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Mulholland, CTO,
suspect that Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce.com event in San
Francisco, drew the eyes of IT practitioners, and very compelling it
was too. However, I also expect that at least some of those who
followed the proceedings, or are trying to understand exactly where
this powerfully emerging new player fits into their environment, were
a little lost with some of the keynotes, let alone the product
announcements. So before going into this topic a little further I
would like to redirect your eyes back across the Atlantic to Berlin,
and the 51
annual
Global Consumer Electronics Show
is the big one, and it was here that all the household names queued
up to announce their new tablets, or extensions to their existing
tablets (too many to list, but all on Android!), or you could see
specialized software for the iPad, or Android, from one of the 76
exhibitors in the
I will use one new tablet announcement to make the point and it's
the new
Cius
running Android. This is aimed totally at the enterprise market and
combines a lift-off tablet with a desktop docking station that makes
it a standard PC and even includes a phone handset. Cisco is aiming
for those places like the shop floor in retail (though it could be
the shop floor in engineering equally well), where the ability to
walk around with the tablet part some of the time is very useful.
real point of the Cisco Ciusis to deliver a new generation of apps
that are strongly visual — picture a stock line and a shop
assistant demonstrating its key features to a potential customer, or
a similar demonstration to an engineering firm, or health
organization, or... well there is potentially quite a list. This is a
whole new category of capabilities and in the enterprise market at
least it looks to be strongly Android-based, though iPad is
definitely the consumer favorite and already in the executive suite.
The tagline for all these new enterprise tablets is some variant of
'enterprise deployment by design' as opposed to iPad deployment
by stealth. Is there a market? Perhaps we should ask HP, who, on
lowering the price of their Touch Tablet to clear them out, found
themselves with so many orders that they have been forced into
another production run. The buyers, including corporations, love the
HP quality but don't want webOS, and are 'breaking' them to
install Android!
it's Android in this new enterprise market that brings us back to
Salesforce.com, because all these new tablets and apps are going to
need a very different development and deployment environment, and
it's mostly all about 'people', 'sales' and 'marketing'
too. With this in mind watch the YouTube video of
Benioff
explaining how all of this comes together
and whilst watching it spot the name check for Capgemini for
delivering the Burberry example!
makes sense if you are aiming to deliver on tablets, or even
smartphones, to get the basics right as it's going to be
fundamentally an Internet/Web-based architecture running natively.
And that brings in the major rebuild of the Salesforce.com
Platform/Software-as-a-Service, P/SaaS to support HTML 5.0 under the
name of touch.salesforce.com with the claim 'any app will be
accessible on Touch' (existing apps on the current Force platform
will be migratable). The same thinking brings a new sense of purpose
to new features on Database.com announced last year, as it has to
take a higher profile enterprise role to support this new generation
of 'post PC' based apps for the enterprise.
into the mix Chatter, the Salesforce.com social toolset, and its
extensions to add social profiles by collating known published facts
on a specific customer from their disclosures on social sites such as
Facebook, or to build a true sales contact base, and a new definition
of CRM appears, though whether this is Social CRM or just the total
rethinking of the front office of an enterprise is the real question.
Especially if you consider the new front office productivity apps
from the Salesforce.com Manymoon acquisition, claimed to be the
number one set of product apps on Google App Marketplace, now being
made available under 'mobility' as well as on the PC.
believe that Salesforce.com has seen the opportunity to become the
front office engine of choice for the enterprise. A point that
inevitably begs the question as to how this links to the existing ERP
and other enterprise applications of the back office, and may explain
two further points from Dreamforce; the first was the positioning of
Microsoft as the main enemy, which given its competitive positioning
and product range it is; and the second the queue of big names in the
industry on stage to align to the Salesforce.com bandwagon and
vision, from Google CEO Eric Schmidt (supporting Android!), to
Charles Phillips, now the CEO of Infor, providing a new set of
applications called InForce that allow ERP data to be combined with
apps on Salesforce.com.
titled this a vision for the front office as the more recognizable
term, but actually there is a new term around and it's the 'Post
PC' environment meaning more than just simple mobility, but a
revolution in what we can do with non-PC technology and how we can do
it. There is, of course, a lot of hype and misunderstanding of this
term, so I will point to
good sensible blog on this topic
by Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps back in May this year.
However, I do think we just saw Google Android and Salesforce.com
setting out their vision for this and targeting Microsoft as their
competitor for this rapidly growing new market. For a complete
picture it's also worth seeing
point of view of the other new player in this space
which is VMware and their use of the term 'Post-PC era' at the
recent VMworld event.