Talking Cloud Integration at #DF13

Here’s a quick interview I did with Matt Childs from Vidcaster on the show floor at Dreamforce 2013:

Last week I interviewed Jeff Kaplan from THINKstrategies to get his views on the conference and what was announced. Some of the highlights are here. The slides we reviewed are below.

Related articles

• Are you ready for Dreamforce? (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)
• What 22 B2B Experts Took Away from Dreamforce #DF13 (socialmediatoday.com)

Marc Benioff Speaks at Disrupt SF 2013

Michael Arrington talks business strategy with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Good discussion about technology disruption and the impact of cloud, social and mobile on the industry.

Stuck in the Post Dreamforce Cloud #DF12

Have you recovered from Dreamforce 2012? Next week I’ll be at Oracle Open World talking about cloud integration and to be honest, I’d much rather write about the Marc Benioff show than register for Larry’s World at this point. (Although, I do wonder if we’ll see the 2nd tweet from Mr. Ellison and what his position will be on all things cloud this year. Remember the @Benioff  boot out last time around? Some classic tweets.

I guess like a lot of people you could say I’m stuck in the PDC (Post Dreamforce Cloud) at this point. I’ve been spending time in the Dreamforce Chatter org reviewing sessions, watching YouTube videos and reading a plethora of blogger opinion about the conference (see links below).  Sound familiar?

To bring back some of the #DF12 energy, today I hosted a webinar focused on some of the Dreamforce data management highlights. The presentation congratulated the 2012 Informatica Cloudy Award winners and featured live demonstrations of two of the hottest topics at the Informatica booth:

• Salesforce and SAP integration
• Master Data Management for Salesforce

You can download the slides and watch the recording here:

Informatica Cloud @ Dreamforce 2012 from Darren Cunningham

Denis Pombriant wrote one of the best summaries of Dreamforce I’ve seen so far here.  I also enjoyed his interview with Brent Leary from CRM Essentials.

Related articles

• Dreamforce 2012: Before and During (blogs.salesforce.com)
• Salesforce Customers are Asking for Big Data Management #DF12 (cloudintegration.wordpress.com)
• Event Report: Dreamforce X (#DF12) Emerges As The South By Southwest (#SXSW) For The Enterprise (forbes.com)
• Dreamforce 2012: A Few of Our Favorite Tweets #DF12 (designingdesignthinkingdrivenoperations.wordpress.com)
• 20 Awesome Instagram Photos from Dreamforce 2012 (radian6.com)

Oracle to Join the Cloud Crowd?

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I recommended that Larry Ellison read Marc Benioff’s book. It seems that he did. #Nextslide.

Here’s a summary of the Oracle Public Cloud and the Oracle Social Network – clearly ZDNET is not impressed!

And here’s how @benioff replied on Twitter. #Nextslide.

 

 

 

 

RIP Steve Jobs.  A true legend. A great loss.

Related articles

• Oracle Public Cloud Announcement: Salesforce is a Roach Motel (searchenginejournal.com)
• Oracle’s Larry Ellison finally puts his head in the cloud (venturebeat.com)
• Ellison Reveals Oracle’s Public Cloud; Calls Salesforce The ‘Roach Motel’ Of Cloud Services (techcrunch.com)
• Oracle being dicks: cancels Marc Benioff’s keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld (dccrowley.posterous.com)
• Benioff Bounced From Oracle Stage (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Oracle OpenWorld snub fails to put off Salesforce CEO (go.theregister.com)

Survey: Organizations Champion Cloud Technology to Gain Competitive Edge and Maintain Growth

I was on a call with an industry analyst this week who had this to say about cloud computing:

“The cloud is a big fluffy thing that moves around – same with Cloud Computing.”

He went on do define SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. Thank you very much.

