Accelerating your Business with the Cloud: A Dreamforce Conversation with Tim Campos from Facebook and Jane Vaillancourt from NetApp

Ryan Nichols

Appirio’s CEO Chris Barbin hosted an interesting conversation today with Tim Campos, CIO of Facebook, and Jane Vaillancourt, VP of Global Sales Operations at NetApp for a standing-room-only crowd at Dreamforce. The topic was “Accelerating your Business with the Cloud.”


Facebook and NetApp represent two very different staring points when it comes to cloud computing. NetApp was founded in 1992, and runs their core business applications on-premise. Their cloud initiatives have been business-led, often-times by “business people solving their own problems, not coming to the technical teams,” according to Jane. IT’s interest in the cloud came later: “We have a highly customized Siebel environment,” she explains. “We tried to upgrade-- it wasn’t successful, so we started to look at SaaS.”

Facebook, on the other hand, was founded in 2004, and according to CIO Tim Campos, “grew up in a world where cloud computing is ubiquitous. We’re not restricted by legacy-- all of our systems are 3 years old or less. And, we have an environment that encourages innovation-- we want to do things differently.” As a result, Facebook has “developed an enterprise architecture that’s predominately cloud based, with a number of SaaS and PaaS elements.”

Both companies started their journey to the Salesforce cloud with an SFA implementation. NetApp realized that the traditional waterfall approach was not going to result in a successful outcome for their project. Instead, “we moved everyone into a single building. The badges were invisible-- you couldn’t tell who was business, who was IT, who was from Appirio.” says Jane. “We had some growing pains learning how to work agile, but its continuing to provide huge value to us. We had a tremendous outcome.”

After automating their sales processes, Facebook also started working with Salesforce as a platform, ultimately building over 12 applications on Force.com ranging from apps for HR to apps to help maintain data centers. “We started with where our business is differentiated,” says Tim. “We want to fully enable those business processes. For example, we don’t want to recruit the same way that everyone else recruits-- if we want to hire the best, we’re going to have to do things differently.” Supporting the unique way that Facebook hires required building a custom recruiting application on Force.com.

The impact of moving to cloud platforms? “The main benefit is strategic,” says Tim. “Facebook is very, very good at running Facebook. Our data centers aren’t optimized for running Oracle or other business applications. We benchmark the costs of running in the cloud, but it isn’t a huge factor one way or the other. ”

Any advice for other companies looking to move more of their business to the cloud?

“Embrace this change holistically,” recommends Tim. “ Don't just look at one specific area and adopt the cloud there. The benefits are fully realized when you're doing it across the board. And the challenges are easier to manage when you spread your investments across multiple applications.”

“Keep it simple, iterate quickly,” recommends Jane. “To start, keep it is as simple as possible. Ask ‘If we do this, will it substantially impact deals? Or is it just a nice to have?’ Our needs change as quickly as a sales team turns over. So keep it simple, focus on taking feedback and fixing things quickly. When everyone raises their hand and says ‘I'm part of the business’ then I know that we're going in the right direction.”

Where will this journey to the cloud end? For Facebook, it could result in an IT infrastructure that’s entirely cloud-based. Facebook will run 100% in the cloud “when ERP can be delivered for a large scale international company from the cloud,” says Tim, “ and I don't think we're very far away from that day. For smaller companies, that day is here already. Startups just need laptops and data connections, and that’s it. Everything else is in the cloud, and these are fantastically productive companies.”

Dreamforce Keynote: Breaking Boundaries with the Social Enterprise

Ryan Nichols

A technology conference keynote whose highlights included a traditional Hawaiian blessing, an intro video set to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” words of wisdom from MC Hammer and Neil Young, and a chattering car and coke machine can only be summarized in single phrase: “breaking boundaries.”

The topic of this morning's Dreamforce keynote, of course, was the Social Enterprise.  We’ve been talking a lot about the social enterprise a lot these last couple of days.  On ComputerWorld, our CTO Glenn Weinstein looked at the relationship between the 3 major trends in enterprise technology: social, mobile, and cloud.  On The Huffington Post, our Chief Strategy Officer Narinder Singh took a fun look at the personality types of the social enterprise.  Most importantly, we’ve been trying to bring the social enterprise down to earth for our customers by describing the real-life success stories we’ve seen over the last 3 years.

But after today’s Dreamforce keynote, its clear that the concept of the social enterprise has broken out of the boundaries that have defined the conversation to date.  Here's what I mean:

Breaking out of the thread:  The center of Chatter is currently the thread, just like Facebook used to be. But the launch of instant messaging and online meetings make Chatter appropriate for a broader set of communication and collaboration requirements, those that need to happen in realtime.  

Breaking out of organizational boundaries:  Using Chatter to improve collaboration between employees already has a dramatic impact on productivity.  Now we can use Chatter to improve collaboration with customers and partners-- the type of collaboration with an even more immediate business impact.

Breaking out of the browser:  Salesforce has always talked a big game when it comes to mobile, but its mobile offerings have been focus on point apps for CRM and Chatter.  Now, with touch.salesforce.com, we'll be able to access the full power of the salesforce platform anytime, on any device.

Breaking the bonds of skepticism: Perhaps most importantly, today's keynote demonstrated how the social enterprise is breaking away from the enterprise skeptics.  Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts addressed this in her fantastic closing remarks: "For any CEO who is skeptical-- you have to, HAVE to, create a social enterprise. If you don’t connect with your customers socially, I don’t know what your business model is in 5 years.”

