#SIIA Interview from Dreamforce: Cloud Integration in the Spotlight

Here’s an interview from #df11 focused on cloud integration as well as industry trends.

Related articles

• Notes from Dreamforce 2012 (davidcummings.org)
• Appirio surveys Dreamforce attendees about mobile, social (zdnet.com)

Congratulations to the Informatica Cloudy Award Winners

Image via CrunchBase

Earlier this week, I wrote about Dreamforce 2011 on the Informatica Perspectives blog and congratulated the winners of the first annual Informatica Cloudy Awards. The 2011 cloud integration award winners are:

• Most Unique Integrations – CETCO
• Highest All-Time Success Rate – McKesson
• Big Data Cloud Integration – Avaya
• Rising Cloud – Novatel Wireless-Enfora
• Most Connected – Motorola Mobility
• MVP –  Andrew Bartels, PSA Insurance and Financial Services

You can read more about the Informatica Cloud awards here. Speaking of cloud integration, here is a presentation I had the pleasure of delivering twice at Dreamforce with three great Salesforce.com customers: PSA, Topcon and Qualcomm.

Hybrid IT: The Importance of Integration to Salesforce Success

View more presentations from Darren Cunningham

The Cloud Crowd Rolls in Style to Dreamforce 2011

I recently outlined some of the things the Informatica Cloud team is working on in anticipation of the cloud computing event of the year – Dreamforce 2011. (See the post Getting Ready for Dreamforce on the Perspectives blog.) Well, yesterday I had a chance to catch up with my friend Tom Wong – aka Mr. Dreamforce himself. Tom’s got a lot going on right now as his new company Eventley gets going (“if you’ve been to Dreamforce and used the Attendee Portal, you’ve used Eventforce by Eventley”), but somehow he’s found the time to connect with eight other Salesforce enthusiasts to organize “The Road2DF,” which has already become a movement leading up to the conference. Here’s they’re describing the journey:

 ”9 of us are driving cross-country 3,000 miles in an RV on the Road to Dreamforce. From Chicago to San Francisco over 4 days, we’re going to chronicle our journey and hope to connect with 100s of attendees and believers both online and at meetups along the way.  JOIN THE MOVEMENT.”

The event schedule appears to be growing by the day with official stops planned for Chicago, Iowa City, Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake, Las Vegas, LA, and of course San Francisco in time for Dreamforce. According to Tom, who has a history of getting very excited about Dreamforce, the ideas are flowing for lots of interesting activities and announcements along the way.

• There’s already been a Haiku competition (the winner: Driving to the cloud | Nine chaps en route to Dreamforce | See you in San Fran)
• There’s a blog
• There are 150+ followers on Twitter,
• And it sounds like the local Salesforce user groups are jumping on to the bandwagon, er RV.

I think we’re going to hear a lot about this trip before during and after Dreamforce. It’s a great idea with some really passionate people involved. Talking to Tom I had this vision of the scene in Slapshot where the local boosters follow the team from city to city. I believe there were a few moon shots along the way – something I think this crew is going to want to avoid. Then the movie Roadtrip popped into my head. God speed!

Related articles

• Dreamforce ’11 : Social Roadmap – salesforce.com (salesforce.com)
• Salesforce Irons it Out: 21st Century Social Enterprise Certified (zdnet.com)

What Do Salesforce.com Customers Care About?

Image via CrunchBase

I was asked a simple question yesterday: “What do Salesforce customers care about?” I found that after a lot of rambling and some whiteboard scribbling that my answer was not so simple. I thought I’d try it out here…and maybe get some input from some of you.

First of all, some background. I first became a Salesforce user back in 2005, while in product marketing at Business Objects (now owned by SAP and no longer a customer I suspect). At that point, I was primarily interested in customer analysis, customer references and  competitive intelligence (win / loss analysis and other sales reporting). In 2006 I joined Salesforce product management to work on developing an analytics product line. (This is when I discovered blogging – here are some early examples.) I spent a lot of time gathering input from customers about the types of dashboards and reports they’d like to see. (It’s nice to see that many of the requirements outlined here have now been delivered.) I also spent a lot of time with AppExchange analytics partners, before joining a SaaS BI start-up, where I became a CRM administrator for the first time. Since then I’ve spent most of my time thinking about leads, campaigns and opportunities, but I’m a huge fan of Salesforce Content and Chatter. I’ve also been involved in Eloqua and Marketo implementations along the way.

