Thursday, May 31, 2007
Answers to the salesforce.com - Google Rumors
We thought we would settle all the salesforce.com / Google rumors that are floating around. The news is not an acquisition, but rather that Appirio is is now the first partner to be certified as both a salesforce.com consulting and AppExchange partner, and as a partner in the Google Enterprise Professional™ Program. We're surprised at the amount of speculation and activity our new products and discussions with the two companies have caused, but then again, it is quite an accomplishment....
All joking aside, we won't add to the growing number of theories regarding the specifics of the upcoming announcements. Instead we would like to discuss the value Appirio found in integrating Google and salesforce.com in our offerings, and what a broader alignment between the two companies will mean for the industry.
 Appirio's Sales Sleuth - Google Gadget for Salesforce.com |
From the onset, Appirio's mission has been to accelerate the adoption of on-demand in the enterprise. Our initial focus was solely on salesforce.com and its ecosystem because of its technical excellence, business relevance, open approach and strong market momentum. All of those components were critical in breaking new ground with enterprises that, at the time, were still cautious of on-demand. We feel equally passionate about Google in the enterprise because it excels in all those same areas.
Our excitement led to our developing the Google Gadgets for salesforce.com. As a result, we became the first certified partner of both salesforce.com and Google to deliver integrated products and consulting services to enterprise customers. While technical mash-ups between Google and salesforce.com have been around for some time, we felt the strong fit between the products and approaches of the companies also made their integration very relevant to end customers projects requiring new products and services.
As for a broader message, we do have predictions regarding the impact of the upcoming Google - salesforce.com announcement. Regardless of what the first announcement actually is, we can count on a few things:- On-premise vendors will not be able to easily mimic it - For both business and technical reasons, you can be sure SAP, Oracle, etc. will not be able to create a "me too" announcement. This reflects the fundamental gap between on-premise software and the Internet. While SaaS solutions live and breathe because of the Internet, on-premise solutions treat it as just another external 'thing'. Choose your favorite amongst the rumors and consider how an on-premise vendor would try to replicate the capability. The realization that there are fundamental limitations to on-premise software (in addition to the score of business, cost and technical disadvantages) will drive home the point that on-demand cannot be thought of as just another delivery model. As more and more enterprises understand this, we will see an even greater acceleration of on-demand adoption.
- The announcement will have business relevance - You can be certain that the announcement will not hail the fact that salesforce.com and Google have agreed to a specification for the 73rd WS* (web services) standard. In enterprise on-premise software, low-level technical announcements are often cause for dramatic celebration or worry. For example, if IBM and SAP agree to a standard for asynchronous web services security, for days people will wonder about the potential impact on Oracle. The on-demand world allows the market focus on the business and technical implications, not how Google and Salesforce.com are internally constructed. For Google and Salesforce.com, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are natural extensions of their Internet centric approach.
- The ecosystem will foster even more innovation - The salesforce.com and Google development communities will add dramatic value to the initiatives announced, regardless of topic. This will further validate another intrinsic difference between on-premise software and SaaS - the rate of partner innovation. Because of the SaaS model, the ecosystem can begin to innovate immediately, not waiting on customers to upgrade or magic combinations of versions and new patches.
Overall, we believe the collaboration will be the first of many and help the broader market understand the revolution that is occurring in the software industry. Marc Benioff's keynote at Software 2007 highlighted the potential magnitude of this change. Companies like Google, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo and salesforce.com are paving a new path of computing for both consumers and the enterprise of tomorrow.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Message to NetSuite - SaaS Vision is About More Than Just "the Suite"
This past Wednesday (May 16) NetSuite CEO Zach Nelson responded to a Phil Wainewright blog on Appirio’s completely on-demand business infrastructure. His comments highlighted a myopic, Netsuite-centric view of the universe:
“How much would it cost to do what you described, and how much does it cost to maintain it, what sort of resource do you need on staff to address re-programming when you want to exchange different data than was originally envisioned, or when one of the 10 vendors decides to change their API?”
Despite his clear self-interest and agenda to promote NetSuite, the questions above have merit. In fact, we ask these questions, and many others, when helping clients incorporate broader SaaS adoption into their organizations. Our Services 2.0 piece describes our view of how systems integrators will work differently with clients in the Internet-enabled SaaS era.
The integration among SaaS solutions described in Phil’s initial blog could be built by an integrator for a specific customer, or provided as an “integration as a service” offering to the market, by Appirio or another third party. We take a similar neutral approach in evaluating “best of breed” vs. “suite” arguments. Factors favoring one over the other include capabilities and scope of the solutions involved, business needs of the client, complexity of integration (which drives total cost of ownership, or TCO), and the characteristics of the consuming organization such as size, industry, and structure.