Benioff opened today's keynote by claiming that while Salesforce may have been "born cloud" back in 1999, that today its being "reborn social."  Today's announcements will help Salesforce's enterprise customers go through a similar rebirth.

Data.com: Apps without Data are Dead

Ryan Nichols
Very exciting to see Salesforce announce Data.com today, in partnership with D&B, the leader in business data. Over the last year, D&B and Appirio have partnered to bring D&B’s rich set of company information into SaaS apps people use to work... including Salesforce and Google Apps. We’re excited to see this capability brought into Salesforce’s new offering.

The launch of Data.com adds the important layer of “data as a service” to the traditional (and over-played) division of cloud computing into software as a service, platform as a service, and infrastructure as a service. And its a critical layer to consider: without Data... “nothing else matters,” to quote an upcoming Dreamforce presenter.

Apps without data are dead. And for most business applications, living behind a firewall, data is hard to get in and even harder to keep up to date. Apps in the cloud are different-- they’re open, so its easy to get data in. And they’re social, so the data is easier for anyone to keep up to date. That’s why our enterprise customers have been so interested our work bringing together D&B, Salesforce, and Google Apps.

Having a CRM that’s tightly integrated with company information from D&B and contact information from Jigsaw will be a powerful combination indeed. It makes clear how ridiculous the argument “but I don’t want my sensitive customer information in the cloud” has become. The reality is that much of the most valuable information about your customers is in the cloud already-- it doesn’t belong to you. And much of the proprietary customer information you’re trying to protect is obsolete.

The rise of SaaS has already shown us the power of sharing application infrastructure across thousands of different companies. Applying the concept of shared infrastructure to data and offering “data as a service” offers many of the same benefits:

• Instant Elasticity: Your data can grow with your business. Entering a new region or market segment? No need to start with an empty lead database. 
• Continual improvement: Your data just keeps on getting better over time, without you having to invest in expensive, ongoing cleansing. 
• Focus on core vs. commodity: And most importantly-- you can focus on generating unique insights about your customers instead of maintaining commodity information about them. 

The launch of data as a service is one of those “only in the cloud” phenomenon-- Salesforce is able to make this new capability available to their global customer base, without any upgrades. Can you imagine SAP shipping you a pre-populated CRM system? We’re hoping that we see as much innovation and disruption from this layer of the cloud computing stack as we’ve seen in the others.

The Social Enterprise: What is it? Does it really matter to enterprises?

Balakrishna Narasimhan

As we kickoff Dreamforce 2011, an event that’s bringing together more than 40,000 cloud innovators this week, we thought we’d take a few minutes to reflect on this year’s theme around the social enterprise.

Wikipedia defines a social enterprise as an organization that applies capitalistic strategies to achieving philanthropic goals. While Salesforce is a socially responsible organization, that’s not what they mean by social enterprise. Salesforce defines a social enterprise as one that collaborates, sells and operates socially, that engages and markets to its customers on public social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and makes its own products and applications social.

So, you may say to yourself, sounds great but what does that actually mean? That’s a question that we’ve been spending a lot of time answering this week, both with our customers and with the community in forums like Computerworld and The Huffington Post.

At Appirio, we’ve had the privilege of working with 250+ enterprises including many of Salesforce’s most innovative customers. We’ve been delivering elements of the social enterprise for a while now, ever since we first brought together Salesforce and Facebook on the Dreamforce stage 3 years ago. So we’re able to look at each part of the social enterprise through the eyes of our customers, to better understand how to make this important trend a reality in your business.

The Social Enterprise: Through the Eyes of Appirio’s Customers


Employee Social Networks: Making Sales, Marketing, Service and Operations Social
Brown-Forman: One of the world’s largest spirits producers, Brown-Forman, owns and makes brands like Jack Daniel’s, Herradura and Finlandia.  They wanted to find ways to help their employees collaborate better. One would think that a company that produces Herradura tequila would have no problem being social, but their employee portal (like most at large enterprises) was largely unused and static. Appirio started by examining their internal processes to see where cloud-based collaboration tools could have an impact. We then helped them customize and roll-out Chatter for their US employees. Adoption and usage have far surpassed expectations and led to an estimated 50% increase in collaboration effectiveness.

Yahoo!: Like many sales teams, Yahoo’s sales teams had to navigate more than 10 different systems to find what they needed and had no easy way to share best practices. We helped them design and roll out a new sales portal, called “The Source”, which replaced all their other systems, integrates both Salesforce Content and Chatter, and gives their sales team a single source for everything they need to sell. Yahoo’s Kristen Sanders, who led the effort, tells us in this video that everyone at Yahoo! wants access to “The Source”. Bet that never happens with your Sharepoint portal!

Perceptive: Perceptive Software (a Lexmark company) was using a call center and Lotus Notes-based applications to support 6000+ customers. When we modernized their support processes with Salesforce Service Cloud and Portal, we saw an opportunity to use their customer community to give them new product ideas and feedback using Salesforce Ideas. Now Perceptive’s customers can not only get answers whenever they need them but can also actively make Perceptive’s products better. Read more about their success here.

