Summer Davos in Dalian -- Inevitability of Transformative Change - Blogging for the Huffington Post

Narinder Singh

The World Economic Forum's mission is to improve the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society. Much has been written about their Davos and Dalian events and how each event effectively crystallizes the context and direction of thought at any particular time. This year I had the good fortune of attending my first World Economic Forum gathering as a part of the Technology Pioneers program. The transformative power of technology pervaded the event. This was evidenced not just in the viewpoints of the few technologists like me who were in attendance. Rather, it stemmed from the social entrepreneurs, young scientists, young global leaders and even government agents that have unleashed change on the world faster in the past few years than over the last half century.

While technology is no panacea for the world's challenges, its place at the decision making table of all aspects of our future is undeniable. The new reality is that information technology is the fundamental building block to future change. 6000 miles away in China, with attendees from over 90 countries, it was clear that this lens extends far beyond the confines of the Silicon Valley.

Dalian crystallized three significant themes that broaden the platform of information technology in our future to include, well, everything.  

Read more at The Huffington Post...

Dreamforce 2011 Wrap up: Our 10 Favorite Blogs about #DF11

Balakrishna Narasimhan

Last week, we were at Dreamforce with about 40,000 other cloud believers (and maybe a few skeptics). As usual, there were a number of exciting product and platform announcements ranging from data.com which brings together social profile information with structured D&B data, to the first social manufacturing application, to the integration of Infor and Workday with Force.com. But what made this year’s event notable was the way Salesforce is unifying their diverse platforms and products around the idea of enabling the 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. Salesforce has been moving in this direction since the launch of Chatter in 2009, but it’s only now that the vision has become fully realized. They’re poised to become the platform to address a range of emerging business challenges that traditional software doesn’t even acknowledge let alone address.

As we looked back over the week and read through all the excellent commentary that’s been written about Dreamforce, we wanted to highlight our main takeaways from the week through articles that we enjoyed reading. So without further ado, here are our top 10 #DF11 blog posts.

Salesforce has moved far beyond CRM
1) Has Salesforce.com graduated to the IT big leagues? (InformationWeek)
2) Accelerating your business with the cloud: Conversations with Facebook and NetApp (Appirio blog)
3) Salesforce not only matures but has plans for enterprise domination (CloudAve)

Salesforce’s platform enables an entirely new class of social business apps
4) The promise and challenges of Benioff’s social enterprise vision (ZDNet)
5) The social enterprise: What is it? Does it matter to enterprises? (Appirio blog)
6) Salesforce gunning for manufacture ERP (ZDNet)

Chatter has gone from a feature to the main interface for enterprise data across apps
7) Collaboration hardwired into context (Enterprise Irregulars)
8) Salesforce.com, Workday forge Chatter alliance: Win-win for both (ZDNet)
9) Platform for the social enterprise: Salesforce and Workday (Appirio blog)

And finally, if you want to just relive the experience of being at Dreamforce and see the impact of a social world, we loved this very creative look at the event through social media.

Platform for the Social Enterprise - Workday and Salesforce

Ryan Nichols

Yesterday’s Dreamforce keynote was a deep dive into Salesforce’s cloud platform, with a focus on its new social capabilities.

At this point, we’re used to hearing about Force.com’s success in the enterprise. Seeing Appirio customers like Avon and Facebook up on the big stage talking about the amazing things that they’re doing on the force.com platform is always one of our favorite parts of Dreamforce.

Widespread traction in the ISV community has been harder for Saleforce to come by-- that’s why there was so much excitement around last year’s RemodyForce announcement with BMC, and why we got to witness yesterday morning the very odd spectacle of former Oracle leaders Chuck Phillips (now CEO of Infor) and Ray Lane (Investor & chairman of HP) talking to Benioff about the investments they’re making on Force.com.

But we didn’t get to hear nearly enough about the most interesting platform partnership announced at Dreamforce-- the new partnership between Workday and Salesforce. Workday will be making its workforce data available in Salesforce Chatter, and will enable Force.com as an extensibility platform to Workday.

Salesforce + Workday= "Cloud Suite" for the social enterprise

We had the pleasure of hosting Aneel Bhusri (Workday’s co-CEO) at our Casino Royale Dreamforce after-party the other night, along with business and IT leaders from large enterprises like Flextronics and Brady already using Salesforce and Workday. Conversations that night made clear to us how much potential there is to bring these two cloud leaders together: Imagine being able to do vacation approvals in the flow of your work, without having to switch over to a new system. Imagine being able to collaborate about a hiring decision, in the context of that person’s interview notes. Imagine assembling a virtual team to make an important business decision, and having all the financial data you need to make that decision at your fingertips. Imagine being able to build a lightweight extension to your core financial system... without spending years on integrations and upgrades.

