#DF12 Panel - Cloud as a Business Strategy: Lessons from Enterasys, K12 and Kelly Services

By Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)

Yesterday, we were fortunate to sit down with leaders from three companies who are really embracing the notion of cloud as a business strategy, rather than just an IT strategy. Our CEO, Chris Barbin, moderated a panel featuring Ben Doyle, VP of Sales Enablement & Analytics at Enterasys, Dianne Conley, VP of Marketing Systems at K12 and Judy Snyder, VP of Global Applications at Kelly Services. Each of these companies has embraced the cloud and used it to drive amazing business results including Enterasys growing at 6x other networking companies, K12 growing at over 30% and Kelly Services providing employment to over 500k+ people annually.

What is your company doing in the cloud?
Ben Doyle, Enterasys: We deployed 20 cloud apps and it’s been transformational for us. We now have social customer interactions in private chatter groups, social sales forecasts, opportunities that chatter and even routers that chatter!

Dianne Conley, K12: We had a legacy CRM that was hamstringing K12. Our CMO and I sat down with our Ops team and decided we needed to make a change. We wanted to transform our customer experience, not just replace one platform with another. I came by myself 3 years ago to my first Dreamforce where I met Appirio for the first time.  Soon after that, we evaluated Salesforce and Oracle. We started implementation in Aug 2011 with Service Cloud for enrollment and our customer care centers globally. It’s been very successful but we’re just getting started.

Judy Snyder, Kelly Services: Our cloud transformation started in IT. We’d implemented Sales Cloud globally and then in 2009, we decided on a cloud-first strategy in IT. We deployed Chatter globally as our collaboration platform. We also implemented the Microsoft cloud for email. And we implemented Service Cloud and IT help desk.  Our goal is to be 100% virtual - we want to find people anywhere in the US, recruit them, onboard them, train them using virtual classrooms, give them a sense of community so that they engage with each other, measure performance and incentivize with gamification. We are looking for ways to grow without adding physical locations.

Where did you get started and how far into the journey did you start to realize it was transformative to your business?
Ben Doyle: We started with Sales and Service Cloud in 2003. Around 2007, we started looking to replace our home-grown quoting and config tool that wasn’t performing as we needed it to and was costing a lot to support.  We looked at the AppExchange and went with BigMachines. It was a very successful strategic project that gave us lots more visibility at the opp level than we’d ever had. That project was the catalyst for us adopting a cloud-first IT strategy in 2010. Now, when we evaluate a new business need, more often than not, we find that we’re more comfortable with a cloud solution.

Dianne Conley: Within 5 months, we were piloting the application. Typically we’d only be about halfway through requirements collection at that stage. We embraced agile and realized we could accomplish great things in a short amount of time.  Agile has been transformative to our business. Even our COO is pushing agile. It’s given senior management the confidence that we as an organization don’t have to labor over things for months and months. 

Judy Snyder: The pivotal moment for us was when our cloud apps moved from internal IT apps to customer-facing applications that generate revenue.

What was the biggest surprise or biggest unexpected obstacle?
Ben Doyle: Change management. We recently moved off Outlook to Google Apps which was a big change. We were really surprised at the amount of education and hand-holding needed to get people to change and embrace something new. It’s also not just about getting people to accept change but training them to make the most of new tools. IT used to be 66% operations and 33% applications and with cloud, it’s the opposite. In a cloud-first world, IT has to be user-centric. We’re changing the culture of the IT function to support business.

Dianne Conley: We too experienced some change management challenges. Our management team had bought into what we were trying to do but to get our IT team engaged and aligned was a bit of a challenge. We learned that the first thing to do was to build a team that trusted each other. In an agile project, we didn’t have everything documented so we needed to build the trust to work together as a team and figure out challenges as team.

Dianne mentioned the C-suite was on board at K12. What was catalyst for the C-level engagement at Kelly Services?
Judy Snyder: Two things. First, our CIO loves Chatter. The other was seeing the customer solutions – seeing what we can deliver to external customers quickly – which was the revenue generation piece. As soon as we had customer-facing applications, the lightbulb went off and IT was no longer just a cost center.

Ben Doyle: For us, when our CEO started Chattering, it was a really big moment. Toward the end of a quarter, he started Chattering about sales wins. Everyone likes to see the CEO talking about deals we are winning. That built momentum, and other execs started to chime in and contribute. It’s really made our organization much more collaborative and has paved the way for making our own products social.

Beyond Salesforce, what cloud apps are you using?
Ben Doyle: The power of having a cloud-first IT strategy is being able to take advantage of the ecosystem cloud vendors have. For example, we’re using Box which is completely integrated with Salesforce. We also use Google and Smart Sheet (cloud-based PM tool) which also connects to Box. It’s much easier to assemble a set of cloud apps that easily hook together without any deep technical integration than trying to do something comparable in the on-premise world. And the sum of parts is much greater by taking advantage of all these cloud apps. For example, we can use Appirio’s tool to bring relevant lead and opportunity information from Salesforce right into Gmail.

Audience: This is clearly a big change for IT, how do you manage that?
Ben Doyle: We’ve had some turnover, but not a lot. We said from the outset that your job may change but there's still a need for people with the skills to take advantage of these cloud applications. For example, about a year after we deployed Box to make content available on mobile devices, our ops team is now looking at decommisioning servers and reducing footprint. Frankly, it takes a bit of time for IT operations to adjust since it's a more dramatic shift for them.

Judy Snyder: We experienced the same thing. Our sales team brought in CRM and our IT team was resistant at first. Our IT team since has embraced the Force.com platform and are starting to see Force.com as a career path. It helps their resume for their next job if nothing else. Developers see it as career enhancing to learn Force.com. The only issue is on the infrastructure side because there are no servers on-site.

Dianne Conley: The guys in IT that we partnered with were all seen as heroes. In the past, when they couldn’t deliver, they got a lot of grief from the rest of the organization. Now that we’ve given them the tools to become successful, everyone wants in!

