These are reflections from having spent a few days at the annual Salesforce.com event, Dreamforce. We hope they are valuable to people who need an executive summary-level understanding of the company and its position in the cloud and SaaS marketplace. Full disclosure, the company paid for my flight and hotel to attend Dreamforce.
The current economic climate is having a devastating effect on almost every business around. In order to adapt to changing conditions and opportunities, businesses will need to use flexible, adaptable systems to survive. The days of expensive year-long implementations of behind-the-firewall software look to be behind us.
According to a new report by Accenture, a large number of Millennials (those born between 1977 and 1997), expect their companies to accommodate their IT preferences, including their preferred computers and applications. More than a third of Millennials also indicated that they were dissatisfied with the technologies their employers currently provide.
Among other things, Millennials would prefer to use instant messaging, text messaging, and RSS feeds to communicate with their clients and customers, though very few companies currently support these technologies. The report also highlights that a lot of employees are simply bypassing corporate IT departments if those don't offer them the services they need.
Mobile messaging is experiencing a period of record growth, according to some figures released from VeriSign earlier this week. Looking at the numbers more closely, some interesting trends emerge. Those include the use of messaging for social and political change, marketing, such as that done by U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's mobile campaign, and the use of mobile messaging for charitable donations. Other sectors experiencing significant increases are the enterprise and financial institutions. In those two areas alone, mobile messaging has seen a 115% increase in only a year's time, and much of that is thanks to the financial industry's adoption of the medium for business to consumer communication.
We at ReadWriteWeb are huge Basecamp fans. It raises the productivity of small, physically dispersed teams (like ours) to a level that enables new virtual companies to be be viable. Basecamp changes the traditional answer to the question: "can we operate virtually from around the world, or do we all need to live in the same place?" ReadWriteWeb, for example, lives on Basecamp; it is our office.
But there is one problem. Basecamp is browser native. I want mobile native. And ReadWriteWeb's VP of Content Dev Marshall Kirkpatrick tweeted today that he wants a Basecamp AIR app. Either way, it's clear that browser-only doesn't cut it anymore for Basecamp.
Web Office vendor Etelos announced recently that it is enabling enterprise customers to white-label the Etelos platform, via a multi-product offering called the Etelos Platform Suite (detailed below). Up till now, Etelos has been a company that offers a wide range of apps and services to developers and vendors - it took care of everything from billing to customer management. Most of that service offering was done via a proprietary platform. Essentially, now Etelos is letting other companies use that platform to do the very same thing.
The iPhone may have outsold RIM's Blackberry devices here in the U.S., but Google knows that getting their software in the hands of business execs still means building Blackberry apps. The company's recent offering in this arena is a new, deployable package of Google Maps for Mobile which IT admins can distribute using Blackberry Enterprise Server.
At big events, PR likes to put out some info prior to the event under embargo, but save something exciting for the Keynote. Well I guess that was Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, joining Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com CEO, up on stage to announce their partnership. Facebook sent Sheryl Sandberg, not Mark Zuckerberg, as this was a business crowd with more Blackberries than iPhones and plenty of ties.
It was a big party. Amazon and Google were also invited. The message - all aligned with Salesforce.com in their quest to be the dominant Cloud Computing platform for business.
Twitter. It's either the stupidest thing on the internet or it's an essential tool in your workday. Most people feel one way or the other about the service and the biggest indicator of which direction anyone goes is whether they've spent more or less than a full day learning how to use the service.
For the scores of people now convinced that a group micromessaging service like Twitter can be powerfully useful, there are few prospects as interesting as the use of such a tool at work - for work. There are lots of different software options, though, and it's hard to know which one to select. Enter a new report from Pistachio Consulting, topic area experts and providers of an excellent new report on the options.
In a couple of reports released today, Forrester Research makes projections on the future of enterprise web technologies. Forrester predicts that social networking tools and internal wikis "will have the greatest impact on workplace collaboration". It is bullish too on forums and RSS, which Forrester claims "have a future in the enterprise but are currently underused". Mashups are also mentioned in the report - previously they'd claimed it would be a $700 million market by 2013. As for which technologies will decline, Forrester says that podcasts have "a limited future as an enterprise tool".
