SINGAPORE--Salesforce.com and Google have joined forces to deliver on the promise of "cloud computing" in the front office, the back office and in the development team, freeing up IT resources from maintenance.
Salesforce Asia-Pacific region president and CEO Steve Russell, said that Salesforce for Google Apps marked a tectonic shift in Software as a Service (SaaS) and that it turned today's chief infrastructure officers into chief innovation officers by allowing even large enterprises to operate without the need for their own data centers, with everything running up there, securely in the cloud.
Russell also announced that Salesforce would be launching its first data centre outside the U.S., in Singapore, later this year.
Salesforce.com's executive vice president for products and marketing George Hu said Salesforce was now on track to become the first US$1 billion SaaS company with phenomenal year on year growth, especially in Asia, of over 80 percent.
Hu said part of his work was to dispel the myth that SaaS was not just for the small to medium enterprise.
Citigroup chose Salesforce to help drive success and lower risk. Japan Post is Salesforce's largest deployment with over 65,000 seats, and thus the model is scalable even for very large companies.
Nine years ago, Salesforce started off with sales force automation, but today has a wide variety of services from customer relationship management, partner management, channel management.
For the Spring '08 release, Salesforce now offers idea management which was recently selected by Starbucks for use worldwide.
Idea management is a Web 2.0 concept that allows users to register new ideas and comment and vote on ideas which would bubble up over time and be taken up by Starbucks for implementation.
Salesforce content management brings the concept of tag clouds to presentation files, documents and spreadsheets and allows users in the enterprise to leave comments on each file for others to see.
"It doesn't look like Documentum. It looks more like Facebook", he said.
Force.com was about a platform as a service and allowed developers to take their own ideas and create it on the Salesforce computing cloud without having to worry about performance, security or servers.
It was more than just a database service and was about creating a manufacturing management system for Cisco or a wealth management system for Merrill Lynch, he said.
It addressed the three key issues that start-up developers had to deal with and let them concentrate on innovation, freeing them from having to invest in and maintain the hardware and allowing anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection to innovate. It also provided a platform for the marketing and distribution of that service worldwide, Hu said.
Later this year, Salesforce will be launching its "Tour de Force" event in Bangalore, Shanghai and Tokyo to highlight the potential of Force.com as a development platform.
Hu noted that another myth was that SaaS was hard to integrate with legacy applications.
Even today, usage statistics show that half the transactions are already delivered via the API (as opposed to the web interface), meaning that the functions and data are called by legacy applications such as Oracle, SAP or Microsoft Outlook.
"It starts with our philosophy: enterprise applications should be as easy as buying a book on Amazon.com", Hu said.
Salesforce's marketing director Jeremy Cooper demonstrated Google Apps for Salesforce. Google Mail and Google Talk work with the familiar interface everyone is accustomed with organizational branding, but all messages are logged in the system for compliance alongside the customer or call it refers to.
Another way was for the call center application to initiate an email which included a Google Apps document or presentation and sent it out via Google Mail but from within the call center interface.
Cooper said this was unique and now allowed organizations to easily use Google Talk IM or email to contact customers and yet keep all records easily accessible for today's stringent compliance rules.
Google Docs (word processor) and Google Spreadsheets allow a user to pull the latest up to the minute company presentation template from the cloud and allow multiple departments to work on the same set of data and see updates in real-time.
CIO and CTO of Temasek Holdings Charles Koh said that using Salesforce meant that his department could concentrate on innovation rather than maintaining servers.
If needed, he could call Salesforce and turn on extra computing power without having to worry about business continuity or maintaining the servers internally.
Today's companies no longer installed and maintained their own PABXs, instead contracting out telephony services to telcos, and there was no reason the same could not be done with software and hardware, he said.
Later, Hu explained that Salesforce had a senior vice president and a team focussed on understanding local laws and compliance, as well as a general consul to help them proactively keep abreast of local legal issues, laws and compliance issues, but that so far, local laws had not hampered Salesforce's growth outside the U.S.
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