What is one thing that each of you would have done differently if you had the chance?
Judy Snyder: I wish we’d have done it sooner, I was in IT and was a resistor at first. I was conservative, worried about internal controls, compliance – and was nervous. In retrospect, I needed to be less risk-averse.

Dianne Conley: There are a couple of technical things we would have done differently. I probably would have tried to work more closely with folks that were going to be end-users of the applications – enrollment and customer support agents – rather than business analysts and higher level managers. We had to spend a good few months optimizing based on what end-users actually needed rather than what their bosses thought they needed. Now, we’ve built a very tight relationship between the Salesforce administrator and the actual folks on ground. She has a desk there and talks to end-users all the time.

Ben Doyle: We had a group of users that were early adopters, the middle and then those that struggle. I would have spent more time with the laggards to help them embrace the change. We went from using desktop apps to only a browser. We underestimated the amount of work needed to help people adopt new business habits.

Summary
The common lessons across our panel of cloud powered business innovators are the following:

• Cloud-first for new apps is viable now
• Move fast, and be agile
• Engage end-users throughout the process to drive adoption
• Have a plan for managing change both within and outside IT
• Let the initial success build on itself, don’t stop! 

If you want to share your story about using the cloud to drive business strategy or have questions about how to make this happen at your company, tweet @appirio or leave us a comment!

#DF12 Day 1: Salesforce as a Social Engagement Platform

by Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)
 

If you’re in enterprise technology, the Dreamforce keynote is an event you look forward to all year. Over the past year, Salesforce has really embraced the notion of social as core to every one of their applications, from sales to service to marketing to HR to custom applications. What was revealed in the keynote yesterday was an expansion of that vision and a series of announcements that together reveal Salesforce's aspirations to become a new type of enterprise technology platform.

If you look back at enterprise applications, they’ve always been designed primarily for record keeping and their primary goal was to hoard information since this information was core to the company’s competitive advantage. Systems like these worked well when companies controlled interactions with customers and could almost mandate the use of systems.

In the social and mobile world, this notion of controlling customer and employee interactions and locking away that information in systems of record is just out-of-date. In a world where both customers and employees define how they want to interact with your company and can no longer be forced down certain interaction paths, the function of enterprise technology needs to change fundamentally. In today’s world, the role of the systems that touch customers and employees is to give both customers and employees a reason to engage.

All of Salesforce’s announcements (and there were many) fit within the theme of making Salesforce the platform for engaging with customers and employees. For more on systems of record vs systems of engagement, check out this brilliant piece by @dionhinchcliffe. Obviously, the vision is much further ahead on the customer side but we’re sure that Salesforce has only begun to reveal their ambitions on the employee or Work.com side.

So, let’s take a look at each of the major announcements and see how they fit together into a new vision for enterprise technology.

Sales - Engage with Everyone Who Touches Sales
Of course, since this is Salesforce, the first stop was the Sales Cloud and its transformation from an administrative system for sales to one that really makes it easier for sales people to sell.  There were three main announcements:

• Social Key: this one sounds almost too good to be true but the promise is that the Social Key will make it possible to connect customer (or presumably employees, if they're contacts in Salesforce) profiles with their social presence on Facebook, Twitter, etc. In the past, this used to be a manual task but the Social Key promises to automate this. Less than 10 minutes was spent on this announcement, but this is the foundation for the new customer 360 (check out this chalk talk on the need for a new 360).
• Chatter Partner Communities: a common problem for sales teams is collaborating beyond one’s own company. Chatter made it easy to create a virtual account team within your own company but it didn’t let you bring in partners, resellers and others who are key to winning the deal or servicing the account. With Chatter Partner Communities, it’s now possible to collaborate seamlessly with partners.
• Salesforce Touch: as has been rumored for a while, Salesforce announced the GA of their HTML5-based mobile experience. An effective mobile experience is critical to changing CRM from something sales people have to deal with before a forecasting call to something that actually helps them sell. If the demo today was any indication, Touch is going to be a big step forward for sales teams.

The common theme across all three announcements in the sales cloud is engagement. Social Key makes it possible to track customer preferences and engage effectively as a salesperson, Chatter Partner Communities help you engage your extended selling team and Touch brings it all to you in an engaging mobile experience.
More on the announcements here

Service - Let Customers Engage with Each Other and You on Their Terms
The next stop in the tour of the social enterprise was customer service. Here, the theme was around using social to offer customers the ability to interact in the ways they choose and even solve each other’s problems. The vision was showcased with a great customer story from Activision.

The biggest new announcement was around Chatter Customer Communities. Similar to the partner communities in the Sales Cloud, customer communities enable companies to create private Chatter groups with customers where they can get issues resolved by connecting with service experts or others in the community. At first glance, this doesn’t sound like big news, but what makes this unique is that the customers’ social profile and the company’s knowledgebase can be shared across all channels including the community. This means that whether an agent is on the phone or in the community, they have a complete picture of the customer and the full knowledge of how to solve the customer’s problem. In the future, I’m sure we’ll see gamification and badging to reward customer engagement and perhaps even direct feedback from customers to agents.
More on the announcements here

Marketing - Create a Social Engagement Funnel
With their acquisition of Buddy Media earlier this year, it was clear that Salesforce had something up their sleeve for Marketers. Today, they unveiled a unified vision for marketing that goes from monitoring using Radian6 to engaging using a Radian6 console to advertising using Buddy Media, and of course measuring everything using Salesforce campaigns and reporting. The Social Key is again critical to creating that single social profile of the customer across the rest of the marketing cloud.

