After a rather intense lead-up, Dreamforce 2011 is finally behind us – and what a show it was! 4 days, 45,000 registered attendees, Metallica, Will.i.am, MC Hammer, Alanis Morissette, Jay Leno, and on and on. This was one of the largest tech shows we've ever seen in terms of numbers, and the energy was amazing.
We unveiled our ongoing message of building the "Mobile Social Enterprise," which focuses on enabling mobile access to social networks. We build Chatter and Facebook/Twitter into so many of our mobile apps that it only makes sense.
This of course matches up well with Salesforce's big unveil of the Social Enterprise. Take a look at Marc Benioff's presentation below to get a true sense for their vision of the future:
These days you really can't visit a tech blog without seeing 3 stories on the front page about tablet computers. iPads, Samsung Tablets, BlackBerry PlayBooks, Xooms, and a whole cadre of cheaper wannabe products.
What makes them so hot? Tablets are cheap, tremendously portable, have thousands of apps, but most of all – people love using them. There's just something to interacting with a machine and its software so intimately.
Earlier this year we at Model Metrics commissioned a study by Dimensional Research to find out what exactly businesses are starting to do with these things. The results were interesting to say the least:
78% of respondents are deploying tablets by end of 2013
Only 51% have a strategy on what to do with them
72% of participants have iPads, but most of those are just testing the waters
We find this particularly interesting because we've found a few things that work, and work very well. If you've got the time, here is a 30 minute presentation on how you can start using the iPad in your business. Lots of use cases, from field sales to customer service, and anything in between.
Today we released the results of an independent survey that shed interesting light on how enterprises are using tablets.
The results may surprise you. We hear a lot about how mobile is the next big thing. And from the conversations we have with enterprises, it most often is. But what we’re hearing, and this survey validates, is that we are still in the very early days of using tablets to deliver actual business value.
Most enterprises have tablets purchased by employees who are just “testing them out.” Perhaps using them for work email. Only 22% of companies have “officially” deployed them for business use in some fashion. This may even have occurred in a small department, not necessarily across the company. At the same time 72% know they are used by employees within their companies.
Along the same lines, 78% plan to have tablets officially deployed by the end of 2013, yet only 51% report having an adoption strategy in place.
This means there is a huge opportunity for enterprises to drive innovation with these new devices. The enterprises we talk to with the right mindset may not yet know exactly how to leverage them for business, but they see the potential to differentiate and do things differently. We’ve done some really interesting mobile projects for clients in the consumer goods, insurance and life science industries in particular that are really exciting.
Check out the results for yourself. Does your business have a plan in place to leverage the next generation of mobile devices?
Apple's iPad is the hottest device in the workplace today. According to Computerworld, Medtronic recently purchased 4,500 iPads for employees, and they aren't the only ones. Microstrategy is behaving similarly. Many companies are making the jump early to adopt these devices and putting themselves at an advantage.
Given the iPad's vast consumer and business market acceptance (15 million units sold in 2010 alone), what exactly are companies doing with these devices? Are they more than just a pretty toy?
Join us for a free webinar where our CTO, John Barnes will walk through answers to those questions and more, including how to take salesforce.com Content with you even without an internet connection. If you don't currently have a tablet device strategy in place you don't want to miss this interactive event.
Unless you live in a technology cave you have probably noticed the discussion in the industry around Flash and HTML 5 that has been started by the Apple controversy.My goal here isn’t to rehash what has been said around using Flash or HTML 5 in a browser or on a mobile device, but to share my thoughts around this debate as it applies to Enterprise Business applications.
There is valid debate occurring around the pro’s and con’s of using Flash to serve a banner ad, or a video, or if the <canvas> tag or <audio> tag are a viable alternative.However this is a minor point when you are considering which platform to use to create a business application or a consumer facing RIA (Rich Internet Application).
First, let’s look at where the HTML 5 spec currently sits.It is a much-needed refresh of the current HTML 4 spec and has some great features such as support for video, audio and offline data storage using SQL Lite.The W3C HTML 5 specification is currently in “Working Draft” status and is not expected to be finalized until 2012 or later.The other current issue with HTML 5 is that is only supported in varying degrees by the major Internet browsers and some of its features may never be supported by some browsers (such as an offline data store).