This partnership is a big win for Salesforce. Workday confidence in Force.com is a great proof point of the value that Salesforce’s platform can bring to ISVs. Its also a big step forward towards their vision of the social enterprise. One of the most interesting things about Chatter is that (despite the name) it has never been about idle chatter-- Chatter is about getting work done, collaborating in the context of real business data. Since many enterprise deployments of Chatter start where Salesforce has traditionally been strongest-- in sales & support teams-- a lot of the initial Chatter success stories have been around productivity in those departments (for example, Appirio’s rollout of Chatter for the sales team at Yahoo). Other apps built on force.com also have their data in Chatter already, but there’s still a lot of critical business data that’s not on force.com. Having data from horizontal applications like HR and Finance in the Chatter stream will truly make Chatter an enterprise-wide collaboration platform.

And what about Workday? Why are they doing this? The main reason is focus. “Salesforce is really focused on becoming a platform company, and we’re one of the companies that will embrace that platform, “ Aneel said yesterday in an interview on Bloomberg. “We’re much more focused on the application worlds of HR and accounting.... and this is a massive undertaking.” Partnering with Salesforce allows Workday to focus on their core applications instead of having to build out their own Platform as a Service or social layer.

Workday’s openness has been key to their 90% annual growth year over year-- they have an innovative integration platform embedded in their product, and adhere to a philosophy they call the “natural workplace.” Instead of forcing people to come to Workday, people can use Workday from wherever they naturally work. The benefits are clear, especially for HR and Finance applications with a large number of “casual” users.

We’ve always argued that the benefits of cloud computing accelerate as you move more and more of your business on the cloud. When you combine these new integrations between Salesforce and Workday with the existing integrations between Salesforce and Google, its possible to assemble a “virtual cloud suite” that offers the benefits of best of breed applications without creating separate “SaaS silos” of information. Here at Appirio, we run our entire business on Salesforce, Google, Workday, and other SaaS apps in the cloud ecosystem. We spend less than half of what Gartner says an organization our size should spend on IT, and are able to support the productivity of our employees better than organizations many times our size.

Yesterday’s announcement takes us one step closer to bringing the benefits of a “connected cloud” to all of our enterprise customers.

On Being Named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer

Narinder Singh

Today, we are honored to be named a 2012 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. The World Economic Forum, most known for the annual Davos conference, created this program in 2000. Every year, they award approximately 25 companies in three categories - Information Technologies and New Media, Energy and Environment, and Life Sciences and Health.

Companies receiving the award are to “hold promise of significantly impacting the way business and society operate. Technology Pioneers must demonstrate visionary leadership and show signs of being long-standing market leaders...” It is humbling to read those words and look through some of the companies that have been past winners-- Napster, Google, Mozilla, PayPal, and more recently Foursquare and Spotify.

When we started Appirio, we felt that the enterprise technology industry had stagnated in innovation, impacting our entire economy’s ability to grow. The consumer Internet had shown us we could do more with less and the power of what could happen with shared (cloud) systems, but enterprises were resistant. Our drive five years ago (and now) is to help the industry through ‘The Big Switch’ to cloud computing and bring Internet-pace innovation to business practices across all industries - driving the level of disruption Marc Andreesen described recently in the Wall Street Journal.

In our submission early this year to the World Economic Forum we wrote:

Any leap forward in technical innovation disrupts existing industries – telegrams to telephones, fax to email, closed systems to the Internet. Cloud computing is having a similar disruption on the IT industry. For the first time, all you need for a virtual worldwide labor force is an Internet connection, which is having a profound impact on jobs, education and the economies of countries around the world. The ‘everything-as-a-service’ cloud model is also dramatically changing how people work, how developers code, how businesses use technology, and it’s having a huge impact on the companies that supply those businesses.

Combining the disrupted power of the cloud with the power of the crowd (crowdsourcing) allows for a reinvention of both how technology drives business and the very nature of how labor organizes towards fulfilling that promise. That revelation led Appirio to form CloudSpokes - an open, cross-cloud community for crowdsourced development - and drove its growth to nearly 20,000 users from 60 countries in just a few months.

We believe to our core that the scale of change these trends will bring to the technology industry will be profound. The only question will be if we resist this change or adopt and accelerate its potential. We know the answer we want and are honored to be recognized for our potential, passion, commitment to making it happen.

@singhns