Dunkin’ Brands: Appirio recognized Dunkin’ last year as a cloud pioneer, for their success replacing multiple disparate franchisee-facing systems with a single scalable and flexible system. We built a custom portal on Force.com to help Dunkin’ onboard and manage new franchisees. While this app wasn’t originally designed as a social app, Dunkin’ is now using Chatter to collaborate around franchisee management processes. This is one of the benefits of building applications on a platform like Force.com - your apps keep getting better.

Customer Social Networks: Listening, Engaging, Marketing and Social Products
Starbucks: When Starbucks launched a national call for community service, they knew they had to engage their large Facebook community. In less than three weeks, we helped Starbucks build a highly scalable web app to help volunteers find opportunities, pledge their time, and encourage their friends to do the same, using a viral Facebook app. The campaign was a huge success, generating over 1M hours of service, driven largely by the social nature of the campaign. See Starbucks CTO, Chris Bruzzo, talk about Pledge5 at Cloudforce, or read an interview with Chris on the topic.

Avon: A few years ago, mark, a division of Avon that empowers young women to build their own businesses, realized that their next generation of customers spent far more time on Facebook than they did on websites. Word of mouth referrals have always been Avon’s biggest source of business, and mark wanted to use Facebook to encourage, manage and measure word of mouth referrals. We built a custom Force.com application to encourage Avon customers and reps to make Facebook referrals by showing them relevant offers and friend suggestions in Facebook, all linked to campaign metrics in Salesforce. See Avon’s Annemarie Frank talk about social marketing in this Dreamforce keynote.

Rypple, FinancialForce and Appirio: We helped develop FinancialForce’s PSA application which was the first social services management application (seen here in action on the main stage at Dreamforce). We’re also helping Rypple, a social employee recognition application, integrate their application with Chatter. And finally, our Cloud Management Center uses Chatter to help our development and support teams collaborate effectively. All of these are examples of using Chatter to make your actual offerings more social.

Getting Started with the Social Enterprise
Clearly, the social enterprise requires you to rethink the way you engage with customers, the way you collaborate internally and even the way you build your offerings. It’s an enterprise-wide effort that starts with a plan and creates real business impact. We’ve seen many, ourselves included, start out by assuming that it’s as easy as turning on the technology but it’s not that easy. Paying attention to the fundamentals around your processes, policies, governance, culture and the way information flows through your organization is critical to ensuring success with the social enterprise. This is why we usually recommend that our customers begin with a social enterprise blueprint to define how and where to apply social technologies to address your business priorities.

We’ve covered a lot of ground here so I’ll leave you with something that really crystallized the social enterprise concept for me. A few weeks ago, one of our account executives asked if he could get a mobile app that would let him know what Dreamforce events were happening beyond our own and if any of his customers were planning to attend. That’s a request that would’ve been inconceivable even a year ago. But now, thanks to the building blocks of the social enterprise (and the power of the cloud community), we were able to deliver exactly that mobile app to not only our sales team but to all 40,000 attendees of Dreamforce (you can get the app yourself here).

Enterprise end users and customers who are used to Facebook and Foursquare are going to demand mobile and social apps that help them do their jobs better. The only way that IT can adapt to this new world is by building their cloud powered business on social platforms like Salesforce. Welcome to the Social Enterprise, it’s going to be a fun ride!

Want a social enterprise? You’d better be in the cloud. - Blogging for Computerworld

Glenn Weinstein

The notion of building a "social enterprise" is taking root in customer relationship management (CRM) circles lately. A social enterprise, according to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, has three primary characteristics:

• Employees are connected to customers and prospects through public social networks, such as LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Employees collaborate internally by means of a private social network.
• Enterprise applications themselves are "social," which means that a system can post updates to, or consume data from, a social media stream.

Each of these requires technology support from IT. Connecting employees to external social systems (I'd also include Facebook as a must-have) is best done via some kind of tool-supported framework, optimally integrated with your CRM. You can build your own private social network, but it's more likely the social media vendors (examples include Yammer, Salesforce's Chatter, and Jive) can deliver a better experience than you could build. And remaking your enterprise applications to be social? Well, that one's going to take a bit more effort.

Read more...

Business Is Social - Blogging for the Huffington Post

By Narinder Singh

The first time I went to a work party was the summer of 1995 at an extravagant gala Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) threw in San Francisco with thousands of employees. Slightly in awe, I was fascinated with meeting people and learning their stories. Like all opulent events, I met people who were incredibly interesting, made you feel interesting, and were the life of the party (the engager); obsessed with talking about themselves (the braggart); simply repeated what those in positions of power said (the echo); those who loved to surprise you (the shocker), and those who listened and absorbed but seldom participated (the wallflower).

In truth, all of us have parts of each of these personas inside us. For businesses, social media accelerates and amplifies those characteristics at an unprecedented rate and scale in a very public way. It creates the world's biggest global gala and leaves many of the world's most established companies trying to find their way and voice... just like each of us in our first jobs.

For example, Twitter usage shows that a few companies play the role of engager -- making an entire community feel like they are part of a group that just clicks. Consumer brands like KLM, Tide, and Starbucks have gotten there and their twitter feeds feel like a hip conversation. Others, mostly B2B providers have struggled. Even brand names like Accenture and Goldman Sachs, have wrestled with the concept and risk looking overtly promotional or just absent from the party.

Read more at The Huffington Post...

What the Cloud Leaders Can Learn From Each Other

Glenn Weinstein

After moving hundreds of companies onto public cloud computing solutions, we at Appirio are in a great position to observe the best of the leading cloud vendors - what makes them great, and what inspires such intense customer loyalty.

