Listen and Ye Shall Hear: The Importance of Salesforce’s Acquisition of Radian6

Eryc Branham

It’s no secret that enterprise companies have viewed the Social Revolution with a somewhat cautious eye, with its promise to unleash the power of employees to tackle a company’s most pressing needs but perhaps at the expense of over-sharing in the workplace.

However, innovative companies have been experimenting for several years, looking not just at internal employee collaboration (from SharePoint to Yammer to Chatter) or external customer communities (from Lithium to Jive) but how a company can harness the multitudes of users on the web who interact with a company’s brand on a daily basis, for better or worse.

The real challenge has been collecting, analyzing, and making that social data actionable for a company, all at internet-speed and in a way that isn’t all consuming. That has been the focus of Radian6, makers of a Social Media Monitoring tool that salesforce.com announced this week that they are acquiring.

Workday’s Integration Cloud: Why integration isn’t a dirty word anymore

by Jennifer Taylor

Today, Workday announced their “Integration Cloud Platform” for building and running custom integrations that connect to Workday’s on-demand HR and financial applications. We’ve been working with this platform in our labs for a couple of months now, and are impressed. It demonstrates a couple of important trends for the entire industry:

Integration is different in the cloud
As customers adopt more and more cloud applications, integrating them with their remaining on-premise applications is becoming a critical challenge. When we asked cloud adopters their priorities last year, 77% replied that integrating their cloud and on-premise apps was “important” or “very important”, ranking just behind security and manageability.

But integrating with cloud applications doesn’t have to be as painful as integrating with traditional other on-premise applications. In addition to the innovation in “Cloud-to-Cloud” integration we’ve been driving with our CloudWorks technology, we’ve seen tremendous innovation in what we call “Cloud-to-Ground” integration: first integration delivered as an appliance (e.g., CastIron), then delivered as a service (e.g., Boomi), and now integration embedded with your SaaS solution (e.g., Workday’s Integration Cloud).

Customers will find each of these integration approaches appropriate for different integration challenges, but all represent a big step forward. 61% of cloud adopters say that their cloud applications are easier to integrate, and “cloud solutions are difficult to integrate” was rated the #2 misperception about cloud computing.

Leading cloud apps are becoming “platformy”
Workday’s approach to cloud integration is innovative-- they’re bundling an integration platform with their solution, giving developers a tightly integrated environment where they can build, deploy, run, and manage custom integrations.

This is a very different type of “platform” than the application development platforms offered by Salesforce.com or Google, but all represent the same trend towards openness and extensibility. Conventional wisdom is that you can only use SaaS for “vanilla” business processes. As leading cloud applications open up and become more and more “platformy,” this logic is flipped on its head-- cloud applications are now far easier to extend to meet specific business requirements than their on-premise cousins.

Ecosystem of innovation
And that leads to the final implication of Workday’s Integration Cloud-- the innovative power of a cloud ecosystem. Workday is opening its integration platform to partners to develop and sell packaged and custom integrations. Cloud vendors don’t have to go at it alone-- successful cloud providers have all been able to tap an ecosystem of partners to make their customers successful.

That of course, is what gets us most excited about Workday’s Integration Cloud-- the opportunity to build the integrations required to make our enterprise customers successful as they move their core HR and financial applications to the cloud. Let the innovation begin!

Appirio Invests Again in Core Salesforce.com Business with Infowelders Acquisition

By Chris Barbin

If you’ve been following this blog or Appirio over the last few years, you know we talk a lot about how we’re investing in new areas that keep us on top as a trusted cloud advisor to our enterprise customers. Areas such as CloudWorks, our cloud service broker technology, our expansion into Workday services, our ongoing work with Google’s technology, or our new crowdsourcing cloud development community CloudSpokes regularly make it into this blog.

One thing we don’t do as much “launching” around is the work we’re doing with salesforce.com and their platform. Perhaps this is because it’s so core to our DNA and what we do day in and day out on the ground with hundreds of customers (which we do talk about with a bit of frequency!)

So it’s interesting to note that in the last month, we’ve had two announcements (OK, one blog, one actual press release) around how we’re investing in our core salesforce.com services business. The first was the acquisition of the TRE3 Group which brought us great process and strategy expertise around CRM, sales operations and how to create a social business using technologies like Chatter. Today we’re announcing the acquisition of Infowelders, a well respected salesforce.com consulting shop based in the Midwest.

While Infowelders may not be a household name, you’d be surprised at how often their name came up when talking to customers, prospects and even Salesforce itself. They’ve been around for almost seven years, helped more than 250 customers take their first steps to the cloud, and in the process, have built a well-respected, talented team that folks in the upper reaches of Salesforce and our other partners call “smart,” “reliable,” and “good people.”

To get a flavor of the team from Infowelders and understand why I’m so excited they’ve joined forces with Appirio, here are a few questions that I asked Adam Wiebe, their president and CEO.

Q: Infowelders may be based in the Midwest, but you’ve got strong ties to Silicon Valley and the enterprise software world. Can you give us some insight into your background and how Infowelders got started?
In 1993 I was working at Oracle when the first web app server hit the market allowing the browser to replace fat clients. Talk about a genie being let out of the bottle! Shortly thereafter, I was working with one of the first patented 100% Java applications and had the good fortune of meeting James Gosling (father of the Java programming language). Since that day I’ve been excited about the cloud and how to use the browser and Internet to its fullest potential, and have dedicated my career to providing commercial grade applications delivered via the cloud.