This an exciting vision for the future of marketing where we go from mass marketing to 1-1 engagement at scale. The Marketing Cloud starts to provides some of the tools to make this transition but it’s still a massive change for marketing organizations to retool their organizations from outbound mass marketing to inbound 1-1 engagement. The Marketing Cloud also has some gaps in the areas of marketing automation and data analytics. Nonetheless, it's exciting to see Salesforce start to help marketers with a set of integrated applications to engage prospects and customers on social networks.
More on the announcements here 

Collaborate - Make Collaboration More Engaging with Files
In the area of collaboration, there were two main announcements. The first was extending Chatter to partners and customers, which we covered in the context of sales and service. The second announcement and it was big one, was Chatterbox which provides the ability to securely share files across devices using Chatter. Chatter has had file sharing capabilities for a while but extending it right to the employee, customer or partner’s device is a major step. No more logging in to Chatter to the get latest version of a sales presentation or marketing video, you just have it, regardless of what device you’re using. People who use Dropbox in their personal lives experience something similar but the difference is the secure sharing based on Salesforce user profiles and the collaborative context from Chatter.
More on the announcements here 

Work - Increase Workforce Engagement with Social Feedback
Along with marketing, the other new area that Salesforce sketched their vision around was Work. HR and Marketing are both being dramatically changed because of social, so it’s no surprise that Salesforce is entering this area. EVP of Social Apps, John Wookey, gave an engaging presentation talking about the misalignment between traditional org hierarchies and the way work actually gets done and recognized. Work.com provides a social platform for employees to share goals and feedback, right in their Chatter profile. This provides a real-time picture of an employee’s impact, rather than an annual performance review that rarely captures the full picture. Salesforce also announced an integration with Workday to bring together social performance feedback with Workday’s talent profile and core employee data. Finally, they announced a partnership with Amazon to redeem Work.com recognition points for Amazon.com gift cards. The vision was brought to life by showing how Facebook uses Work.com. For those watching closely, the Facebook story contained a hint about where Work.com might go next when it touched on how Facebook runs their recruiting process.

What was announced today is just the start for Work.com and Workday. We believe this is the first step in unveiling a new vision for HR around workforce engagement rather than administering transactions. As savvy industry commentator and new Appirio partner, Jason Averboook, has observed, Work.com is such a big change from the status quo that one of its biggest values in the short term might be that you can’t simply port over a broken HR process to Work.com.
More on the announcements here

Innovate - Engage with Business Users and Customers Wherever they Are
And finally, it was COO, George Hu’s turn to talk about how the platform is changing to become an engagement platform for social and mobile apps. 

• Salesforce Identity: Salesforce Identity makes it possible to log into other enterprise applications with Salesforce. So, what does this have to do with being an engagement platform? It’s about making Salesforce the single source of relevant information, whether from internal apps for a traditional 360 or from the social profile for the new 360. It also makes it possible for other apps to benefit from the enterprise social graph in Salesforce. 
• Chatter Canvas: Closely related to the vision of making Salesforce the engagement console for enterprises, Chatter Canvas makes it possible to bring data and information from other applications right to a Salesforce page. Common scenarios include order history or invoice history from SAP shown on an account page
• Heroku Enterprise Cloud Service: The new Heroku cloud service extends the platform to social networks by making it easy for enterprises to create apps to engage people on social networks using Heroku, but now with a enterprise-grade tools and support.
• Touch: Finally, Touch brings all of this to any device and promises to make the vision of write once, deploy anywhere true at last.

George closed with a futuristic demo where he created his own Coke drink on a Freestyle machine, shared it on his Facebook page, and then his friend, the always game Dan Darcy, used the barcode from George’s post to get the same drink at a Coke machine near him.

What it all adds up to is a new vision for what drives every business’ success - engagement with customers, partners, and employees - and a technology portfolio and partnerships that start to make this new vision a reality. At Appirio, we’re excited to work with Salesforce, Workday, Facebook and Google to break the stranglehold of the on-premise vendors and usher in a new era of engagement and productivity!

Watch the entire keynote here

The Future of Work: Employees as Customers

by Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)

Tomorrow, Salesforce is set to unveil the next phase of their evolution from a CRM company to one that provides businesses with a technology platform for today’s mobile and social world. One of the areas that has provoked a lot of speculation leading up to tomorrow has been what Salesforce plans to do with Work.com, their new HR offering. When Salesforce acquired Rypple and hired John Wookey, many thought they were going to diveheadlong into the HR space and potentially even compete with Workday. But, Marc Benioff has been very clear that Workday is an integral part of their strategy for Work.com. In fact, Workday’s co-CEO Aneel Bhusri, is slated to speak in tomorrow’s keynote.


As we thought about why Salesforce is entering the HR or people space, we were struck by the parallels between marketing and HR, two functions that are undergoing enormous change because of the impact of social, the explosion of data and the increasing importance of technology within both functions. But even beyond marketing and HR as functions, there are clear parallels between the way companies attract and retain customers and the way companies attract and retain employees. If you’re looking for clues on how Work.com might evolve now and in the future, Salesforce’s strengths on the customer side of the equation provide some very good pointers to what they may offer for employees. 

Flying through the Clouds with Metrics

by Narinder Singh (@singhns)

Labor Day just passed and school is back in session.  Inspired by our kids and prodded by our customers to share our experience across thousands of cloud projects, Appirio is kicking off our chalk talks.  In one our first chalk talks, we want to share some ideas for how IT organizations and sales operations teams can make sure they are consistently getting the most out of their salesforce.com environment.  

After a lot of hard work, traditional on-premise software could be made to run alongside your business.  Traditional software would enable your business to get to a destination, albeit slowly.  And over time, we had pretty good instrumentation on what was going on.  The cloud was completely different, businesses could move faster and change direction at will. It was like flying compared to the trucks of the on-premise world.  In this first generation of cloud applications, most businesses migrated well-defined and isolated processes.  Like a propeller plane, businesses in the cloud could get to their destination with a basic compass and navigating by sight.  

