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Salesforce.com is planning to invade Indian market. According to a report in the Industry Standard, Doug Farber, Vice President of Salesforce’s Asia Pacific operations, told the media that they are planning to focus on some select cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Gurgaon and Mumbai. They are hoping to slowly create awareness about cloud computing in India. The biggest drawback usually quoted against SaaS or Cloud adaption in India is the unreliable power and internet infrastructure. However, Mr. Farber is confident that Salesforce can overcome this using many different approaches
Bandwidth is a problem in India and everyone is aware of that. So, how will a technology like such which is dependent on bandwidth survive in India? Farber said "Yes bandwidth is a problem in India. But we have found out ways to work around it. For example, one of the things that we have done is something called offline PDA. A person is connected through his iphone or laptop in which the data is stored and synchronized as and when the device gets the connection back and on. So, there are mechanisms to work around such problems."
On top of the above mentioned solution, Salesforce can take comfort in the fact that India’s mobile infrastructure is fairly reliable and they have a decent mobile data network. Like Mr. Farber, I also don’t think the broadband infrastructure is going to be the biggest obstacle on their cloud computing plans. However, they will face major hindrances in places they don’t anticipate. My argument below may not hold true for medium to big companies in the country but it definitely applies to the small business segment.
But I like the fact that Salesforce is planning to take a crack at the untapped Indian market. I hope that they succeed in popularizing cloud computing in a country where broadband adoption is still dismal while mobile has been a runaway success. In fact, SaaS/Cloud Computing is better suited for India than the traditional software solutions. It will help Indian businesses, hampered by unreliable power and broadband infrastructure, to compete well in this global economy. Check out my two part series on Cloud Computing and Developing Countries here and here.
PS: My analysis above is entirely based on my personal experience in the country during the past 2-3 years. If you have experienced anything opposite, I would love to hear about it. Please share it in the comments section below.
I reported a couple of weeks ago about the aggressive stance salesboom is taking in order to acquire Salesforce.com customers.
Hot on the heels of that comes Netsuite's Renewforce program. Renewforce seeks to migrate SFA customers to Netsuite's own product line and is guaranteeing;
More and more we're seeing downward pressure on SaaS vendors - there is a cyclical effect going on here. When Salesforce first bought SaaS to mainstream business users, the major play was that their product would disrupt the incumbent offerings. Much of this disruption was going to come about as a result of the move from CAPEX to OPEX and the lower TCO of the product.
We're now seeing the initial SaaS vendors begin to feel the pressure from a new generation of vendors - all believing they can do it cheaper than SFDC.
It's a little comical that, simultaneously with consumer applications scrambling to find ways to gain a monetization path, business applications are being pressured on all sides by downward pricing pressure.
I wonder how far this pressure will cause prices to drop and who is best placed to trim the fat sufficiently to come out on top?
I kind of think those two names have quite a nice ring to them.....
Anyway, I've always been somewhat dubious about the true utility of Facebook. Having said that 120 million users create their own utility - merely from the momentum of the crowd.
Given my doubt it was interesting to see the announcement at Dreamforce by none other than Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, that Salesforce and Facebook are joining together to allow force.com applications to leverage Facebook's social graph.
This video gives a nice little example of using Salesforce's ideas application that allows companies (most notably Dell and Starbucks) to leverage the crowd to gain ideas for potential products or services.
It's a great move for both companies - it allows Salesforce to offer it's customers the power of true virality, while it allows Facebook to tap into where the dollars really are - business.
They say that all is fair in love and war - and most people extend that saying through to business. It was interesting to receive an email the other day from CRM vendor salesboom. A quick disclaimer before I launch into this post - I'm not intending to review the salesboom offering - that's been done before. Rather I'll look at the way salesboom aggressively hunts down customers.
Salesboom.com is a CRM vendor that isn't shy about announcing where it sees its competition. Salesboom came to my attention just after the announcement earlier this year that salesforce would be supporting Google docs. The unreasonablemen, looking at it as they do from a "real-world for enterprise" perspective, posted about salesboom, congratulating them on their integrations with Outlook, a product that in his words can be considered;
a true enterprise app...
