First blog since Dreamforce… not good! The marketing guys are all over me. “You have to blog consistently.” Of course they’re right, but who has the time! Inauguration was yesterday, pretty amazing times. So now that Obama is in and the recession will be coming to an end, banks will become stabilized, the capital markets will bounce back, and general goodness will proliferate throughout the world, it’s time to blog and get ready for a great 2009. Maybe he’ll need a quarter or two…
Anyway, things are moving fast. Salesforce’s year end is approaching at the end of January, so things are crazy. A million deals, trying to help the SFDC guys to pull them in. Since Dreamforce, we have seen custom development opportunities on the Force.com platform explode. Some of our customers and prospects are simply looking to add a bit of functionality such as in-line dashboards with the slick Adobe Flex look. Others are extending application functionality to expand the footprint of Salesforce in dramatic ways within their organization. We have seen huge demand for platform applications of all sorts, especially portals, call center applications, and now Salesforce Sites for building websites of top of Salesforce.
Many of these applications leverage Amazon’s new web services as well as Google technologies. The mashing up of all these cloud technologies has definitely arrived and we as a company are really starting to be known as the cloud guys and not just the salesforce guys. Of all the cloud players outside of salesforce, Amazon is definitely the most interesting (no offense to Google, Adobe, Facebook, etc.). Salesforce is the place to start for entry into the cloud, but once in, it’s time to leverage all these other technologies and bring the things they do great back into Salesforce and to the huge benefit of users, customers, or partners.
So what’s cool about Amazon? Roughly 30% of their revenue now comes from outside their core business of selling their own books. We get asked all the time about what they’re doing and how it can be leveraged. Here’s my quick two cents:
- EC2 – Host your data center on Amazon, leverage it for databases and mail servers, use it as a disaster recovery site, and leverage vast amounts of computing power. This isn’t the most exciting offering to talk about, but you can have access to Amazon’s amazing infrastructure for pennies.
- S3 – This is what most people think about when they think about Amazon Web Services. This is simply storing documents with Amazon, again, for pennies. You can easily pull images of documents into Salesforce or wherever else, so the user doesn’t even know where it’s located, they just know it’s easy to access and you know that it’s cheap.
- DevPay and Fulfillment Services – Now we’re getting into some more exciting areas. DevPay enables you to leverage Amazon’s shopping cart and billing system for launching a store. You can even sell subscription plans, not just a fee per order. Fulfillment Services is really interesting. This may not be a true cloud app, but you can actually send Amazon your inventory and they’ll store it in their distribution centers, which of course are the best that money can buy. They handle packing and shipping when someone buys from you, whether from your website or from there’s. You can focus on sales and marketing, they focus on the boring stuff that they do better than anyone else. Very cool!
- Mechanical Turk – This is definitely my favorite. Amazon calls it artificial artificial intelligence. It’s basically a workforce in the cloud. Some tasks computers just aren’t that great at. So you can send a task up through Amazon to the Turkers and for pennies they’ll complete the task. These are people located all around the world, who, for 2 cents or 5 cents or 1 dollar, depending on the task, will do something you ask of them. It could be looking at an image and transcribing it into data. When Steve Fossett’s plane went down, they leveraged the Turkers to look at satellite maps and help in their search, scanning for the plane. Companies also leverage it to clean data, analyze catalogs and competitive coupons, etc.
Anyway, hopefully it won’t be another two months and change before I blog again! Definitely check out the Amazon stuff and let me know what you think. On a sidenote, some of our team was out in Seattle meeting with the Amazon crew. Amazingly nice and wickedly smart people with huge visions. Thanks again to all those guys. To circle back to Obama and the future, leveraging the cloud is also the right thing to do from a green standpoint. Amazon and salesforce already have the servers and the data centers. No need to build the infrastructure yourself and incur all the electricity costs along with everything associated.
All the best,
ac