But flying in the cloud opened up so many possibilities that businesses wanted to do more. Now businesses want to fly longer distances (more transformational initiatives) and have developed sophisticated jet planes that fly higher and faster. With this increased capability, comes a cost - businesses can no longer just pilot their application with instincts and minimal instrumentation. You need metrics to understand all the elements that drive up the cost of managing your cloud environment such as complexity from custom code, configuration, and user administration vs. benefits in adoption you get from that complexity.  Businesses need to be able to balance resources with speed of change, know where they stand relative to others and find the optimal route to their destination. That's what Appirio Cloud Metrics for Salesforce.com gives you - the instrumentation you need to take your Salesforce instance to the next level.

If your Salesforce.com changes taking longer than they used to? Are you unsure if your systems integrator is doing this the ‘right’ way?  If you want to get a more nuanced and data driven view of where you stand - so you can figure out how to move to new heights - then having metrics in the cloud is a must.  Appirio’s Cloud Metrics for Salesforce.com investigates these problems and can help you understand the hidden complexity in your Salesforce environment.  For more information come see us at Booth #701 at Dreamforce, check out Phil Wainewright’s blog on Cloud Metrics, or read the Cloud Metrics website.  

Marketing and HR: Two Peas in a Pod

By Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)
 

This week, Salesforce will be announcing their plans for Work.com, which is their broader vision for social HR, building on their Rypple acquisition. This comes on the heels of Salesforce's ~$600M+ acquisition of BuddyMedia and the announcement of their Marketing cloud a few months ago. While marketing feels like a natural extension of Salesforce’s CRM expertise and platform, HR or “Work” might at first seem like a non-sequitur.  But, marketing and HR aren’t as different as they may appear at first. Both organizations are in the process of rethinking how they relate to their customers (prospects/customers for marketing and employees for HR) and the role they play within their own companies.

Social Shifts the Focus to the Individual
Both marketing and HR are being changed dramatically because of social networking. For marketing, the obvious impact has been the way interactions with customers have completely changed from structured interactions that are controlled by the company, e.g., advertisements, events, customer service calls, survey feedback, etc. to interactions with customers on social networks where the best the company can do is engage and influence the conversation. The notion of a brand that a company can control seems almost quaint in this world. Just ask Progressive Insurance. Marketers now need to understand what people are saying about their company on social networks, engage with customers and prospects on social networks and try to create advocates who can spread the word about their companies. Marketing is no longer about trying to broadcast messages and hammer prospects into submission. It’s increasingly about creating engaging content and customer experience “a-has”, like responding quickly to a complaint on Twitter, to delight customers and inspire them to become advocates.

Over 50K CloudSpokes Members: Why Crowdsourcing is Taking Off

by Rob Cheng (@robcheng)

CloudSpokes hit a big milestone this week, passing 50,000 members after just 19 months -- hitting that mark 5x faster than Dreamforce! Of course, CloudSpokes could never have grown as fast as it has without Salesforce and other public cloud pioneers laying the groundwork for us. So we wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on the surprisingly deep relationship between the coupled evolution of cloud computing and crowdsourcing.

The Cloud Brought Crowdsourcing to App Development

Prior to the information age, large scale crowdsourcing was mostly applied to solving physics or math problems because those were the only problem domains where you could expect consistent and reproducible results regardless of geography. Once the Internet made it possible to easily share data globally, innovative companies took advantage by crowdsourcing previously intractable problems like discovering new deposits of gold, understanding the structure of a key AIDS enzyme, or improving prediction algorithms. 

But when it comes to application development, access to data isn’t sufficient. You need access to code, configuration, assets, and more importantly, a place to deploy and test your code that mirrors the production environment. This last requirement has traditionally been so difficult even for internal development teams that entire industries have sprung up to help solve the impedance mismatch between dev, test, staging, and production environments. That’s where the cloud comes in -- not only have SaaS offerings created standard environments for developers to target, but cloud platforms and infrastructure have made it easier to clone production environments with perfect fidelity, even while limiting access to sensitive data. For example, while Salesforce.com makes it easy to create complete sandboxes from production orgs, CloudSpokes clients find it’s often faster and safer to simply duplicate the subset of object metadata needed and have the competitors deploy that metadata into their developer orgs. Similarly, standardized EC2 AMIs and Heroku Git repositories help ensure consistent and reproducible results with crowdsourced code, enabling the power of crowdsourcing to be applied to a whole new set of problem domains, from automating back-end business processes to developing innovative mobile interfaces.

Crowdsourcing is the Extension of Cloud Principles to Development

While it’s tempting to view the cloud as simply an enabler of crowdsourcing, the relationship is actually much deeper: crowdsourcing is the natural result of applying cloud architectural principles to the development process. One of the core characteristics of cloud is elasticity: instead of paying high upfront (capital) costs for fixed capacity, you can pay variable (operating) costs based on capacity that scales according to demand. Similarly, crowdsourcing provides a model where you can replace high upfront labor costs with variable costs and more importantly, pay only for results instead of paying for inputs.

But just as with cloud computing, cost is only part of the equation. Public cloud vendors are able to rapidly innovate because customers share a common multi-tenant platform, so they don’t have to devote time and resources to support hundreds of possible on-premise configurations. With crowdsourcing, customers benefit from multi-tenancy in a much more direct ways. Drawing from a multi-tenant pool of shared development talent means you can staff every project with technology specialists instead of the IT generalists that are often necessary due to limited headcount. Because crowdsourced challenges attract multiple participants and submissions, you can reduce the risk of single sources of failure in your development process. And crowdsourcing allows you to combine the best aspects of multiple independent approaches within a competition model that drives innovation for your applications.

Crowdsourcing Will Become Just Another Benefit of the Cloud
If you scratch beneath the surface of almost any Internet success story, you’ll find that crowdsourcing has played an important role: Google’s pagerank analyzed user-created hyperlinks to improve search, Amazon’s recommendation engine dramatically increased online purchases, Yelp crowdsourced reviews, YouTube and Wikipedia crowdsourced their core content, and even the ubiquitous social media hashtag was originally invented and popularized by the community. Crowdsourced content so fundamentally reflects and reinforces the architecture and principles of the Internet, that today it’s hard to even find a site that doesn’t utilize user posts, pins, uploads, comments, votes, shares, or tags in some way.

