12Sided, The Blog

Taking a little break from blogging. Post July 4 will have lots of good stuff on xRM, behavioral interviewing, the cloud, and of course, coffee.

Last week @ Cloudforce Seattle, Salesforce.com demonstrated some impressive Twitter integration into their Service application. From a CRM perspective, you want to know what your customers are saying whether in sales or service. For Sales, it helps get you to personal faster. For service, it helps you show the love. In researching similar and related technologies, TwInbox for Outlook looks promising.

Check this Microsoft Showcase video about TwInbox: Office Casual: How to Twitter in Outlook (with TwInbox).

The Email Standards Project has started a proverbial avalanche for Microsoft via Twitter. Check TechCrunch: Microsoft, Outlook Is Broken, Says 6,000 Tweets (And Growing). Fix It.

Also check Microsoft to ignore web standards in Outlook 2010 – enough is enough at Email Standards Project.

To get in include the http://fixoutlook.org/ URL somewhere in your tweet.

Check TechFlash Guest post: Bootstrapping and the infinite runway by Hillel Cooperman. Solid read. Since the “at bats” phase is used, I like to think of Babe Ruth. He led the American League in strikeouts 5 times in 1918, 1923, 1924, 1927 and 1928. In 1927 hit 60 home runs, breaking his own record as the all-time single-season HR leader. The 1927 Yankees are regarded as one of the greatest teams ever. So you can have failure and success, but you have to take a bat in hand and get to the plate.

Batter Up!

This post over @ 37Signals Forget the resume, kill on the cover letter has been generating a lot of buzz. The message is pretty simple: Match your cover letter to the audience to get in the door. Apply at a startup, go startup. Apply at larger corporate entity, go corporate. Makes sense but amazing how many do not follow this advice. Check the Jason Zimdars example. It is very impressive.

Make Your Own Luck.

Salesforce.com has been unleashing a full-court press on the Force.com Sites platform with a Deep Dive webinar today. Sites was pushed heavily at the Cloudforce Seattle event last week and today offered a further look under the covers. The idea is fairly simple. Provide a platform to host websites that can easily integrate with your existing Salesforce.com applications: Workflow, rules, analytics etc.

The Sites development is done through VisualForce, which allows for anytime of user interface to be developed. This includes Flash and rich media down to vanilla HTML. Security is handled similarly to Salesforce.com and other cloud providers through a security profile per site. Sites offers some advance caching that goes beyond many dedicate web hosts. Overall, Sites is an impressive way to deliver web functionality through the Salesforce.com cloud. Google Analytics will be supported through the traditional JavaScript includes. I was expecting simplified configuration functionality as found in WordPress. Expect this in later versions.

Microsoft will have the ability to offer similar functionality through hosted Dynamics CRM and Azure. Windows Azure is slated for production later in the year and Force.com Sites live today. The cloud is going to look very different in 2010.

Finally getting back to Cloudforce Seattle and the tons of info learned last week. The message was clearly that Salesforce.com is not just applications. Cloudforce Seattle was all about the platform moving to the cloud. I have a notion that there will be several “clouds” in the future. Clearly, Salesforce.com aims to be the enterprise cloud.

Taking an educated guess, but if I was employed by Salesforce.com I would see the cloud(s) through the following lens:

• Amazon AWS: Raw horsepower for the cloud. BTW, a partner.
• Google Apps: Powering the desktop cloud. BTW, a partner.
• Windows Azure: Microsoft Redux. Not serious for the enterprise. Find every hole and angle to exploit.
• Facebook: Pure social play. Not a competitor until they are a revenue threat.
• IBM & everyone else: Legacy vertical stacks. Too many holes to exploit. Focus on Salesforce.com advantage for each opportunity.

The Cloud Model will adhere to 3 themes: Multi-tenant, pay-as-you-go and elastic. The cloud is multi-tenant. Period. That is the only way to scale and offer the elasticity that the model requires. Without multi-tenant, it is merely remote hosting of previous application server provider (ASP) models. Pay-as-you-go is an interesting concept. Gone are the days of large outlays of capital and then turn-and-burn for the ROI. The Cloud allows for modest investment upfront. You can try a service easily. The main objection has been and will be “lock-in”. Prospects do not like the notion that you will host and somehow own their data. The industry media has not helped this notion. The elasticity is the value in the cloud for both parties. The relative cost of adding more capacity to the customer is cheap and the price the customer pays for added capacity is as well. Make not mistake though, the old days of huge margin for enterprise software providers is long gone. Smaller Cloud providers will find themselves up against increased barriers to entry.