Appirio sees these vendors on many levels. Of course, we are partners with cloud leaders, and fellow evangelists in the marketplace of ideas. But as Appirio’s CIO, I also see them as providers of technology to run our own IT. We run our business on Salsforce, Workday, Google Apps, and Amazon Web Services, among others, and we believe our internal technology is as good as any company’s, at a lower cost, with a faster pace of innovation.

Here’s what I see as the “best of the best” - the things that make me glad to be in this business and excited to help our customers transform the way they look at technology.

1. From Salesforce.com - instant provisioning
The official definition of cloud computing from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) lists, as its very first “essential characteristic” of cloud computing, the notion of on-demand self-service:

“A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service’s provider.”

Disappointingly, many cloud vendors still require us to navigate our way past pushy sales reps and wait on a support department to activate a tenant, even if it’s just for development or trial purposes. By contrast, Salesforce has set the enviable standard by permitting any curious user, anywhere, to instantly provision a fully functional “Developer Edition” org, with no expiration date and no onerous limitations. These developer orgs have been the secret to Force.com’s wide acceptance among developers, and a key to the rapid innovation we see on Force.com development projects.

Salesforce makes it just as easy for existing customers to quickly create replicas of their production orgs as “sandboxes,” for testing or development work. By doing so, they achieve the full promise of on-demand computing, achieving something that would be nearly unimaginable using on-premise software. (Imagine trying to provision a “developer copy” of SAP in five minutes or less? How about 5 weeks? 5 months?)

2. From Workday - laser focus on enterprise
Dave Duffield and Anil Bhusri started Workday with a pretty unique objective for a startup - to serve the world’s largest enterprises, as a replacement for the on-premise Peoplesoft systems that Duffield is so closely associated with.

I’m not sure how many other startup founders could have pulled off such a daunting feat. The typical pattern seems to be to start small, aim at the consumer or perhaps the small and medium business (SMB), and build over time. But human capital management (HCM) and financials are fundamentally different at the enterprise level, and they set about building a next-generation Peoplesoft for the cloud computing era. I recall one of their early publicly available design documents, which proudly touted their multi-tenant architecture and object-oriented database as core strengths.

Workday has gone on to capture the hearts and minds of many CIOs not with fancy sales tactics, but with a compelling product, a commitment to true public cloud computing, and a deeply rooted belief in the model’s superiority to legacy on-premise software. No founding team could have more credibility than the team that brought Peoplesoft to the market a generation ago.

Our own employees see the real Workday difference every day - simply by the fact that they actually use the system! Workday has transformed HRIS from an “expert system” with arcane user interfaces suitable only for HR clerks, to a modern, flexible web-based application designed from the outset to be useful to every employee and manager in a company.

3. From Google Apps - no more limits
I had a most unforgettable sales call a few years back, when visiting with a CIO and his direct reports to talk about how Google Apps could replace their Microsoft Exchange messaging infrastructure. The CIO had suggested I load my slides (yes, in PowerPoint form...) onto his laptop since it was already connected to the projector. As I displayed a slide explaining that each user - not each company, but each individual user - gets a 25GB mailbox in Gmail, the CIO’s computer suddenly displayed a pop-up message from, of all systems, Outlook. And the pop-up said something to the effect of, “You can no longer receive mail since your mailbox is full.”

I could not have timed or orchestrated a better demonstration. I think his mailbox capacity was around 100MB or so. The groans around the room told me this pop-up was not uncommon. And I know that even today, many companies’ internal Exchange servers limit mailboxes to some ridiculously small capacity, even as storage costs have plummeted and cloud vendors routinely provide massive online storage for pennies. This perfectly illustrates the inability of on-premise technology - the hardware dependencies, the long refresh cycles, the painful upgrades - to keep up with public cloud technology.

Google grants its apps users all sorts of storage capacity for documents, videos, sites pages, chat logs, and other corporate data. Massive storage isn’t an expensive add-on - it’s an inherent part of the service, along with super-fast search (would you expect anything less from Google?). And it seems like every week or two Google rolls out some new service for Google Apps users to take advantage of. Planning for the next Exchange upgrade cycle now seems like an unconscionable act of disregard for your own employees’ productivity.

4. From Amazon Web Services - staggering innovation
For pace of innovation, no vendor can top Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is the modern-day Thomas Edison, cranking out inventions quicker than most people can even imagine them. Just review their What’s New page for the past month or so:

• Aug. 3 - AWS Direct Connect, for creating a direct network connection from its physical server farms to your data center, bypassing the public internet for increased bandwidth and decreased network costs.
• Aug. 3 - Virtual Private Cloud (a 2010 innovation) moves from beta to general availability, allowing creation of a virtual network that operates inside your corporate network.
• Aug. 8 - AWS Cloud Formation template composition, for reusable building blocks of cloud stacks.
• Aug. 15 - AWS Tooklit for Eclipse 2.0, which incorporates AWS Explorer, multiple AWS account suport, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk debugging into a single tool.
• Aug. 16 - AWS GovCloud, a special AWS region with additional security certificatins, designed for use by U.S. government agencies.
• Aug. 18 - Spot instances for Elastic MapReduce.
• Aug. 22 - ElastiCache, a cloud-based in-memory caching service, protocol-compliant with Memcached.