Now I don't want to get into an argument about the merits, or otherwise, of Outlook. I do think that Outlook as an installed application will be disrupted, I haven't given up on the idea that Microsoft might disrupt Outlook themselves. Suffice it to say that salesboom were chasing customers by integrating with the tools that those customers are using today, rather than second guessing what they'll be using tomorrow.
Anyway, the email I received the other day had salesboom once again looking down the barrel (both barrels to be honest) at salesforce;
Salesforce.com's stock is at a 52 week low and it has been downgraded to sell from buy, we like to think that we are playing a part in this decline...
I have to say it's a little opportunistic to claim the credit for the stock price - there are perhaps one or two things happening in the economy that might be playing a part in that situation ;-) nonetheless it's a ballsy move, designed to cast a bit of a shadow over the "big-boy" of SaaS, salesforce.
Salesboom are also upping the ante with their migration offer.
salesforce customers receive (with some conditions);Putting the credit to the side for the minute - the second two parts of the offer have always struck me as being smart. Software is sticky - plain and simple. Migration is both a cost, but more importantly a hassle, for businesses - the actual migration is a pain, retraining is a pain and integration is a pain. Salesboom are providing some real solutions to this pain with their offer.
The salesboom "magic migration button" which promises to quickly and painlessly migrate data, workflow, customizations and other business implementations from salesforce, Siebel, ACT! and Netsuite is a great marketing feature - people like a simple depiction of a process - "one click migration" is as simple as it comes. As salesboom says;
[the] tried and true migration process alleviates the fear of a lengthy migration process or the possibility of losing data and business requirements while also ensuring a swift ROI due to the minimal transition period
I've always been a proponent of SaaS vendors going heavy on the service - in my opinion a reasonable sized investment up front - in terms of migration and initial support, gives a vendor a better than average chance at converting that sale and, more importantly, keeping that customer on-board. It's an oft-repeated theme - service is the killer app for SaaS.
It's always interesting watching fast followers in a market - traditional thinking has it that "me to" applications have difficulty gaining momentum in a market with a strong incumbent already operating. SaaS changes this a little bit, and SaaS with a major emphasis on the second "S" helps even more.
Add to this the fact that there are those who consider that even salesforce is due to be disrupted, and that their model of creating their own infrastructure isn't ideal. I posted about outsourced hosting previously and, while I'd have to admit that salesforce is in a different situation (leveraging their infrastructure as they do to create a second revenue stream from PaaS) - nimble players such as salesboom could create a chink n the armor of their larger slower moving competitors.
Steve Clayton from Microsoft is a great guy with one of the blogs I religiously follow (and I follow a lot of RSS feeds). I actually quite like his somewhat defensive stance - it must be hard working for a company that, from appearances, is reviled by all the cool kids in town, and to be at the receiving end of all those "I'm a Mac" ads must get a little tiresome. He's not blindly pro Microsoft - and can admit when MS competitors have good products offerings.
He does however have to toe the party line, hell hath no fury like Steve Ballmer spurned, and I'm sure even Ray Ozzie has a bite and a bark. Sometimes this party line just get's a little too much.
Steve posted the other day about Software+Services, Microsoft's play on SaaS saying that;
It’s taking the best of services and combining with the best of local software to deliver the experience the user wants – the power of choice. At some point in the future we may consume all of our software across the Internet but I’m willing to bet against it – there is much to be gained from using the best of both worlds. Services than run in the “cloud” of the Internet and software than runs locally on a phone, games box, PC, Mac, iPod, television or all manner of other devices.
That’s it in a nutshell. Software plus Services is a Microsoft term that explains an industry trend and whilst I don’t expect others, not least our competitors, to use that term they’re doing Software plus Services. The reach of Internet services combined with the power of local software. It’s as simple as that.
But everyone else calls it SaaS Steve - sure S+S is a Microsoft term but is there any need for yet another term? - why oh why does Microsoft insist on creating a worldwide industry standard followed by one industry player - it doesn't do MS any good, it confuses the marketplace and it's just argumentative.
