Monday, February 25, 2008
Adobe and Salesforce - A Fine Blend of Art and Science
Chris Barbin
Application development is a unique combination of art and science. Today’s announcement from Salesforce.com and Adobe introducing the free Adobe Developer Toolkit for Force.com is a good example - combining Adobe’s deep understanding of design with Salesforce's powerful platform-as-as-service model so developers can build innovative and visually appealing on-demand applications.
The Adobe Developer Toolkit is a new set of tools and services that streamline the process of creating customized rich user interfaces for delivery via the web. It allows developers to create on-demand applications that work without an Internet connection. The toolkit connects Adobe’s Flex and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), two of the leading rich internet application (RIA) environments, with Salesforce's Force.com platform. This gives Flex developers access to the Force.com web services APIs, so they can make data in a Force.com database available offline.
CIOs and development organizations need to deliver users a wider set of on-demand applications that require very rich client interfaces and/or offline functionality. These have traditionally been two of the biggest challenges for developers of on-demand applications.
Appirio has been an early adopter of various front end on-demand development paradigms, including Adobe Flex and Visual Force. We use these technologies in a number of ways, for example:
- To create user interfaces for call centers - where a high volume of calls means that saving a few clicks can add up to thousands of hours a year
- To develop interfaces for the iPhone - where the user expects a very specific interaction style that works the same as other applications
- To design custom applications for a very specific purpose - like the cinema management application we have written about previously
- Even to create applications for our own internal use (yes, we eat our own dog food here) such as our Professional Services Automation (PSA) application
The Appirio Professional Services Automation (PSA) application enables professional services organizations to track, manage and reconcile a large collection of projects. Appirio originally developed the PSA application to visualize and manage our various projects, resources, timelines, skills and assignments, and at the time there was not a native Force.com application available on AppExchange that offered these capabilities. While you could use Force.com to manage the respective data, workflows and reports, Flex was what enabled us to create a single visual interface that could both increase individual user productivity and provide clear visibility into the status of projects.
This Flex-based scheduling tool brings our PSA, which is built entirely on the Force.com platform, close to functional par with pure-play on-demand PSA vendors at a fraction of the price. This neat little component (shown below) lets managers drag-and-drop projects, lay out an entire consulting team's assignments on a single color-coded grid, and double-click to drill down for more details. This makes consulting managers more productive - and smarter. If the result is just an increase of a few percentage points in utilization, the financial payback will be dramatic.
Here are a few screenshots of the Appirio PSA application and our Salesforce interface on the iPhone. For those interested in participating in the current beta program for our PSA application, please contact us at beta@appirio.com.
Screenshot #1: This is a high-level view of our PSA application, which lays out the entire consulting team's assignments on a single color-coded grid.
Screenshot #2: This view of the PSA application shows how individuals and managers can double-click to drill down for more detail.
Screenshot #3: Example of a Visual Force application on the iPhone showing the apartment floor plan for a real estate agent.
Labels: Adobe Flex, appirio, Force.com, iPhone, on-demand, Professional Services Automation, SaaS, salesforce.com
Monday, February 18, 2008
There has been no lack of stories about Force.com , the new platform-as-a-service offering that Salesforce.com announced in 2007 and has been building on ever since. One analyst last week even went so far as to call Force.com a direct challenge to Microsoft and “the bigger prize” in the blog-inspired rumor that Oracle may acquire Salesforce.com.
While the rumor has not been confirmed by any of the parties involved, we do agree that Salesforce.com has a gem on their hands with Force.com.
Disrupting a Market, Helping Customers and Making a Few Billion - Not Too Shabby
For one, Force.com opens up a large market for Salesforce.com. Various analysts scope the market for core business applications like ERP, CRM and supply chain management at around $30 billion. While the market for specific niche and custom developed applications is estimated at more than twice this size. Force.com allows salesforce.com customers to leverage a platform that brings all the benefits of on-demand to address this larger market opportunity.