Infowelders first came to be when I was an account executive at Salesforce in the early days. In 2004, there was an obvious need for quality implementation partners, and I convinced my wife Hendy (who has some serious project management chops) to start a company in this area. Once she had jumped into the deep end of the pool, she (and I) saw what a big opportunity this was. I joined her as the second employee.

Q: Infowelders opened up shop when salesforce.com wasn’t such a household name like it is today. What convinced you this was the right partner to attach yourself to and that cloud/SaaS/on-demand was going to be such a game changer for companies?
From Day 1, Marc Benioff and Parker Harris at Salesforce set out to create the next great computing platform (even if that’s not what they called it at the time). CRM just happened to be the first killer app they chose to build on what we now know as Force.com. Seeing first hand how successful Marc was managing Oracle’s Rapid Application Development tools (Designer/Developer 2000) gave me unbridled confidence into where Salesforce was going. That and my own frustration watching just how much money and time was being poured into traditional IT efforts that resulted in very little business value convinced me cloud was the future.

Q: You’ve done some really interesting work with Force.com and Salesforce’s mobile platform in the last few years. Can you tell us about some of these projects and why you think mobile is going to be such a powerful tool for enterprises moving to the cloud?
We’ve been involved in a lot of great projects using the platform, but I think our most impressive custom development example was a Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) solution that dramatically improved the efficiency, timeliness and quality of a customer’s quoting process. It had over 1.2M lines of Apex code, and cost-effectively automated a critical business process. Regarding mobile, one of the most exciting was the International Mobile Site Surveying app we did at Brown-Forman, which has been deployed already to a half dozen countries on multiple device platforms with plans to roll it out company-wide. I also literally can’t keep our developers away from leveraging Adobe’s flex framework to develop Rich Internet Applications (RIA). It’s the ideal combination of database.com with a super-lush interface.

Q: Not that this acquisition is akin to winning the Super Bowl, but what’s the first thing you’re going to do as part of Appirio? What are you most excited about?
That’s easy! Without question what I am personally most excited about is introducing Appirio’s CloudWorks broker technology to our customers. Using Google Apps as a console for interacting with all enterprise data is the best technology strategy I have seen in my 20 years in software.

"Everybody On" the Bandwagon: HP Finally Embraces Cloud Computing

Ryan Nichols

The big news out of yesterday's HP Summit was Léo Apotheker's embrace of cloud computing and connectivity.... using the tagline "Everybody On."

Leo's embrace of cloud computing is in stark contrast to the skepticism that Mark Hurd expressed at Gartner Symposium a couple of years ago, and brings HP in line with what the rest of the IT industry has known for 2-3 years-- that enterprises of all sizes are moving more and more of their IT to public cloud platforms.

But better late than never-- having the world hear Leo call cloud computing "the future of information technology" is a big step forward for the entire industry, and there was a lot to like in the presentations coming out of HP Summit.

We like to see HP coming out so strongly in favor of:

• Public Clouds (vs. Private): It would have been easy for HP to continue selling CIOs on the fiction that they can have the power of the cloud in their own data center. Instead, Leo was unambiguous-- HP sees its future in the public cloud.
• Cloud Platforms (vs. Infrastructure): It would have been easy for HP to focus on its existing strengths in infrastructure. Instead, Leo made clear that he sees value higher in the stack.
• Hybrid Architectures (vs. Hybrid Clouds): Every enterprise needs to manage a hybrid architecture as they move more and more of their infrastructure to the public cloud. This is a reality that's important to manage. This is different from the concept of a "hybrid cloud" that magically shifts payloads back and forth across the firewall, a concept that's neither possible nor very desirable. Leo focused on the former, not the later.
• Cloud & Mobility: This is a natural for HP to emphasize, with its strength in devices. While it’s wishful thinking to position printers as the "offramp of the cloud," Leo nailed the fact that Cloud and Mobility are 2 of the 3 most important issues facing CIOs (Social Business is the missing 3rd).

All that being said, our enterprise customers have a "we'll believe it when we see it" attitude towards the announcement of this upcoming "HP Cloud." HP is very late to the game, and we've already seen how difficult it is for the incumbents to move quickly in the space, especially when they have as much to lose in the traditional data center as HP does.

In particular, we're skeptical of HP's intention to:

• Lead with a marketplace. This is an implicit acknowledgment that HP's biggest asset in this race is its customer base, not its technology. But it’s not clear that the enterprise needs yet-another cloud marketplace.
• Bridge Consumer and Enterprise. While the consumerization of IT is an important trend, HP's vision for this trend reflects its Frankenstein portfolio of consumer and enterprise devices.
• Execute on Analytics. Analytics remains one of the great unsolved problems of enterprise IT, but HP's demonstration a rack of servers optimizing rental car rates on the fly felt at least 10 years old.

So did the HP Summit get us to buy HP's "Everybody On" vision? Partially-- certainly more than we expected. But one thing is clear-- when it comes to Cloud Computing, it’s now clear that EVERYBODY is on the bandwagon.