Video: Google Buzz Adds Twitter Inside Gmail; Competes With Yammer, Chatter

February 9, 2010

Google Buzz is more useful for the enterprise, mobile setting

At a press conference this morning, Google unveiled yet another “real-time” Web initiative: Buzz.

To me, Buzz is nothing else but Twitter integrated to the Gmail user interface, and which gets status updates from your address book contacts.

But who really needs another Twitter-like? Especially after spending lots of time and efforts building, and perhaps monetising, a large number of “followers.”

So my guess is that Buzz will be interesting to try out (I just got mine activated on my Gmail account) but will certainly bore you quickly.

Google Buzz is Twitter for the enterprise, not the consumer

However, I can see how Buzz can be useful for the enterprise, a professional Twitter like Yammer or Saleforce.com’s Chatter.

No wonder Google quickly said it intends to add Buzz to its Google Apps enterprise offering. Something that Google never really talk about when it launches a consumer product.

Even co-founder Sergey Brin highlighted how Buzz improved his own productivity, accelerating the way he communicates with others inside Google.

So, more than a consumer product (who needs yet another Twitter/social network to worry about it), Google Buzz – like Yammer before it – could actually find success inside the enterprise, not outside.

Here’s what Google’s VP of product management Brad Horowitz has to say about Buzz in the enterprise:

And  Buzz’s demo by product manager Todd Jackson:


DEMOfall To Honour 15 Tech Stars

September 20, 2009
For the very first time, Demo will honour some of its previous presenters that became Tech stars

For the very first time, DEMO organisers will honour 15 of its previous presenters that subsequently became some of the biggest success in Tech

For the first time this year, the DEMO award ceremony will be held during the lunch’s dessert – instead of the usual dinner ceremony – , followed by the Lifetime Achievement awards given to some high-power individuals, including (I wonder how many of them will actually show up?):

  1. Shai Agassi, Founder, TopTier Software, currently Founder and CEO, Better Place
  2. Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, salesforce.com
  3. Donna Dubinsky, Founder, CEO & Board Chair, Numenta
  4. Jeff Hawkins, Founder, Numenta
  5. Subrah Iyar, Founder and former CEO, WebEx
  6. Keng Lim, Founder, Chairman and CEO, NextLabs
  7. Kevin Lynch, Chief Technology Officer, Senior Vice President, Experience & Technology Organization, Adobe Systems
  8. Andy Rubin, Co-founder, Danger Inc., currently Vice President, Engineering, Google
  9. Mike Cassidy, Co-founder, Xfire, currently Co-founder & CEO, Ruba.com
  10. Diane Greene, Co-founder, VMware
  11. Colin Angle, Chairman, CEO and Co-founder, iRobot
  12. Helen Greiner, Co-founder, iRobot, currently Founder, The Droid Works
  13. Teresa Meng, Founder, Atheros Communications, currently Reid Weaver Dennis Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University
  14. Ben Trott, Founder & CTO, Six Apart
  15. Mena Trott, Founder & President, Six Apart

Salesforce Described As Old Guard Of The Software Industry

August 5, 2009

When a company is first in a market, it becomes a target. This appears to be what has happened to Salesforce.com, the startup that pioneered the software-as-a-service model.

A decade ago, Salesforce launched an attacked on the then old guard of the software industry (Oracle, SAP, Microsoft). It steadily built a business renting its software over the Internet instead of selling products customers install in-house. Quarterly revenue is now over $300 million.

After dismissing SaaS (for years), Oracle, SAP and Microsoft all mounted their horses and raced to develop offerings of their own.

The same rules of engagement are now turning against this leader.  Software industry experts have begun asking whether its reliance on proprietary and expensive components (EMC storage gear, the Oracle database) creates a disadvantage when competitors, such as Zoho and RightNow, rely on open source

Zoho is quick to say yes. CEO Sridhar Vembu argues the differences create a “fundamental inefficiency” for Salesforce. This inefficiency is stubbornly reflected in the $65 a month price it charges, Vembu says in a recent blog post. Zoho charges $15, which includes a necessary mail account.