So, the point of the background is to say that I know what I care about as a Salesforce CRM customer, but as I started down the path of answering what was meant to be a simple question, I realized just how much salesforce.com has expanded over the past few years. Here are a few of the bullets I jotted down, recognizing that much of this will vary by organization size and industry.

CRM administrators:

• They care about user adoption, dashboards, business process, taking advantage of the latest features, data quality…and integration.
• These days when I want to know what a guru cares about I read, A Force Behind the Force blog. It’s solid.

Sales Operations:

• As above, but they also are responsible for sales enablement, forecasting, funnel management, quotas, compensation, bookings, billings…and integration.
• I like this blog, but generally, I find sales operations are interested in anything to do with metrics. (Here are a few of my old posts on this topic.)

Marketing Managers:

• Of course it depends on whether or not you work for a B2B or B2C organization and your role (demand gen, events, community, product marketing, corporate communications, etc.), but ultimately what marketing should be measured on is pipeline contribution: Leads that convert to opportunities that convert to closed business…that convert to happy customers…that convert to renewals, more business, etc.
• There are lots of great AppExchange apps for marketers, but I do wonder when the Marketing Cloud will be delivered by Salesforce natively. The Lead and Campaign objects could use a refresh…

Customer Service and Support:

• I’m no Service Cloud guru, but I do know the latest release was a big deal at the New York Cloudforce event in March and more and more organizations are moving to customer service and support in the cloud. Incorporating social media and gaining a single view of customer, products, etc. is also a key value proposition of cloud data integration and master data management (MDM).
• Here’s a solid post on the Salesforce Service Cloud opportunity and a video on social media and customer service.

IT Roles: Architects, DBAs, etc.

• I wrote a post recently called, Is Hybrid the New Black?  To me, it’s fascinating to see attitudes from this audience evolve from cloud skeptical, to cloud curious, to cloud first. It’s as if the Big Switch has been flipped and the so-called “Cloud Rush” is on in IT.
• Look to see significant enterprise IT attendance at Dreamforce 2011. Salesforce has done a great job of gaining trust from CIOs and all levels of IT over the past few years. Clearly this is also an audience that understands the importance of cloud integration.

Application and Platform Developers

• Force.com anyone? I must admit that I’m losing track of all of the evolving platform as a service (PaaS) components. Heroku remains a separate website, and it looks like they’ve gone back to the X-Force branding of 2005 (Appforce, Siteforce, VMforce, etc.).
• What do Salesforce developers care about? If you want get into Apex Code and learn some great tips and tricks, check out the Force Monkey blog. Be sure to also spend time on the Developer Force community site.

So how did I do? Clearly it’s not so easy to summarize what Salesforce customers care about as the on-demand applications and platform have evolved and expanded. One thing I do believe is consistent across all constituents is that all Salesforce customers care about data, which is why data integration, data quality and overall data management are always such hot topics.

To me, what has remained the same is how passionate Salesforce customers are about pushing the boundaries of cloud computing and getting the maximum value from their investment. Salesforce.com has done a fantastic job of creating communities of evangelists and an ecosystem of partners….and the annual extravaganza is just around the corner.

See you @ #DF11. Oh, and here’s a video of Marc Benioff talking about his vision a few years ago…

Related articles

• Salesforce.com to Buy Radian6, a Bet on Social CRM (clickz.com)
• Live Blog: Interview with Parker Harris, Co-Founder Salesforce.com (readwriteweb.com)
• Salesforce.com Acquisition Points To Marketing Ambitions (informationweek.com)

Dreamforce Live – Talking Salesforce Integration with Peter Coffee

Juan Carlos Soto from Informatica recently spoke to Loraine Lawson from ITBusinessEdge about Informatica’s approach to “pay as you go” integration. He also was interviewed at Dreamforce 2010 by Peter Coffee and spoke about the importance of cloud integration to Salesforce customer success, market trends and Informatica Cloud.

Related Articles

• Informatica launches Cloud Express service (v3.co.uk)
• Informatica Embraces Pay as You Go (arnoldit.com)
• Informatica debuts pay-as-you-go data integration service (infoworld.com)

Talking Cloud Integration with the DreamSimplicity Team

Okay, you put a microphone near me and clearly I’ll grab it and go. Thanks to Matt and the great team at DreamSimplicity for the interview and overall fantastic coverage of Dreamforce 2010.