Because the cloud adoption curve is a decade or so behind the Internet, it may be hard to see how fundamentally intertwined crowdsourcing and cloud are becoming. But as the demand for cloud labor continues to skyrocket and as younger employees bring a greater expectation for freedom and career mobility (along with their own devices) to their jobs, the question is not whether crowdsourcing will become a dominant development model, but when. And as with the cloud, whether your company will be in a position to take advantage of it, or fall behind competitors who have figured out the new model first.

The 5 Habits of Highly Effective Cloud Architects

by Chris Bruzzi (@chrisbruzzi) and Nick Hamm (@hammnick)

Image from SearchCloudComputing.com

As Dreamforce nears and Appirio completes its 6th year as an enterprise cloud solution provider and trusted advisor to technologists everywhere, we wanted to reflect on some of the things we’ve learnt about developing cloud solutions over the years. In this blog, we often focus on the business and end-user implications of cloud computing, but this time we want to focus on what’s different about the cloud for developers and technologists.


Public Cloud Development is Fundamentally Different than On-premise
Public cloud development is fundamentally different than traditional development. There are two inherent things about public cloud platforms that change everything.

The first is multi-tenancy. This means that everyone running a cloud application or platform is on the same underlying version. This has huge implications. In the on-premise world, literally every piece of software is proprietary because it’s designed to work with a particular permutation of application, middleware, database and hardware. Something custom that’s written for a particular version of SAP for a particular customer or site has a very high likelihood of never being used again. Contrast this with the multi-tenant cloud model where everyone is on the same application, running on the same platform, database, operating system, and hardware.

Something you write for Salesforce or Google Apps or Workday can run in any customer's environment since everyone is on the same version. This means that reuse, which has always been an elusive goal, is not only possible, but also very achievable. At Appiro, for instance, we have a library of 500+ assets that we bring to any project and that gives our teams a big jumpstart. This may sound familiar, but the difference is that these assets aren’t frameworks that need a lot of work to reuse. Many are literally components that can be plugged into the next project. Any rework that does arise is around fitting into a unique business context, never the underlying compatibility of the technology. A few examples - a component that enables you to “check-in” to a nearby Salesforce account, a component that provides dashboards to visualize mail migration errors for Google projects and an application that enables you to store large files on Amazon from Salesforce.

The second big change from traditional applications is that customizations happen through metadata. So, the core application stays the same and customizations can be exported as metadata and shared. When you combine this with multi-tenancy, you get something amazing. Now, anyone anywhere in the world can spin up a developer instance of the cloud application, and if you share your configuration with them, they can have an exact logical replica of your application. This means that it’s now easier than ever for companies to tap into an entire world of developers to solve their specific problems. Our CloudSpokes developer community is one example of a developer community where enterprises can benefit from the expertise of tens of thousands of developers rather than just the ones they happen to have on staff. Other prominent communities include uTest that offers crowdsourced testing and Stack Overflow that offers Q&A on code development. The public communities of the cloud platforms themselves are far more useful than traditional product communities since everyone is talking about the same underlying platform.

Something that’s related to both multi-tenancy and metadata customization is the ability to collect meaningful application and environment data and measure oneself against others. Since public cloud providers collect application metadata and even provide APIs to access that data, it’s now possible to collect detailed data on your application. For example, Appirio collects data across projects on configuration, code and administration complexity, as well as adoption, for most of the solutions we build for customers. This helps us measure not only the quality of each solution, but also enables us to compare each solution against others to make sure that we’re making the right tradeoffs between simplicity and customization.

But taking advantage of these new paradigms means that you have to think differently about application development itself. It’s a shift from thinking of oneself as a developer to thinking of oneself as an architect and orchestrator of development.

The 5 Keys to Becoming a Cloud Architect 

1. Architect your solution in a componentized way: The key to being a cloud architect is to step away from the mindset of trying to crank through all the functional requirements by yourself. One has to step back and think about the business requirements and then architect a solution of loosely coupled components that address the overall requirements. This takes a bit more work upfront but pays huge dividends later, not only in terms of executing on the initial project but also for maintaining and evolving your solution. This was the promise of loosely coupled Service Oriented Architectures, but the constraints of on-premise software made it nearly impossible to actually work in this manner. 
2. Value interface (API) over language in your architecture: In past paradigms, IT organizations often defined themselves as Java or .NET shops. That then became the lens through which all architecture and development decisions were viewed. While the intent of driving deeper understanding and awareness of tooling around the development process was admirable, it led to applications being bound together too tightly. The cloud shifts the focus from the language to the service delivered. The whole premise of cloud applications and services is to deliver a service while abstracting how that service is delivered. As a cloud architect, that means you too have to shift your focus from the technology or language to architecting services and the APIs used to access them. This focus will reinforce components and will lead to future-proofing of your application development efforts. 
3. Drive reuse wherever possible: The next step is to think about the best way to execute each component in your design. There may already be trusted assets out there that you can reuse for some of the components you need. For example, Salesforce makes a lot of assets available through Force.com labs, that you may be able to reuse or adapt. Lots of other cloud providers do the same through open source “labs” assets. If you already have an internal library of assets, that may be an even better starting point. In case you're not starting from an existing asset and actually need to create a new component, you can save yourself a lot of work by starting with a public cloud PaaS like Force.com or Google App Engine.
4. Extend your team with crowdsourcing: For components that can’t be built from existing assets, think about whether you can crowdsource their development. In fact, one of the key values of thinking in components is the ability to create interfaces that allow components to be created in parallel and potentially even in different technologies. So, before you develop, see if the component can be crowdsourced through communities like CloudSpokes for code or 99Designs for UI. The benefit of this approach is that you can get a lot of your application built quickly and in parallel since you’re not constrained by your own team’s capacity. You may also be surprised by creative solutions that you wouldn’t have thought of. This happens to us and our customers with CloudSpokes on a regular basis. Cloud platforms make it possible for many more people to contribute to your success and vice versa. So, in addition to using crowdsourcing, make sure you also engage in relevant communities, whether they're communities directly related to the products you use or more general developer communities.
5. Measure your applications: With cloud solutions, there’s a lot of data available about your application’s configurations, code, quality and more. You can get access to much of this data as an administrator for your cloud application. Start to use the data to build a detailed picture of your application and especially how it’s changing. If possible, try to collect benchmarks on your application relative to others to see where you stand. Some cloud providers collect these benchmarks but not all do, so you may have to do some legwork!