While this is certainly an appealing opportunity for Salesforce.com and partners like Appirio, CIOs should pay close attention to Force.com for another reason - because it has the potential to shape the way IT develops and integrates custom applications in the same way that on-demand computing changed the way companies purchase and deploy their packaged business software.
The Force.com platform provides all the necessary technologies and services that an IT organization needs to develop and run custom built applications - all delivered as a service over the Internet. The stack ranges from a secure computing infrastructure and back-end database to a powerful workflow engine, logic and presentation layer and APIs to integrate with existing systems. Like other on-demand applications, there is no need to buy, manage or maintain any hardware or software.
Bringing the Benefits of On-Demand to Custom Development
The most obvious benefit of on-demand development is the ability to forgo building out a locally-managed and maintained IT infrastructure. This means lower costs and less overhead, but it also enables organizations to more rapidly create and roll out applications.
With traditional application development, you need to build distinct staging, testing or production environments, all of which require their own hardware and software. Procuring, configuring and porting data to this infrastructure could take weeks or months. Force.com lets you get started innovating within minutes - you simply set up a new sandbox or developer org with a few clicks, and Force.com handles the provisioning details. Because the application is in the cloud and isn’t directly tied to the infrastructure, you don’t have to worry about breaking applications as new versions of the platform are introduced. This allows you to get more life from applications you create or buy from third-parties.
Force.com also provides a sophisticated application framework that allows even non-professional programmers to configure common rules and workflows. At the same time, those who need more customization can turn to the Apex on-demand programming language and the VisualForce user interface language. We tapped into both these for the Dolby cinema management proof-of-concept we presented at Tour de Force last month as well as the Employee Roster Application we built before Visual Force was publicly announced. Stay tuned for even more Visual Force and Force.com custom applications that we are in the process of rolling out in the coming weeks and months.
Why Buy When You Can Take From Others?
The Force.com platform uses the same back-end infrastructure that powers Salesforce.com’s own on-demand CRM applications. Customers get instant access to a highly scalable and secure computing infrastructure that is powerful enough to support the two billion transactions a month that already flows through Salesforce.com’s applications.
Amazon.com is another company that is allowing developers to tap into their own infrastructure and the investments they've made over the last decade. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides storage, raw computing power and other infrastructure services on-demand. While it doesn’t address application development like Force.com, the company is doing some interesting things in SaaS that offer great promise to IT organizations. More on this coming soon…
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Where in the World is Appirio?
While I would like to claim that the reason this blog hasn’t been updated since September is because the entire company has been out of the office solving world hunger, that isn’t exactly true.
However, we have been busy. Over the last few months we’ve been working with our customers on many exciting initiatives to accelerate on-demand in the enterprise by capitalizing on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms that have now emerged from the likes of Salesforce.com, Google and Amazon.com. While these projects may be less awe-inspiring than actually addressing the issue of world hunger, they reflect that on-demand has become an option for both enterprise applications and general application "infrastructure."
Dolby Taps SaaS to Arm Customer Service Reps and Enter a New Market
The proof of concept highlights the power of development-as-a-service, as well as the potential of SaaS platforms like Force.com. Appirio and Dolby brought together the flexibility and lower overhead of on-demand software with the value of leveraging existing IT investments to show how to lower costs and adapt systems more quickly and easily.
The entire proof of concept took less than a week to design, develop, create and test. Using legacy on-premise platforms, it would have easily taken that long to get the hardware / software / network / security setup so we could begin – not to mention the effort to configure the database, create the logic and workflows, integrate it with external internet service and actually design and build out the user experience.
This is just one example of the interesting and innovative things we’ve been working on during these months of silence. In future pieces we’ll describe how to take advantage of on-demand applications and align them with emerging SaaS platforms to create an overall SaaS strategy for the enterprise.
Image from the Dolby prototype created with Visual Force
Labels: appirio, salesforce, salesforce.com