'Integration Among Cloud Providers Will Improve Their Value Proposition'

Peter Coffee, director, Platform Research, Salesforce.com, in an exclusive conversation with Biztech2.0, discusses the company’s focus on the Indian market and also shares his views on growing interest in the cloud computing model.

What does service cloud mean to customers today?

In the last several months, Salesforce.com has made two really important changes in what it means to offer cloud computing. One of the first notions was that facilities underneath our own packaged application could be made available to other developers in the enterprise or entrepreneurial software development market, what we call as platform-as-a-service or force.com. The other important recognition of the last year is that improving operations of the business inside the walls of the business is not enough any more.

You have to give business superior access to communities of customers and ecosystems of partners. So service cloud encompasses that planet worth of knowledge and understanding of what the company’s offerings can do. Thus, platform-as-a-service makes it possible to build more from bottom up, but service cloud makes it possible to do more by taking in more of the world around the company.

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Will clouds become more important in the current crisis period?

In the current economic condition, there is tremendous reluctance to take scarce capital and occupy it in capacity that is not generating value for business. Cloud computing allows companies to construct new systems without capital investments in new IT infrastructure and grow those systems to meet ever-changing business requirements at a rapid pace.

What is your take on the growing interest of leading IT vendors in the cloud market?

It is interesting that in the last few years, companies which were dismissing the idea of the services model are now eagerly wrapping themselves in the same flag by saying we are going to be cloud computing providers too. But this is the difference that I would encourage buyers to consider. There are technology companies that are introducing service offerings as a way to sell more technology and there are services companies including Salesforce.com whose entire culture is based on services and which are creating new technologies to accelerate and expand the delivery of new services. I think it makes a difference.

The IT department of every company is now interested to buy more services than technology. Every conversation that takes place today about the dramatic shift toward a services model of IT, at some point winds up mentioning Salesforce.com. However, we do not do it all. Amazon does infrastructure services, Google does collaboration and offers mining services and we do enterprise application services. So we believe that cloud is already a multi-vendor environment and every cloud provider becomes more valuable as a function of the other cloud, with which they can integrate and multiply their value preposition.

Will large companies get interested in cloud model?

The companies that are today making aggressive use of cloud technology are pretty much evenly divided, at least in our own customer base between small companies (around 100 employees), medium companies (around 1000 employees) and large enterprises. For example, we offer the standard application development platform to Dell Computers, which has tens of thousands of users on our platform. Our largest individual customer is Japan Post with 65,000 subscribers. Thus today even the largest companies are realising that better allocation of scarce capital, rapid time to value, faster development and deployment of applications are strategic benefits. Thus, cloud model is not in anyway confined to small and medium businesses but is also becoming the focus of new enterprise IT investments in large companies as well.

Can you shed some light on your plans for the Indian market?

We view the Indian market as one of our best prospects. The interest in development on the Force.com platform in India has grown four times as quickly in terms of developer registration as it has in the US. I think this is an excellent indicator of the potential that is recognised by the Indian software development community for doing cloud-based development. We will be going live in the first quarter of this year with a production data centre at Singapore to provide a closer facility to improve performance and capacity available to the Indian market place.

What are some of the main concerns of Indian CIOs when it comes to adoption of the cloud model?

When I speak with companies in India, some of the concerns that are put forth before me include the infrastructure issues in the country, to which I reply that if you are looking for an IT strategy to deal with an electrical power network, which is not yet meeting your expectations, turn to the cloud. That is one of the great things about the cloud, most of the heavy lifting on your infrastructure is being handled by the service provider and as long as you have a wireless Internet connection and laptop, you have all the capabilities and you don’t need to rely on massive server farms to provide your enterprise systems. There are other challenges typical to the Indian market place like many different languages are spoken. It is relatively easy to provide multi-language localisation capabilities with the Force.com platform as it has built-in facilities for this.

Which other applications is Salesforce planning to offer?

Many people associate Salesforce.com primarily with the CRM market, but in the last one year we have introduced some really important capabilities outside of the Salesforce automation space. Content application is now interwoven with our CRM application. So when you want to share a presentation or brochure with a customer, instead of e-mailing a bulky attachment, you can now send them a link and they can consume the material at their convenience from your systems. It also means that you also know when something was read and how much time was spent reading it, which can be very valuable information.

Another important product that we brought out is our ‘Ideas’ application. This is well known as it is being used by Dell Computers for the ‘Dell idea storm website’ and Starbucks for ‘My Starbucks idea website’.

What kind of trends do you see in the usage of cloud computing?

In India, I think probably there are more computer users at home than in enterprises. The uptake of technology in India has gone through a very important transition where the average individual in India is now probably leading his company instead of following his company in the adoption and effective use of computers. I believe this is going to drive intense expectations for cloud computing. It will have to be adapted to the exigencies of the Indian market place. It will have to overcome the issues of bandwidth, language diversity and power systems. It is going to be so overwhelmingly focussed on end user demands (both corporate and individuals) that the other issues will be overcome because the market place has definitely made it the choice of the day.