Tell Us How You Think Like a Cloud Architect
Do you have any other tips on how to think like a cloud architect? We’d love to hear from you on Twitter @appirio or in comments!

Chris Bruzzi leads Appirio’s Technology team. His team is responsible for Appirio’s Cloud Enablement Suite, an integrated suite of applications, assets, benchmarks and crowdsourcing community to enable enterprise cloud development. 

Nick Hamm is member of Appirio's Technology team and is responsible for Appirio's Cloud Asset Library. He is a Salesforce MVP and has helped over 200 companies across a wide variety of industries transform the way they do business by implementing cloud solutions.

What Makes This Year’s Dreamforce Different - The Return of the Jedi

@singhns
(A 3 part blog all rolled up into one.  Don’t worry, the really geeky Star Wars analogies are at the end) 

Given salesforce.com’s leadership in the commercialization of cloud computing for business, each year Dreamforce feels like New Year’s Eve (for the cloud).  It’s a milestone event people plan around, sets off a huge set of social rituals (parties), and for me, it leads to reflection and contemplation for what has come to pass and what will happen in the coming year.

Why is this year different than the past ? For me, it’s not the people registering (may approach 80,000) or the celebrities (Sir Richard Branson, Jeff Immelt, Collin Powell, Tony Robbins) or that this will be the last Appirio event held at the MOMA for several years (due to renovations).  

What makes this year different is that it feels like the beginning of the epic battle that concludes every great story.  The climatic scene you know is coming and that everything else builds up to - Achilles facing Hector, the storming of Normandy, the final battle in Lord of the Rings, the confrontation with the Death Star in Star Wars and Return of the Jedi.  It is the outcome of these moments that decide the fate of many beyond those directly engaging in the battle.  

This Dreamforce, more than ever before, it’s about more than the main character (Salesforce). It’s about the epic battle between history and progress, the clash of cloud with on-premise across every part of the business, the battle between social and control.  If you have spent your career around the intersection of business and technology -  the moment has a dramatic tension, it’s the instant before all hell breaks loose in the battle for the future enterprise application architecture.  

Next week we will see Salesforce align with Workday more directly than ever before.  They will together represent a threat to the majority of revenue collected by SAP and Oracle.  They will help redefine what a system strategy looks like in the future. In fact, Marc, the original cloud rebel, may actually be the Han Solo to Aneel’s Luke Skywalker.  Marc’s efforts carved a path never before seen, whereas Aneel’s work, with the very well known HR and Financials areas, strikes to the very core of the old empires of Oracle and SAP.

Yet it’s about more than just the goliaths of the past and the future battling each other.  At every turn there’s a tension between the highly structured IT systems and business processes of the past with the collaborative, social, be everywhere mobile world we live in.  Dozens of vendors will introduce solutions that help us navigate the new world with control - instead of trying to take tightly controlled, physically and emotionally closed systems of the past and adapting them to the new world. It is the battle for how you will get to the future that is perhaps most important for customers - will your future build on the foundation of the past or reinvent the future ?

To understand the extent of this clash and why now is so pivotal, lets look at what brought us to this moment.

Systems began by organizing around the structure of a company - Sales, Service, Marketing, Finance, HR, Manufacturing, etc.  As gaps emerged, organizations undertook expensive, necessary, never-ending, partially successful initiatives to create a 360 degree view of the customer (a term used ad-nauseum over the years).  IT strategies and systems of the past placed a premium on control, governance and structured processes.  This resulted in a strong desire to "get things right" and a recognition that the foundation would ground an enterprise’s systems strategy for a release cycle or 5-10 years.  

While this highly structured IT approach created consistency, it struggled when that consistency was challenged by changing business conditions.  As a result IT became associated with being slow and unresponsive to the needs of the business, when in fact it was their design principles (appropriate at the time) that led them to optimize in ways that created this rigidity.

Over time frustration rose because of this rigidity, but there didn’t seem to be any alternative.  Businesses just assumed this was the way it was.  People like Nicolas Carr wrote “Why IT Doesn't Matter Anymore” (2003) because innovation was slow, incremental and often easily replicated by others. Enterprise technology looked more like the auto industry than the harbinger of “creative destruction.”

The Internet changed everything.  

The Internet showed the power of the collective.  By placing everyone on a shared platform we saw innovations in content and collective contribution.  Then we saw innovations in connecting information from multiple sources with great ease to produce things substantively more than the sum of the parts.   All of a sudden, the most important person was the user and “systems and solutions” designed themselves around the user.  Once “you” became the central paradigm, social became a natural extension.  And finally mobile transformed technology from something you used only when in front of a computer to something that's an integral part of your whole life - wherever you are and whatever you're doing.  

Even if we just stopped here, our expectations of enterprise systems would be fundamentally different than they were in the past. Having experienced complicated and powerful applications that are simple and natural to use, we start to expect the same of internal systems.

Yet, something else happened. Because the Internet connected people together at scale, it became possible for people to organize themselves like never before through social mediums like Facebook and Twitter. In that instant a world where businesses just pushed information out to consumers was gone forever. Consumers could have conversations at scale about everything - including your products and services. The amount of content they generated about their own preferences, their experiences with products, and how their lives were impacted dwarfed anything a company could control with its own marketing efforts - no matter how significant. 

