliances from their electric footprint (pattern in spikes in pattern consumption) to help optimizing power consumption on a local and global level.
USSPENDING.GOV (government expenses monitoring) costed only 200.000 USD: it was cloned from FedSpending.org (non profit organizations). The US Gov just licensed their code. Lots of saving can be generated from content and application sharing, we are just at the beginning of this change.
Patientslikeme.com is another excellent example of user generated content in critical context.
Still, there are lots of “Information Shadows”
There is no global namespace in most of the knowledge fields or social fields.
There have been few examples of that: CDDB database. Reading the checksum of each song it maps content of a cd on a global namespace.
Web will be more and more based on a network of sensors (power usage, traffic, local readings, etc) using common namespaces to give them meaning.
My final impressions from the keynote session are: - we are in a transition situation, using legacy systems created decades ago and introducing (not widespread adoption) new distributed models of computing and value creation through IT. The IT is changing evolutionary patterns and innovation style.
Day 2 - WWCMD? What Would the Community Manager Do?
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009I am attending “WWCMD? What Would the Community Manager Do?”
from
Micki Krimmel (Sugar Packet Inc.)
The session audience is packed with community managers, most of them were in that position in the last 18 months at marketing dept. Quite impressive. Here in the US it seems community manager is a well defined job within marketing organizations. In Europe on the contrary it looks to me the Community Manager is not such a sharply defined role and is often mixed with other responsibilities in communication and digital marketing. Community Manager is clearly an Emergent Job.
The whole session is centered on Community Manager job, role qualities and the key concepts are based on a blog post Blog Four Tenets of community manager.
In summary the 4 tenets for community managers are:
1) Community Advocate - Listening community issues and solve them
2) Brand Evangelist – the best fan of the company’s brands. Represents the brand values
3) Pr – (empathizer, pattern recognizer, meaning maker) capable of managing Events & Panels, stimulate participation on new media tools and authoritative to shape editorial contents. Must have with a strong shared vision on products, services and markets. Responsive on a 2 way street
4) Gathers input. Community managers are responsible for gathering the requirements of the community in a responsible way and presenting it to product teams
How to hire a community manager.
THE FIRST QUALITY: COMMUNITY MANAGER HAS TO BE THE BIGGEST FAN OF COMPANY’S PRODUCTS
Mostly hired in marketing dept. No college grad, he has to know company’s functions, to be accountable and the seniority to qualify and interpret feedback in company’s terms. Has to be influential within the company and to monitor alignment of service and quality offered to the community of customers with expectations and company’s communication messages. The community manager inherits the “customer service” culture of the company.
A Wells Fargo community manager, in a comment, underlined the critical role of the community management in post merger management, when inevitably the quality of customer services suffers. Collecting the sentiment from the web and transmitting the messages with the correct priority to upper management.
For the list of real time questions answered during the session check the session’s twitter page
Day 2 - Why Social Media Marketing Fails - and How to Fix It
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009I am attending a session named “Why Social Media Marketing Fails - and How to Fix It” by Peter Kim (Dachis Corporation), Charlene Li (Altimeter Group), Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research). It is about using social media instruments with customers by corporate marketers.
In general the experiences in the different industries seemed to me quite early and mostly at startup phase. Most of initiatives have been difficult to start because of policies/regulations and because of cultural issues
In banking environment starting social business with customers is a real challenge.
Employees because of internal policies cannot take part in discussions,
Wells Fargo decided to start with Lifestyle content related social interactions with customers; about emergencies management, earthquake etc. The conceptual link was: the company that takes care about your future needs as a customer may help you in critical situations of life.
Local issues, are prevailing and global social campaigns have to take extreme care of local issues, such as language, social context etc. Cultural adaptation is issue #1 since it’s about relationships among people and tiny mistakes in relation to local social customs can be deadly for any initiative.
Most companies target social media marketing to drive sales; most of the marketers in the first experiences do not ask. There is no change of perspective, no cultural evolution to openness, no interaction about new products, services etc. WallMart was one of the first entrants in social business: a flop pelople complained, it took years to learn by mistakes, now WalMart is there with an important base of social interactions.
The session turned quickly into a Q&A session, people from the audience twittered comments and questions, and “live” questions alternated with question read from Twitter on-screen. Pretty interesting situation of an open event with a very efficient form of interaction between speakers and public. 70% of the audience had laptops open and on during the whole session. This suggests me that out of our industry this kind of interactions are probably still far from the norm.
Day1: Dion Hinchcliffe view of enterprise 2.0
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009Dion Hinchcliffe session was focused on strategies that can be used to energize any organization with new innovative methods for cutting costs, driving growth, and spurring innovation over the network.
Session started with a fact: A bunch of people with a few milion dollars budget and 18 months have a greater audience at night in prime time than the whole TV networks and cable system in the US. You Tube.
Reeds law “the value of large networks, in particolar social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network” finds in YouTube one of the clearest example. You Tube does not own any content, it’s pure infrastructure, social logic and service. Data/content belongs to users, Reeds law makes the rest.
Web 2.0 defined as “network application that explicitly exploit network effect” encompasses the usage of the Web where social interactions, viral dynamics and the openness of the Web accelerated the circulation of ideas, opinion, news.
Enterprise 2.0 is the translation of Web 2.0 logic into corporate life.
The first person who studied the phenomenon was Professor Andrew McAfee in his paper: “Enterprise 2.0, the dawn of emergent collaboration-MIT Sloan management Review”
Web 2.0 in the Enterprise 2.0 was dedefined as emergent freeform, social application, primarily to improve the collaboration problems.
The use of blogs and wikis to capture institutional knowledge, made it discoverable and let structure and organization emerge naturally.
The main Enterprise 2.0 benefits were summarized by Hinchcliffe as: increased knowledge retention, adoption of knowledge management tools with User Generated Content, Increased Transparency, Less duplication of efforts (the information and knowledge is available and, above all, open and searchable). This approach generates an emergent structure and processes from the initial free-form unstructured set of interactions.
An article published on McKinsey Quartely a survey showed that according to the earliest Enterprise 2.0 experiences, social software enabled tacit interactions on a previously unknown scale. 20% of job types in the average (developed countries) is related to transformation (raw materials in object/goods); 40% is focused on transactions (repeated task or defined business process) and the remaining 40% is committed in decision making. In this case tacit interactions and tacit knowledge is involved, every decision making process is different and taps from different knowledge sources. Social software can improve dramatically effectiveness and efficiency of decision making. Knowledge is searchable, knowledge is explicitly related to people, and these people can be located and easy interactions can take place.
The presentation gave an outlook of “open supply chain” patterns. Jakob’s Law, which says one must design online products and services to take advantage of the fact that users spend most of their time elsewhere finds an explicit application in “embedding” own content or key services on other web sites. Amazon started this pattern several years ago. This year the bandwith used by Amazon web services exceeded the bandwith used by its web site. Core Amazon.com services were accessed more from other web sites: that open supply chain is configuring as one of the emerging pattern of “distributing access and preserving core competence and key assets” for many web enterprises.