A CRM price promotion from Salesforce. Does it point to inefficiencies?

A CRM price promotion from Salesforce. Does it point to inefficiencies?

Maybe that is why Salesforce resorted to a $50 percent off promotion, he adds. “That gap, or may be I should call it the Grand Canyon (in price) is exactly what you have to resort to when you have a fundamentally inefficient business model that precludes you from dropping your price the honest way,” he says.

He could be right. While this disadvantage may take months, or perhaps years, to show up in business results, it is likely something Marc Benioff and crew are mulling. It is one thing to stay ahead with features and AppExchange partnerships. It is another to have cost on your side.


Oracle Fires Apps Chief Ed Abbo Over Cratered Sales, Salesforce CEO Reveals

June 25, 2009
Oracles chief of applications was fired over a plunge in revenue sales, said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff (photo credit: Dan Farber)

Oracle's chief of applications was fired over plunging revenue sales, said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff (photo credit: Dan Farber)

For Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, Oracle’s problems last quarter came from its applications business – which competes with Salesforce.com, SAP and a slew of enterprise software companies – not from its lower profitability.

“It’s applications license revenue cratered. They fired their head of [the applications business]… He was gone without a trace the next day – Ed Abbo, the head of all Apps for Oracle. And their overall apps revenue decline very significantly,” revealed Benioff during a conversation at the Structure 09 conference.

As senior vice-president of Apps – and former CTO at Siebel – Abbo supervised Oracle’s “legacy” applications business, including the various CRM products acquired from Siebel, Peoplesoft… which compete squarely with Salesforce.com offering.

Later, Benioff took another yet another jab at Oracle pointing that its past mentor – Larry Ellison – hasn’t delivered a killer app in a long time; which for him explains Oracle’s latest move into the cloud space.

Follows the Benioff’s video comments on the news:


Benioff Spells The Truth Behind The High Cost Of Enterprise Software: Maintenance

June 25, 2009

Listening today at Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff at GigaOM’s Infrastructure 09 conference, one would think that the enterprise software business is a real racket… or cash-cow, depending on where you stand!

“The way enterprise software has worked for a lot of the large scale CIOs… You buy these enterprise software products maybe 10 years ago… and let’s say you paid a million dollars for that product.

Well Oracle and SAP charges you 22% a year on what you paid 10 years ago, even if they haven’t given you any updates or upgrades or anything. Just to have it on your servers,” explains Benioff.

That’s a lot of money considering that you are running on old infrastructures, architectures, etc… But as Benioff pointed out, it will take a while for CIOs to get out of the grip of traditional software companies like Oracle or SAP and move their infrastructure to the cloud; simply because it’s complex and requires to be highly integrated.

And, if ain’t broken… don’t fix it!

Here’s a short video clip of Benioff’s remarks on why the enterprise software business is a real racket for companies:


Salesforce.com CEO Ridicules Oracle “Zen” Cloud Strategy

June 25, 2009
Benioff pokes fun at former mentor Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on his cloud computing vision

Benioff pokes fun at former mentor Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on his cloud computing vision

Benioff will always be Benioff, even sick like he was today at GigaOM’s Structure 09 conference.

Asked by Om Malik about Oracle’s CEO “flip-flop” cloud computing strategy, the Salesforce.com CEO and co-founder just couldn’t help ridicule his former mentor, Larry Ellison.

“6 months ago he said it’s ridiculous and made some very caustic remarks which is not very much like him and then he said something very Zen in a kind of very spiritual or mentor way…

the key to cloud computing, the key… grasshopper… to on-demand is on premise. And the key to on-premise is on-demand. And you can not have on-demand without on-premise, and you can not have on-premise without on-demand.

It was very Zen. It was like hitting a new level of enlightenment when I heard of it. This guy’s got it. On-demand is on-premise and yet on-premise is on-demand.