So now, the old world of systems and IT strategies faced what appeared to be a two front war.  

1.  Trying to match expectations for simple, easy to use and powerful systems that treat the user as the most important constituent (rather than a necessary evil) - and are available from anywhere on any device.

2.  Attempting to capture a true picture of the consumer and market in a world where there is far more information and dialogue outside a company (via the Internet) than within a company's own systems. Addressing the 360 degree view of the customer became a completely different animal.

The second driver is so broad that it impacts far more than the systems.  It changes the very nature of relationships between brands and the customer, and changes what it means to be in sales, marketing, service and any part of the business that engages with the customer.  All of a sudden, you have to deal with each customer as a person, where their purchases of your product are just a small part of their story.  This in turn has created a third challenge for systems.

3.  Systems inside the company need to be organized around customers instead of functions.  Structured and unstructured collaboration need to occur faster and in ways never envisioned by the applications serving each functional silo.

The customer has become a far more important driver of what each employees does than where they sit in an organization.  In addition, because our worlds as consumers and workers don’t exist in vacuums, we expect our work systems and worlds to behave like the rest of our life.  As workers we want a greater voice in how things function, to connect to people at various levels and roles to accomplish our jobs, and for ideas to rise because of their merit instead of where and at what level they originated.  And that brings us to our final disruption.

4.  People in organizations, particularly information workers, expect to be treated with the same principles that govern business relationships with customers.  Rewards and recognition, collaboration and how the business supports an employee’s current and future success at work become something that require more than just the right incentives. Your people expect the same technology capabilities that enable collaboration with customers to be a part of their life inside your company.

The climactic battle that Dreamforce is about to start is about far more than technology change.  It is not, as so many pundits have tried to frame narrowly as simply another technology change analogous to mainframe to client server.  It is about the soul of how innovation in information, technology (internet/cloud/mobile) and social has changed our society and will ripple through businesses.  

Even Oracle and SAP no longer debate cloud. They are instead reacting and in the midst of reorienting their own financial models and product portfolios.  They battle the cloud leaders over who can be the best partner for organizations in navigating through this transition.  They are betting on varying rates of cloud adoption to give them time to create solutions aligned with this future. They will try to convince customers that their stability with the past will make them a safe choice for the future.

Cloud providers in turn make the simple case that the very traits that made old world companies successful will prevent them from moving forward.  If this argument holds, it’s nearly impossible for the last generation’s bullies to be the right answer for tomorrow.  Alliances between cloud leaders like salesforce.com and Workday (and Facebook and Google), and the ecosystem of cloud players that come with them, bring forward the battle for the entire enterprise to today.  They speed up the timetable for the old guard to react.  

Fundamentally companies like salesforce.com, Workday, Facebook and Google are designed for a world where collaboration occurs across your organization and directly with customers and partners as organizations and individuals. Except for manufacturing and supply chain operations, these solutions can create an enterprise backbone for how any company can create products and motivate employees to engage with and delight customers

The companies that have first adopted these new technology platforms as their new enterprise architectures are those who are more often dealing with consumers in fast-moving environments (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and other internet companies) or those who have the advantages of starting fresh (e.g. Appirio).  But dismissing cloud as only suited to the needs of companies like these is missing the point. These companies had to change first because of their business strategies and the realities of their market.  They had to change first because they are at the forefront of industries where consumers want more and strategies more dynamic - an inevitability that is coming to every industry.

Dreamforce 2012 will be the beginning of the next epic battle.  The cloud and all it represents has won hearts and minds.  Now the question will be how fast the body of business will evolve and who will shepherd that transformation.  The final scene of this chapter begins next week and we at Appirio can’t wait!

For Star Wars fans see the Special Tribute Blog that carries the Return of the Jedi analogy way too far!

The State of Social @ Work - The People’s Perspective (Finally!)

By Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)

There’s no question about it.  Social media is having a huge impact on the way we live, from how we communicate and organize to the way we buy things or ask for help.  But what impact is it having on how we work?  Ask a vendor and they’ll tell you that social tools can change your business - but only if you buy their product or service.  Ask an analyst and they’ll likely talk about social media’s potential in the business, but point out how ROI is still not quantified and where risks remain. 

But what if we ask the users?  It sounds elementary but it’s amazing how much of the research today on social in the enterprise focuses only on technology buyers or executives, not the actual employees and managers who are (or could be) using social tools and processes to improve the way they sell, service, market, recruit, collaborate or share.  The adoption of social tools in our personal lives is creating a revolution from the ground up, so we asked ourselves, why does all the research focus on the top down?

Get the Social @ Work eBook

This is why we created our first “State of Social @ Work,” a survey of over 300 users in the U.S. and U.K. that tries to better understand how employees are using social tools on the job, how far along they think their companies are with social, and the ways in which they think their company could benefit by adopting social. 

Today we announced the results of this survey, and released an eBook with more detailed data and implications.  Some of the results we expected, some were surprising, and some just raised more questions. 

People Use Social Tools a Lot More Outside Work than at Work
We walked into this project assuming that people were becoming more social in their personal lives - an assumption confirmed in our own survey. Almost 90% of survey respondents said they use at least one social tool personally, with social networking topping the list of tools used at 66% of respondents.

However, we weren’t so sure how social people were on the job. Our survey results indicate the people are using some tools - especially in areas like social recruiting - but overall respondents  used social tools twice as often in their personal life than in their professional life. We ourselves talk a lot about the consumerization of IT and employees are bringing the tools they use at home into work, so we found this a little surprising. However, as @dahowlett pointed out to us recently, “employees work for companies and they want to keep their jobs.”