And that’s just one month!

The current fad, whereby vendors with a stake in the status quo market for on-premise server technology create enough FUD to conflate “private cloud” with “public cloud” and make the choice seem like a minor distinction, is revealed as a false promise by considering the impossibility of on-premise vendors keeping up with AWS’s pace of innovation. And remember, Amazon isn’t only releasing these new services, they are making them immediately available to all existing AWS customers - no need to wait for upgrade cycles, budget season, or steering committees.

5. From Salesforce, Workday, Google, and Amazon - delivering on the promise of the public cloud

At Appirio, we’ve partnered with the true public cloud leaders across CRM, HCM and financials, messaging and collaboration, platform-as-a-service, and infrastructure-as-a-service. We believe these are the essential building blocks for fundamentally transforming IT from a data center-centric model to an on-demand cloud model. The academic and economic arguments alone for this shift are enough to make for a compelling business case. But what makes it an open-and-shut case is the demonstrated market success of the leading vendors - salesforce.com, Workday, Google, and Amazon. Each has shown that the enterprise is ready for public cloud computing, that it works at global scale, that productivity gains are real, that once you head down this road, there’s no turning back. Once your employees, your business analysts, your developers, and your IT administrators get a taste for the public cloud, they won’t let you turn back.

Appirio’s Growth: A Story of Disruption

By Chris Barbin

“The established market leaders almost always try to cram the disruption into their established offerings. In so doing, they spend enormous amounts of money and fail.”

- Clayton Christensen, on disruptive innovation

We founded Appirio 5 years ago with the idea that enterprises were going to need a new type of partner to help them adopt cloud technology (e.g., our very first post on the idea of “Services 2.0”). Today, we’re thrilled to announce yet another validation of that premise-- a strategic investment by Salesforce.com and GGV to help further Appirio’s global expansion in Europe and Asia Pacific.

The last 5 years have been an unbelievable journey for Appirio. We’ve grown from nothing to nearly 400 cloud experts in 25 states and 3 countries. We’ve gone from our first project (a cloud strategy engagement at ServiceSource) to our 1000th, for over 250 of Salesforce, Google, and Workday’s leading enterprise customers. We’ve recruited nearly 20,000 developers as part of the industry’s first cross-cloud developer community, CloudSpokes. And that’s just the beginning-- today’s investment will allow us to help even more global enterprises, like Thomson Reuters and Japan Post, who want to use cloud technology to build mobile, social business capabilities around the world.

But the big news isn’t about us. Appirio’s growth and prospects for ongoing expansion raise a bigger question about the state of the IT industry: Why do companies like Appirio even exist? Why aren’t the on-premise SIs meeting the needs of global enterprises looking to move to the cloud? The simple answer is that the very things that allowed the global SIs to dominate the last 30 years of enterprise technology make them poorly suited for the next 30.

For example, the legacy SIs have always been able to pull out volumes of “industry expertise.” But in today’s world, how relevant are those binders full of antiquated industry knowledge? Two of our customers are using cloud applications to support advertising sales. They happen to be 2 of the fastest growing consumer social networks. How many “media best practices” do you think these rapidly growing companies borrowed from the way print magazines used to sell advertising? Not many.

Marc Andressen made a similar argument in last weekend’s WSJ. He argues that technology is “invading and overturning established industry structures” in dozens of industries. He cites examples from books, movies, music, entertainment, photography, telecom, direct marketing, recruiting.... even “traditional” industries like cars, retail, oil, healthcare, education, defense, and financial services. Yesterday’s “industry template” for any of these businesses is looking increasingly quaint-- just ask Borders.

The functional best practices of the legacy SIs are equally suspect. Traditional best-practices for supporting customers, for example, reflect the limitations of on-premise technology, when the only way to engage with customers was through a centralized call center. Now, cloud-based CRM allows global companies like Plantronics to engage with customers where THEY prefer to be contacted (thanks to integrations with social networks), using representatives that are working where THEY prefer to work (thanks to integrated VOIP). This isn’t the call center described in your legacy SI’s best-practice binder.

Even the traditional strength of “global scale” offered by the legacy SIs is becoming more of a liability than an asset. Employing hundreds of thousands of people makes it very disruptive to adapt to new technology trends (Exhibit A: how long it took the on-premise SIs to start doing anything around cloud computing), or moving to capitalize on newly available talent pools.

More fundamentally, there’s a cultural misalignment between what today’s enterprise requires and what the legacy SIs are able to offer. Legacy SIs are structured to minimize a specific type of technical risk-- that’s what drives their multi-year, waterfall-style project plans. Meanwhile, the biggest risk faced by their enterprise customers has changed-- today, the biggest risk is sluggishness-- the risk that IT is working on projects that are obsolete before they go live, allowing the business to be out-maneuvered by a more nimble competitor.

With the legacy SIs facing such fundamental challenges, who will help enterprises make this shift to cloud-based technology? It has to be a new type of partner. That’s why Appirio’s growth is attracting the interest of the industry and investment community-- we’re a proving ground for a new way of doing things: We hire industry experts, but focus them 100% on using cloud technology to transform those industries. We hire functional experts, but have them focus 100% on inventing the next generation of cloud-powered sales, service, HR, Finance, and IT. We’re expanding globally, but will lead that expansion with CloudSpokes, our 20,000 member cloud-developer community, which already has participation from 65 different countries. And most importantly, we’re building a culture that is aligned with the needs of today’s enterprise - we were born cloud. We are wired to build cloud-powered businesses efficiently and effectively-- our customers start to see value in weeks, not months or even years.