While Marc Benioff is now going a step further by saying that the cloud is passe and the future is the social enterprise (“I’m sorry for those of you who didn’t make it into the cloud – we’ve moved on.” ), based on this research it sounds like for most organizations the cloud is very real in 2011. Only 7% of 1,500 private and public sector organisations surveyed in the UK said that cloud technology did not form any part of their IT strategy. Also:

• Three quarters (76 per cent) believe that moving their IT to the cloud will help to create a technology platform that powers more creative services
• Over two thirds (73 per cent) cited enabling greater business capability as a key consideration when developing cloud strategies

According to Juan Carlos Soto @ Informatica:

“A hybrid model that combines cloud and on-premise technology offers the best of both worlds, allowing organisations to quickly benefit from cloud innovation while ensuring that data fragmentation across cloud and on-premise IT systems does not inhibit success. The first step toward doing that is to have a clear integration plan in place. “

Related articles

• Data is the new platform, and social is the intelligence (bellwort.wordpress.com)
• Is SaaS the key to cloud revenues? (gigaom.com)
• SaaS will dominate your cloud strategy (zdnet.com)

CRM Smackdown: Oracle vs. Salesforce.com

Paul Greenberg published a great review of Oracle OpenWorld today (sessions = good; keynotes = really bad).  He includes some of the main Ellison vs. Benioff sideshow highlights and provides some good details on Oracle’s CRM roadmap. CRM Market Analyst Lauren Carlson takes it step further with a summary of each vendor’s capabilities in her post: Oracle OpenWorld CRM Smackdown.  She also includes an interesting survey, which is still open for input. She poses the questions:

1) Who do you view as the leader in CRM?

• SAP
• Oracle
• Salesforce.com
• Microsoft
• Other:

2) Will Oracle acquire Salesforce.com?

• Yes
• No

3) Who’s more full of it?

• Benioff
• Ellison
• It’s a tie.

You can take the survey here. The results will be interesting.

Best of Both Worlds: Marc Benioff at Oracle OpenWorld

Here’s the presentation delivered by Marc Benioff at OpenWorld this week.

• “We are the cloud people!”
• “Clouds don’t come in a box!”

Cloud in a Box – Thanks SNL

Following the tweet stream from Oracle OpenWorld today as Marc Benioff pushes the “no cloud in a box” message and warns of false clouds, I couldn’t seem to get this song out of my head. Thank’s for the laugh SNL! Now who’s going to create the Iron Man Oracle parody for Dreamforce?

Down with Appliances, Up with the Clouds!

Somehow I missed that salesforce.com introduced a corporate blog: The Cloud Blog. The tagline is, “An Industry View with an Attitude” and it it looks like Peter Coffee and Steve Gillmor won’t be the only bloggers. Don’t get me wrong, Peter is great (and prolific) and Steve is a TechCrunch legend, but I have never seen a blog post from Parker Harris or John Taschek. I’ve seen many articles written by Marc Benioff,  but not an unfiltered blog post. This should definitely be one to follow!

Speaking of Peter Coffee, he pulled no punches in this post: “Appliance” is Abdication.  I wrote about the topic a few months ago and thought “appliance reliance” was good – this is better! Some highlights from the post include:

• “Putting cloudish code in local hardware will not give you a real cloud, any more than sailing a boat in your bathtub will prepare you to compete in the America’s Cup.”

From a cloud integration perspective, this seems like a shot at shot at IBM to me.  I’m just saying.

• “Market forces will require, and economies of scale will enable, the true cloud providers to maintain a pace of improvement that local resources will not be able to sustain.”

Meanwhile, the multitenancy debate rages on over on the Enterprise Irregulars site thanks to an initial post from Josh Greenbaum. I’m with Phil W. Here are my thoughts on the importance of multitenancy.

• “The same companies that promote their appliances today are the ones that tried to marginalize the entire cloud model only two or three years ago. Their goal is to minimize their own pain, not to maximize their customers’ success.”

Strong words from a great writer! Clearly the bar is set high for the other salesforce.com Cloudblog bloggers. I’m looking forward to what they have to say on this and other topics. Stay tuned…

Jim Cramer on Salesforce.com…and an Art History Lesson

I haven’t watched this guy since he was blown up by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, but he provided an over-the-top introduction of salesforce.com for this Marc Benioff and I just had to share it here. Thanks to @CRMFYI for posting it on his great site Salesforce Video Channel.