People and Companies Recognize the Value of Social
So are people not using social tools on the job because they aren’t permitted, or because they don’t think it’s important? It’s hard to say definitively, but results indicate that employees do think investment in social is important. More than 40% of respondents said their company should invest more in becoming a social enterprise compared to other business priorities. We assumed people would say social was important in a vacuum, but this was somewhat surprising when contrasted to other investment areas.  We honestly thought they might be more skeptical.

Where are companies making investments? More than 35 percent of respondents said their companies had set aside budgets or resources to make business processes more social. We weren’t surprised at the top two areas - “establishing social media policies” (47 percent) and “building out a presence on social sites” (37 percent). But we were surprised at what came in third - “adding social features to existing internal applications (31 percent).” The fact that the average employee pointed out a change in their internal business applications says a lot about the success of vendors like Salesforce.com, Workday and yes, even Microsoft, who are investing in social side of their platforms.

Why should companies make investments? According to research from analysts like Gartner, the majority of enterprise social activities are externally oriented - focused on using social media to engage with prospects, customers, partners or suppliers. Therefore, it wasn’t surprising that respondents in our survey also pointed to customer-facing processes as the place where improved social tools and processes could have the biggest impact. 

Perceived Benefits of Social Vary by Geo and Company Size
What was surprising was that beyond “attracting new customers” and “servicing existing customers,” perceived benefits vary by geography and size.  For example, U.K. respondents were twice as likely to select employee engagement as those in the U.S.  And larger companies put half as much importance on attracting new customers as small companies and they were 1.5x more likely to value employee engagement. The results make sense, but are something to think about as companies determine where to make investments.

It’s Still Early for Social, But It’s No Fad
There’s still a long road to go before social becomes pervasive in business, and a lot of confusion remains.  When asked if they would consider their company a social enterprise, the majority of respondents said “no” and 20% didn’t even know what that question meant. Whether they’re talking about the term (which might be good news for Salesforce.com who recently announced they’re walking away from that term), or the concept is up for debate. But what shouldn’t be argued is that understanding what users think is more important than ever before.

Start With Your Users For Success
Ultimately, the success of any software initiative, and especially a social initiative, depends on users. So, before rolling out new social technologies based on executive mandates or a persuasive vendor pitch, remember to ask your employees how and where they think social could help them do their jobs better. You can get a running start with our State of Social @ Work eBook!

Adoption: The Key to Cloud Success

A conversation with Michael Krigsman (@mkrigsman)

We use technology to get things done better, more efficiently, or effectively. The “we” in that statement is often undervalued because, ultimately, it’s users that determine whether or not technology improves business outcomes.

The current wave of enterprise cloud innovation, led by Salesforce.com, Workday and Google, is creating a user experience at work that is inspired by the best of the consumer web. However, even though cloud solutions are far easier to use than traditional applications, enterprises must not forget the fundamentals. Any new solution means change for users; if you want them to embrace that change, an adoption plan and strategy are essential. In fact, cloud solutions need a different adoption approach than traditional change management.

We recently spoke with Michael Krigsman about his perspective on cloud adoption. Michael is well known for chronicling what happens when things go horribly wrong with IT projects in his IT Project Failures blog on ZDNet; he also writes about IT innovation in the Wall Street Journal’s CIO blog and consults on strategy and innovation. This unique vantage point gives him a deep appreciation for the importance of adoption.

For more on how you can drive adoption systematically, be sure to check out Michael’s new white paper, “Achieving Business Goals in the Cloud: The Importance of User Adoption.”

Just Another Work Day

By Naoki Tsukamoto

Workday filed their S-1 last Thursday in preparation for their IPO. Appirio has been a Workday partner since September 2010 and we've been fortunate to have our Workday practice explode globally along with Workday’s growth. Their IPO filing has been eagerly anticipated and is the exclamation point on an amazing run so far. But if you congratulate Workday employees in meetings, they’ll be the first to say that it’s not a milestone worth celebrating yet.

I do love their customer-first culture, but since I'm not a Workday employee, I’ll take a moment to recognize a few of their achievements to date.  Workday’s S-1 filing shows that they increased revenues over the past three years by 400% to $134.4 million for fiscal year-end Jan 31.  Workday already has over 325 major customers and more than two million employees using their platform.  As Dennis Howlett blogged, “If anyone needed convincing that there is an enterprise cloud market for systems of record then that in itself should be proof positive.”

On-premise software vendors have had to finally confront the reality that their lucrative ERP franchises are no longer safe and are making a variety of defensive moves. Oracle acquired cloud-based recruiting specialist Taleo, while SAP acquired SuccessFactors' performance management suite. Last week, even IBM jumped into the HCM space by acquiring Kenexa. Cloud HCM is not just attracting the interest of on-premise vendors. As salesforce.com moves beyond CRM and looks to more social business processes, HCM is attracting their interest. They acquired social performance management provider Rypple last year and are expected to announce a broader HCM strategy at Dreamforce next month.

However, if you stack up capabilities in cloud HCM, Workday is uniquely positioned and the company most likely to offer their customers a seamless and comprehensive solution. Even more intriguing would be some combination of Workday's core HCM capabilities with Salesforce's platform and social layer.   

Enterprise Cloud HCM Landscape

*Note: Excludes SAP BusinessByDesign since it's focused on the midmarket

At Appirio, we are so convinced that Workday offers the most comprehensive cloud HCM solution that we not only recommend it to our clients, but also run our own businesses on Workday HCM and Financials.  We've seen first-hand that Workday's cloud platform offers a new way to run one's business. It's not just cheaper and easier to use but is much easier to extend.  We've been able to extend Workday HCM with social recruiting from Jobvite, gamified performance management from Badgeville and a number of custom Force.com apps.

Ultimately, Workday is the foundation for an entirely new type of HR organization, and that's what we're most excited about. For more on cloud powered HR, see our whitepaper on “How Cloud-Based Human Capital Management Can Impact Business Results.”   Or come see us in few weeks at Booth #701 at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference.  We happen to be right next to our friends from Workday!