Today’s investment by Salesforce.com is further validation that this new way of doing things is exactly what enterprise IT needs.... and will never get from their traditional partners. Appirio is disrupting the legacy SIs just as Salesforce disrupted the legacy ISVs, hopefully with the same positive outcome for the entire industry.

From Cloud Technology to the Cloud Powered Business

By Narinder Singh

As Appirio turns 5 this week and gets ready to celebrate all the great news and customer success from yet another fantastic Dreamforce, we wanted to take a step back and comment on an important shift we’re seeing in the industry: talking about “the cloud” as the means to an end.

That’s always been true, of course, but for the past 5 years, much of the conversation in the industry has been about if, when, and how to “adopt” the cloud. After all, the technology of the cloud is a big deal. Its a massive shift in how enterprises consume infrastructure, platforms, and business applications... consuming them “as a service” instead of running in their own data centers. It’s just like Nicholas Carr predicted in The Big Switch--- on premise computing is like generating your own power from a water wheel, cloud computing is like plugging into a power outlet.

Now, the conversation is shifting to where the real impact lies: how this new technology is used to change business. That shift is equally dramatic. After all, think about a factory that runs off that proverbial water wheel-- it has to be located next to a river, it has to have pulleys strung everywhere to get the power to workers. That’s just like your business--in a million unseen ways, the constraints of on-premise technology are limiting what your business can accomplish. Plugging that old factory into an electrical socket (thereby “adopting” the cloud), isn’t likely to result in much benefit, because none of those business constraints have been lifted.

To take advantage of cloud computing, you need to recognize the ways that your business has been boxed in by the limitations of your old, on-premise technology… and break through those limitations. We call that process “building a cloud-powered business,” and its a big shift in how companies are thinking about the cloud. You’ll hear a lot more about this trend from us later on his blog, on our website, and of course, at Dreamforce.

That’s because a cloud-powered business is just different: The cloud allows your business to do more with less, and makes you agile enough to adapt to changing market conditions. Cloud technology makes information available to an increasingly mobile, social workforce. For example, Yahoo! used the social capabilities of the salesforce cloud platform to build a global sales community that people are actually clamoring to use. This is much more than just a technology change– you need to rethink what’s possible when your business runs on the cloud.

Building a cloud powered business takes a lot more than just giving your employees logins to cloud apps. First of all, you need to bring together your different cloud services, and integrate them with your on-premise systems. You need a cloud-aware, or even cloud-centric, enterprise architecture, where you think about the governance, compliance, and risk-management of your cloud systems. You then need to rethink your business processes, removing the constraints imposed by on-premise technology. Finally, you need to give an increasingly mobile, social user base access to these business processes on any device, in a way that fits how they want to work.

This is a pretty intimidating task for even the most enthusiastic adopters of cloud technology. That’s why enterprises are looking for help from a new set of partners who specialize in building cloud-powered businesses.

That’s what we do here at Appirio. We have what it takes to help enterprises build a cloud-powered business. We have partnerships with the leading cloud vendors– Salesforce.com is even an investor in Appirio. We have the technology required to bring these platforms together, including the industry’s first cross-cloud broker technology. We have the technical experience to architect your cloud systems, both internally through experience gained though 1000+ cloud deployments and externally through our developer community. We have the functional expertise to make these cloud services work for your business, and the innovation required to build solutions that people actually use.

The great thing about next week? You don’t need to take our word for any of this. The success of Appirio’s customers is being celebrated at over 40 sessions at Dreamforce. If you’ll be at Dreamforce, come see first-hand what a cloud-powered business is like.

Dreamforce's Silver Lining - Looking forward to giving back

Narinder Singh

We've always believed that one "silver lining" of cloud computing is its accessibility-- it makes technology that’s traditionally only been accessible to the largest organizations in the world available to organizations without many resources at all-- including non profits, thanks in part to the generosity of our partners at Salesforce and Google.  Making that promise a reality is what led us to launch Appirio’s Silver Lining program-- using our time, our talent and our technology for social good.

As always, giving back will be a big theme at this month’s Dreamforce conference. We wanted to take a minute to share some of the activities we’re most excited about, including the launch of a fun new Silver Lining program we’re calling “Extreme Cloud Makeover-- Non-Profit Edition.”

Giving back
With nearly 100 Appirian’s at Dreamforce, we’re making the most of the opportunity to give back at the event itself.  Look for our “Silver Lining” t-shirts as Appirians help with Project Night Night and UCSF Children’s Hospital Amenity Kit creation. And of course, as a “Platinum” sponsor for the Alanis Morrisette concert to benefit the  UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, we’re looking forward to helping top the amazing $3M raised for this great cause last year.

Looking forward
But of course, Dreamforce is the starting line for giving back, not the finish line. We’re looking forward to using the entire week to engage with the non-profit community and identify ways for us to have even more impact in the days ahead.