We do a lot of work for Fortune 500 clients and have used both Adobe Flex and HTML 5 on projects.Currently HTML 5 is an option if you have full control over which browsers will be used to run an application (which is frequently not the case, even in the Enterprise).In contrast, Adobe Flex is a great platform to build business applications and can run in virtually all desktop browsers.
Flex is a rich platform that has complex UI elements (data grids, tabbed navigators, menus, etc.) built directly into the Flex SDK (now called Flashbuilder).It allows you to take your application and easily run them in Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) on the desktop (outside of the browser) or on a mobile device*.
As a company we are generally technology agnostic and try to bring the best options to the table to meet client needs.Although our focus is around deploying Cloud based solutions we have found that user interface or taking the Cloud offline is important to our clients.The question of Flex vs. HTML 5 for a business application is an easy one to answer today and will likely be so for the next couple of years.The promise of HTML 5 is great, but until the specification is finalized and it is widely supported by all major browsers it can only be used in limited ways and it doesn’t have the developer productivity tools that are inherent in Flex.
Here is a real world example.One of our early iPhone products on the iTunes AppStore was Search2GO, a simple search tool for Salesforce.com.This was built in Objective C and it took approximately 8 weeks to develop.Yesterday I watched two developers create over half of this same functionality using Flex/AIR and had it running on an Android phone in a day.Granted there are still things that could be added, but this was a great illustration of why Flex/AIR is a great toolset.
So while the debate rages on about HTML 5 vs Flash in the consumer market I’d recommend taking a hard look at Flex for business applications.
On the heels of my Top Cloud Computing Stories of 2009 comes (appropriately enough) my Top 5 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2010. Let’s jump right into it.
1) There Will be Another Outage, and No One Will Panic
In 2009 there were two significant outages of Google’s Gmail service, which rendered it unavailable temporarily. The most interesting part of the story is that the outages are so rare that they were deemed newsworthy by the mainstream media. In 2010 there will likely be an outage of another major Cloud Computing vendor, and the reactions in the media will be the same. It will be covered broadly for 2 reasons:
Outages are very rare
Critics and IT luddites are looking for a story to keep the business side off of their backs
Either way, vendors have their best and brightest working to ensure that they don’t happen, and if they do happen they will be short-lived and you won’t even have to think about it. The problem fixes itself.
2) Google Enterprise Applications Will Gain Large Acceptance
In 2009 Google gained significant traction in the market with its Enterprise Apps (Gmail, Docs, Calendar) and in 2010 that trend will only accelerate. Enterprises spend approximately $17b annually on Microsoft Office, and Google’s pricing model combined with its flexibility mean Microsoft could be in trouble. Organizations are always looking for ways to save money, and this is an easy one.
3) Consolidation of Cloud Computing Vendors The big players in cloud computing (Salesforce, Google, Amazon Web Services) have all built good products with basic functionality, and rely on external players to augment them. They focus on what they do best, and outsource the rest.
As many of these augmentations become more mature and become more native to the platforms, look to see the smaller companies to get swallowed up. This creates more value for the big vendors while limiting their exposure to development risk, and increases their internal talent pools.
Combine the business reasons for acquisitions with the ongoing improvements capital markets, and consolidations should make a big comeback this year.
4) "Young" Vendors Will See Explosive Growth
As more parts of the various cloud computing platforms are further opened up for development, expect to see fresh young startups blossoming to fill business requirements. I also fully expect to see our company’s offerings around sales, service, and call centers to grow for these exact reasons.
5) Cloud Computing’s Growth Accelerates
The economic turmoil has been going for over 2 years now, and it appears we are in a new normal. This environment has forced companies to cut costs and run leaner than in previous years. With IT budgets either shrinking or headcount being reduced, it is no longer optional to optimize staff’s time. Organizations do not want to waste resources on maintaining email servers or other on-premise applications when on-demand applications in the cloud make more sense financially.
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On the heels of my Top Cloud Computing Stories of 2009 comes (appropriately enough) my Top 5 Cloud Computing Predictions for 2010. Let’s jump right into it.