Informatica’s New Pay-Per-Use Cloud Integration Platform

Speaking of Dreamforce, here are a few recaps of the “amazing” (aka the keynote keyword) event:

• Four Interesting Trends from Dreamforce (my favorite: “Integration Must be Seamless”)
• Salesforce.com Dreams Big – and Forcefully Part I
• Dreamforce 2010: A Recap of the Cloud Computing Event of the Year
• Dreamforce Social Web Coverage Dec 2010
• Was It All A (Cloud) Dream? 25 Scenes From Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2010
• May the Force Be With You; the Salesforce Dreamforce Festival
• Clinton Keynote – Using Technology To Solve World’s Problems

Follow #df10 on Twitter to keep up with the latest on the post show news and reviews…

2011 Cloud Predictions from Jeff Kaplan

’tis the season, so I thought I’d highlight a great set of predictions from Jeff Kaplan, from THINKstrategies: Look for New Shapes in the Clouds in 2011.

When it comes to cloud integration, he has this to say:

“Vendors that provide cloud integration tools and professional services, in particular, will be key acquisition targets because they represent a critical component in pulling the various cloud piece-parts together.”

Be sure to read Jeff’s full set of predictions (as well as cloud computing opportunities and challenges) here. He also published a good review of Dreamforce 2010 last week and had this to say about the industry at the conference:

Dreamforce 2010: Jeff Kaplan – The Evolution of Dreamforce, THINKStrategies, SaaS Showplace and The Best of SaaS Awards from DreamSimplicity on Vimeo.

Usage-Based Cloud Integration for Salesforce

At Dreamforce 2010 today, Informatica announced Informatica Cloud Express, the first cloud data integration service with usage-based pricing. Here’s a quote from Ron Papas,  general manager, Informatica Cloud, about the launch:

“Since 2008, Informatica’s Data Loader Service has been the most popular applications on the AppExchange. As user needs have expanded, they have requested more capabilities, enhanced customer support and a pay-for-use pricing model. We’ve listened, and Informatica Cloud Express is the result, representing a cost-effective entry point that can easily scale, as needed, to the full power of Informatica Cloud.”

According to Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer, salesforce.com:

“Salesforce.com customers understand how important data integration is to their success, and have voted Informatica the leading data integration solutions provider on AppExchange for two years running. As more and more enterprise applications, data and business processes move into the cloud with Salesforce and Force.com, customers will look to Informatica to help accelerate their success with data integration.”

You can read the Informatica Cloud Express press release here.

D&B360: Informatica Cloud Inside

Here’s  a quick video of Tom Carlock from D&B talking about the Informatica Cloud capabilities embedded within D&B360.
http://www.twitvid.com/player/GKYDT

Dreamforce Advice: Get a Room!

There will be lots of clouds and hopefully no rain on Monday when Dreamforce 2010 finally gets underway. For those of us in the SaaS/Salesforce world, it truly is the cloud computing event of the year. JP Seabury (aka Force Monkey) wrote a great post this week summarizing his Dreamforce: Tips for First Year Attendees.

They are:

1. Check-in early.
2. Explore the Moscone on the day before.
3. Arrive early and get a good seat.
4. Don’t be shy.
5. Bring lots of business cards.
6. Have a plan .
7. Make arrangements in advance!
8. Put the mobile device down. Connect. Engage. Interact.
9. Introduce people you meet to other people who are joining your group late.
10. Dreamforce is like Disney, don’t try to see it al in one visit.
11. Explore every booth at Cloud Expo.
12. Have fun. Leave the office behind, it’s just 4 days.

It’s a great list, with more details about his experiences on his blog. He goes on to summarize some additional tips from some of the biggest Salesforce gurus.

My main advice is for people who live in the Bay Area, but not in San Francisco. Get a room! So much of the Dreamforce networking happens at night and coming and going means you wont’ be connected…and you won’t have as much fun. Trust me, I’ve had to do it in the past and didn’t get as much out of the conference. I also missed the Foo Fighters! (Although I’m pretty sure my wife and newborn child appreciated the effort.)

Here are a few other posts with some good Dreamforce advice:

• Top 10 Tips for Dreamforce
• 6 Tips from a Dreamforce Veteran
• 10 Tips for Attending Dreamforce (or any other conference)

See you on Monday!