To do that, we’re excited to announce the launch of our “Extreme Cloud Makeover-- Non-Profit Edition.” The idea is to send the staff of one lucky non-profit home on an upcoming Friday afternoon with a system that just isn’t quite there. and return Monday morning to flexible, effective, cloud-based systems that users love. We’ll extend your existing salesforce.com implementation, “extreme makeover” style, with a bunch of Appirans contributing their cloud expertise all weekend long. This has been one of the most popular contributions this year in Appirio’s Ideas Community, and we’re excited that so many Appirians are willing to donate their time and talent towards such a good cause.

Get involved
Sound interesting, for your non-profit or one you’re involved with?  Nominate yourself here. We’ll select a winner for the makeover based on the opportunity for us to have significant impact over the course of a weekend, so be as specific as possible about how we can extend your Salesforce implementation. We’ll also be selecting up to 3 runners-up to benefit from free contests that we’ll sponsor on our rapidly growing CloudSpokes developer community.

Dreamforce is always an exciting time for the non-profit community. We’re thrilled to have our own non-profit customers, including MOMA, Architecture for Humanity, and JDRF, share the success they’ve already experienced in the non-profit track. We’re excited to put in some elbow grease at the event itself. And of course, we can’t wait to meet the first winner of our “Cloud Makeover!”

See you at Dreamforce,
@singhns

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Nominate yourself for “Extreme Cloud Makeover-- Non-Profit Edition”

Note: Nominations are due by end of September - so get your nomination in NOW!

Imagine going home on an upcoming Friday afternoon with brittle, expensive on-premise systems that users barely tolerate and returning Monday morning to flexible, effective, cloud-based systems that users love!

That’s the magic of a “Cloud Makeover.”  Appirio is looking for a lucky non-profit salesforce customer to work with, “extreme makeover” style, with a bunch of Appirans contributing their cloud expertise over an intense weekend. We want to dramatically extend how you use salesforce. This has been one of the most popular contributions this year in Appirio’s own internal “Ideas” community, and we’re excited that so many Appirians are willing to donate their time and talent towards such a good cause.

Do YOU want an extreme cloud makeover? Fill out this form. We’ll select a winner for the makeover based on the opportunity for us to have significant impact over the course of a weekend, so be as specific as possible. We’ll also be selecting 3 runners-up to benefit from free contests that we’ll sponsor on our rapidly growing CloudSpokes developer community.

NOMINATE YOUR ORGANIZATION HERE

Cloud brokering isn’t about commoditization - Blogging for Computerworld

Glenn Weinstein

One downside of the term "cloud computing" being rendered meaningless through overuse is that intelligent people can conduct two entirely different conversations and think they're talking to each other about the same thing.  The confusion is now spreading to discussions of cloud brokerages.

Gartner's early (2009) use of the term referred to systems integrators and other third parties who would help their customers negotiate relationships among a variety of cloud vendors.  But recent buzz has refashioned the "broker" concept as a sort of commodities trader, aggregating raw computing power and creating spot markets.  It may be intellectually interesting to consider the feasibility of multiple public cloud infrastructure providers standardizing to the point where computing power could flow, frictionlessly, between data centers. And the OpenStack initiative would be a good prerequisite to achieving this sort of liquidity.

But suddenly we've started talking about infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). There's nothing wrong with IaaS - I'm a big fan, and my company's products all run on Amazon Web Services - but to me IaaS is the least interesting layer of the cloud computing stack, at least from an enterprise business perspective.

Read more...

A Social Innovator’s Dilemma: How Appirio Learned It’s Chatter 1-2-3s

By Eryc Branham - General Manager, Social Enterprise
@erycbranham

Aim before you shoot. While this might seem like common sense, it’s amazing how many times technologists forget that little piece of advice when rolling out a cool new application. Intentions are always good. People get excited, see the potential, and are anxious to get their hands dirty so they go forth and “do” before working through all the ramifications.

And by people, I mean us. Here at Appirio we have a policy to use things internally before we claim to be experts. If we’re going to be cloud and social enterprise thought-leaders, we better eat, sleep and breathe what we’re designing and implementing for our customers.

So it makes perfect sense that when salesforce.com introduced Chatter almost two years ago, we jumped and turned it on for our entire company. And like many technologists, we made mistakes along the way. However, that early journey taught us a great deal about the best practices (and worst practices) when it comes to implementing, adopting and achieving the greatest business value from Chatter.

Chatter is a transformational technology, but realizing its full potential requires more than just turning it on. We learned first hand through the process just how important it is to have a sound strategy, training, and adoption plan that focused on nurturing the community - both leading up to and after launch.

To talk about our journey, what we learned and what you can learn from us, I interviewed two of Appirio’s foremost experts: Brandon Oelling (@cloudy2me), a Solutions Architect who led our internal Chatter re-launch, and Steve Elmore (@steveelmore), a Collaboration Architect who helps our customers design their social enterprise strategy.

Q: Appirio had pretty good usage of Chatter even at the beginning. At what point did you realize we could do better?

Brandon: We instantly gravitated to Chatter as an alternative to mass emails and to connect our workforce scattered across the globe. Rather than a one-way push, Chatter gave us a venue for conversations and to answer questions interactively for all to see.

While we initially saw a big spike in Chatter usage, it dropped off after a few months. We realized we needed to talk to our Chatter users about how they collaborate (email, IM, shared drives, etc.), the intricacies of the business processes they supported, and how Chatter could support those. In our enthusiasm, we also may have added a few problems of our own. For example, one of our engineers created a follow all button to make it easier for our employees to do just that. While it sounded great in theory, by not forcing employees to select who and what they wanted to follow, their Chatter feeds became pretty noisy.