Yet the questions Nelson raises, when combined with the NetSuite agenda, reveal a poor understanding of enterprise level needs - and highlight precisely how SaaS vendors should not look at integration. There are two primary flaws in Nelson’s thinking.
1.The Enterprise Flaw
As Phil’s initial blog described, we at Appirio “eat our own dogfood” to make sure we can relate to the issues faced by our target customers - medium and large enterprises. For these organizations, integration is a must. No single solution covers the scope of their needs. Any non-trivial enterprise has dozens of existing systems that aren’t going away anytime soon. Even NetSuite is missing many functional capabilities like extended HR (e.g. recruiting, and performance management), materials management, supply chain, and a host of others. Last we checked, they offered APIs to their system to address these types of shortcomings.
Undoubtedly, an integrated suite offers great benefit; however, a more specific solution that can be easily plugged into an environment – offering strong integration - also has broad appeal. For enterprises, “No Software” is not an end state, but a process and a path. The ability to smooth the path, one application or module at a time, is compelling for organizations reluctant to undertake big-bang simultaneous change to all systems.
Bottom line, whether you are discussing a suite or individual applications, strong integration capabilities are a must for SaaS solutions in the enterprise.
2. APIs and Integration in the Internet and SaaS Era
API change is a common problem that makes upgrades expensive in the on-premise software world. Integrated solutions must all adjust when APIs upgrade and lose backward compatibility. That’s the logic that drives Nelson’s comment, “what if a vendor decides to change their API.” Yet, the SaaS world should be different. For example, salesforce.com has retained backward compatibility through each of their 9 API versions. One hopes NetSuite and other serious SaaS vendors do the same.
By offering a single instance multi-tenant solution, vendors benefit from managing the API stack in a single environment. Customers benefit too, because future API versions are always supersets of earlier incarnations. Therefore incremental effort to adjust to new APIs between well-architected SaaS solutions focus on adding new capabilities, not keeping the existing ones from breaking. Can you imagine how many mashups would break if Google simply decided to change the Google Maps API without backward compatibility? Good Internet and SaaS solutions are engineered differently. Instead, Google adds to their API without breaking everyone already relying on it today. In the SaaS world, API clients often specify the API version they are written against, to ensure backward compatibility for each call. This is one example of how SaaS implicitly increases vendor accountability – since customers have no choice but to upgrade, vendors have no choice but to aggressively maintain backward compatibility.
Nelson makes a good point regarding addition of incremental functionality. If, Google offers new capabilities tomorrow - say, the ability to get real-time data on current pollution levels for a location, existing integrated solutions would have to change to take advantage of it. The costs and benefits of adding that capability would be independently evaluated. In Nelson’s world, NetSuite would own the maps capability, and simultaneously update both the maps and everything that relied on the maps, eliminating the need to maintain the integration.
We choose this example deliberately, to be provocative. We certainly hope that NetSuite doesn’t try to take over Google Maps. Is integrating Financials to HR an example of the same principle? The answer is, it depends. Every company will have to consider many factors in order to evaluate suite vs. integrated solutions in the on-demand era.
Suites can certainly provide great value as solutions in the SaaS era, but their scope of applicability (customer complexity) and path to value cannot simply mimic that of legacy on-premise predecessors. On-premise suites offered poor external integration to force customers into either/or choices. The Internet and SaaS suites or solutions cannot and should not seek to mimic that approach.
Fleshing out the suite vs. best-of-breed debate is a topic for a future blog. The bottom line here is that integration in the SaaS era cannot be evaluated or thought of using the on-premise paradigms of the past.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Just six weeks after his posting, and following just a single discussion with salesforce.com, Appirio has brought his idea to life, formally launching four new Google Gadgets for salesforce.com.
Designed to provide essential and customizable info directly to your Google homepage – like a “stock ticker” of your company's data – the Gadgets are the perfect tool for the executive or other light user. It gives you constant streaming information (they update themselves automatically), and you can just click to drill down right into salesforce.com.
These lightweight applications are surprisingly powerful in promoting adoption of Salesforce.com as the corporate system of record for customer data. They represent a proof point illustrating a dramatic shift in the way software is developed and deployed - via community collaboration. The intersection of “open market” product management through the IdeaExchange, a scalable SaaS platform, and a vibrant partner and customer ecosystem enables rapid product development like never before. Ideas, features, functions and even full-blown applications will come to market in weeks or months in an on-demand world, vs. years, decades…or never – in the waning world of on-premise software.
Visit Appirio’s downloads page to get the Gadgets on your Google homepage (they install with 1 click, too!).