The business value proposition will be around 3 themes as well: No capital expense, modest operating expense and scales with your business. No capital expense has been, is and will be a huge selling point. Companies finance departments may not understand this concept. Capital budgets are different from operating budgets. How much operating budget is based on usage and a lot of customers will have difficulty with this pay-as-you-go concept. They want to plan usage and that in the past has been done on a capital outlay. Cloud customers will need to get better at capacity planning their cloud usage. Salesforce.com and other cloud providers will need to spend the time to educate that usage is the new pricing.

This does next to zero for the sales cycle though. It is still as long and laborious. I speak from experience.

Immediately post-Cloudforce Seattle, I had identified 5 highlights:

• Visual Force, Model–view–controller (MVC) framework for custom user interfaces
• Mobile Lite, Free (for most) Salesforce.com mobile application
• Force.com Sites and Free Edition
• Integrated Content Library
• Genius, Think iTunes Genius for Salesforce collaboration

Visual Force provides an MVC framework for custom user interfaces as a service. MVC (Model, view, controller) is a standard framework for development. Since most user interface development is done through this type of framework, it is an advantage. Less re-tooling for development staff, less hurdles to clear from IT. The MVC framework carries over to Force.com Sites and will allow for a rich visual experience. Smart move.

Mobile Lite and the Mobile product has a mantra: “Write once, run anywhere” to iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. I have not been able to look into this further, but I know first-hand the difficulties of going cross-platform in the mobile space. “It ain’t easy.” Mobile Lite is a free for most versions of Salesforce.com and provides a lot of bang for Sales. It can take call logs from the phone and update Salesforce. What Sales would not want to have to make sure that his or her activity was logged? The mobile development angle on Force.com is intriguing and I will dive into that deeper.

Force.com Site and Free Edition were the stars of the event. If there was one point they wanted you to leave with it was Force.com Sites. From the impressive Starbucks/Appirio demo to the equally impressive GameCraze demo site by EDL Consulting, Salesforce.com wants to provide the world with the capability of customer facing systems on the same platform. Free Edition is a call to developers to an application vendors to test the waters of the enterprise cloud. The barrier to entry cannot get much lower than free. I would expect to see some interesting startups come from this.

The Integrated Content Library was just plain cool. It allows tagging, ratings, comments and search capabilities of market-facing content. Sales no longer needs to search for the best deck through hundreds of e-mail threads. A user can then assemble a custom deck for the opportunity. The real coolness is in the tracking of the sent content to the prospect. Sales can generate a custom e-mail through Salesforce.com to include a link to the newly created custom content. Tracking based in the e-mail and link will tell Sales, if the email and link have been opened. For Sales, this is pure gold.

Additionally there is a Genius feature that can best be described as iTunes Genius for Salesforce.com. It allows Sales to find experts within the company who have closed similar deals through matching criteria. Deal size, product or owner you name it. To work well, Sales must be disciplined which is difficult to at best. It will be interesting to see what customers Salesforce.com offers as “Super Geniuses”.

There has been a lot of press about this event being in Microsoft and Amazon’s backyard. This tour did not start and will not end in Seattle. Seattle was chosen for effect, no doubt. Salesforce.com means to be the enterprise cloud. Period. If I am right, hire me. If I am wrong, then I will be down to one reader — which will still not be my wife.

Happy Monday.

The Wings of Freedom Tour was in Seattle this past weekend. The B17 Flying Fortress and B24 Liberator buzzed the neighborhood on Saturday and Sunday. Very cool to see these historic aircraft in flight — especially over your house. The rumble is incredible. Would have not liked to have been on the other side with hundreds of these guys overhead.

Check their schedule. This planes will be flying all the way to Chicago over the coming months.

Amazon’s private brands have seeing renewed attention. Rollout of Pinzon in the UK and trademark applications for “Amazon Basics”. Pinzon has a bed, bath, kitchen and dining focus. The private brands have been around awhile. With other retailers making the move for cost-conscious wares, the fact that Amazon has been doing this is suddenly news.

More interesting to me is the addition of Tom Douglas by Pinzon. Tom Douglas is a Seattle celebrity chef and runs Palace Kitchen, my favorite and most recommended restaurant. I have been going there for years. The service is fantastic and the food excellent. My take is that the quality has to be there for him to put his name on it. Good news for the brand.

Check TechFlash for more: Amazon to take private label products international.

Happy weekend.

It is the little things that bring a smile to my face…Selling by speculators and supply from the Brazilian harvest dragged ICE Futures U.S. arabica coffee to seven-week lows.

Have a great weekend.