We’re now at a place where we’ve weaved Chatter into the foundation of how we interact and power our business. Whether it’s collaborating through groups, on customer accounts, or sharing content on key customers and prospects, it’s Chatter that ties this whole process together so everyone has precisely the right information at the right time to support the success of the organization and our customers.

Q: What were some of the best practices we applied in our own relaunch?

Brandon: The first thing we did was write down our objectives for Chatter. That sounds simple but when we opened up the potential for using all of Chatter’s functionality, we saw overlap with some other apps we currently used in pockets of our company and we needed to decide whether to retire certain apps if we wanted the undivided attention of all users on Chatter.

The next thing we did was to ask our employees how they were already using Chatter to gather insight that would help us “architect” our Chatter environment. We needed to know what types of users needed to collaborate on what types of things and how open each of those “mini-communities” should be. For example, our strategic acquisitions team needed a private Chatter group to discuss key partnerships still under NDA. But our staff based in our San Mateo, California headquarters needed an open Chatter group so everyone could get critical updates on customer visits. This type of insight drove the configuration, roll-out and on-boarding of users.

We then focused on “relaunching” Chatter to our employees. Our employees are already heavy users of social tools like Facebook and Twitter, but even so, we needed a plan this time around. We communicated ways to get the most from Chatter through employee webinars, created Chatter Guidelines and made those available for our rapidly growing team, and appointed evangelists who could showcase the power of Chatter and help other employees.

Q: Chatter has had a significant impact on Appirio from a business standpoint - helping us close deals, improve offerings, boost collaboration - as well as culturally. Can you give me some specific examples of this in action?

Brandon: Chatter is used everywhere at Appirio, from on-boarding new employees to celebrating our sales wins and beyond. Here’s a few examples for how we’ve benefited from Chatter:

• Winning deals: The knowledge that we share on Chatter - lessons learned, competitive intel, presentations and collateral from recent pitches (through content) - has helped us close and increase the size of dozens of deals. For example, our sales team for a Fortune 500 financial services customer was able to pick up key points for winning their deal via another Appirio sales team’s Chatter post where they celebrated a competitive win at a similar company with the same competitor. If that was an email, it would be been lost in someone’s inbox and not discoverable over time by the team at-large.
• Improving customer service and knowledge sharing: Chatter Groups play a pivotal role in promoting our internal subject matter experts who can help with a customer problem, as well as educating and sharing knowledge among project and account teams. As just one example, we have Chatter groups set up for our various Centers of Excellence (CoEs) to post and capture community discussions. Our application development Chatter group has become the one-stop-shop for de-bugging customer project issues and tapping into the collective wisdom of all of Appirio.
• Improving our own offerings: We also use Chatter extensively to get feedback and discuss improvements for our own offerings. For example, when introducing a new piece or version of our technology (e.g. CloudWorks) we use a Chatter group to share feedback, answer questions for internal users, solicit new feature ideas, etc. Using Chatter we were also able to collaborate across regions on the pricing strategy for a new offering.

The business impact and connection that Chatter can enable in a distributed and growing business like ours is why we make it a core part of our employee on-boarding. We require all new employees to complete their Chatter Profile as part of their orientation and we introduce them to the company through Chatter as well. We also ask them to join our ‘Appirio Newbie’ Group so they connect with other new employees and to read and understand the Chatter Guidelines. It’s not limited to new employees. We provide all employees with ongoing tips and tricks to support adoption, configuration and management of their Chatter universe.

Q: How are we applying these lessons in customer engagements, and can you give me a specific example of how it has helped a customer?

Steve: Our first-hand use of Chatter for the last two years, and our own journey has given us unique insight into the potential of social enterprise technologies like Chatter. They can not only contribute to a more connected, collaborative workplace, but they can capture knowledge, institutional memory, cultural nuance and the pearls of wisdom that distinguish high-performing organizations.

The experience we had designing and architecting our own Chatter usage led us to create a new customer offering this spring: a Collaboration Blueprint. In this 6-8 week project, our social experts help you to develop your Chatter objectives, design and roadmap the most effective implementation, while simultaneously prototyping a “model Chatter” environment based on your unique needs.

Chatter is not just a feature of Salesforce CRM, it’s a platform unto itself and to get the most from it, a little pre-planning goes a long way. For example, in regulated industries there is a great deal of concern around the internal dissemination of non-public information. With one customer we were able to discover and identify in the Blueprint how existing controls and behaviors could extend into Chatter and provide greater security while simultaneously reducing the number of information silos. With another, our recommendations identified key areas that had to be addressed first to ensure proper resourcing.

Q: What is one piece of advice you’d give others who are just starting down this path on how to achieve greater value from their social investments?

Steve: Social is just another way of saying people interacting with people.

Clearly people are the foundation of Chatter and any social enterprise solution. The first step should always follows the ancient maxim: know thyself. You should always factor in the organizational psychology, behaviors and existing structure before rolling out an enterprise-wide social platform like Chatter. Understanding the collaborative capacity, existing appetite for social tools, and what will resonate will help you craft a plan that works in the end. When you look at a financial services firm in comparison to a technology start-up, they are completely different animals in how they manage risk, and they require very different social approaches. That is not to say many of the steps are not the same, but how the organization leads, handles change initiatives and communicates “what’s in it for me?” are important things to think through.