And if you can understand that then you’ll know why cloud computing is what it is.”

So here it go. The secret of cloud computing. Now study that… grasshopper :-)

And for your amusement, here’s the video clip where Benioff explained Oracle’s cloud vision!


Why Benioff Is Wrong To View Open Source As Most “Un-Green” Model

November 4, 2008

I thought Marc Benioff a.k.a. “there’s no greener model than our model” made a fool of himself when he painted open source as “un-green”.

It not only sends the wrong message especially to cost conscious companies, but worse, Salesforce.com chief comments reflect a complete misunderstanding of what open source really is.

“Open source is the most un-green model there is. Because still every customer has to set up there own data centers, set up there own servers, install all those stuffs, its just open source… that’s not green,” explains Benioff.

Yes, software can make a difference it terms of power consumption. But it’s wrong to think that open source would be less “efficient” than let’s say proprietary software.

And the best proof of that is Salesforce.com itself which uses open source software and virtualization to make its “multi-tennant” model work!

Another perfect example of the contrary is SugarCRM, a Salesforce.com “open source” competitor that also offer an “on-demand” solution. So what’s wrong with that?


Salesforce.com Touts CRM and Platform As Most Strategic Aspects Of Cloud Computing; Urge Others To Build Enterprise Applications [video]

November 4, 2008

Salesforce in the CloudSalesforce.com wants to remain focus in what it does best i.e. CRM, an application that manages relationships with customers and its platform. “Two of the most strategic aspects of cloud computing,” says Salesforce.com CEO citing Merrill Lynch report expecting the cloud computing market to reach $100 billion in 2010.

For Marc Benioff, the San Francisco, Calif.-based company will not build other categories of enterprise applications like ones managing human resources, enterprise/manufacturing resources planning (ERP) or enterprise financials (payable/receivable/general ledger…) because it will distract the company for its core.

“If all the sudden we decide to start selling some new category of applications, there will be competition between [our internal] resources [like taking some sales people out of CRM for example],” explains Benioff.

Salesforce.com growth is constrained by its salesforce or the lack thereof… Can it really scale?

In an usual turn of event, Benioff admitted that he was jealous of SAP’s and Oracle’s salesforce. “If I’m jealous of Oracle or SAP for anything, it’s because they have sales forces in the 10s of thousands. We only have 3,000+ employees… I wish I had twice, 3 times as many salespeople that I have,” added the company’s chief. “We view ourselves as a distribution constrained organisation”.

The only way Salesforce.com can scale is if it can attract developers on its platforms and start developing those hard, heavy and complex enterprise applications. ”I want to have all these applications on our platform but I just don’t want to pay for their development and I’d really like to see other people to sell it if they can,” said Benioff.

Anyone out there interested?

Here’s a video excerpt of Benioff’s comments:


Best Of Benioff: Bailout SAP, Open Source Is Most Un-Green Model, Natives Are Restless, Listen To Customers More And Sale As Much As We Can! [video]

November 4, 2008

I had a blast yesterday with some of the things the colourful CEO of Salesforce.com said during his briefing with the media.

So I decided to do a short video of my favourite moments that I refer to as “BoB” that stands for the “Best of Benioff”!

My favourite of all? Unfortunately, I didn’t caught it on tape and it was Benioff’s “love” everybody strategy!

Enjoy the short clips. I’ll add some of the transcripts after the jump.


Salesforce.com Cloud Is For Data-Centric Enterprise Applications; No Competition For Amazon, Google, Microsoft

November 3, 2008
Will Marc Benioff find success in the clouds?

Will Marc Benioff's fortune come from the clouds?

Salesforce.com twist to cloud computing dubbed “Force.com Sites” is an interesting one. Although “it’s more of an evolution than a revolution,” confide to me Marc Benioff after his 2 hours long media briefing session.

Indeed, the main difference to earlier announcements made by the San Francisco, Calif.-based company during its latest “Tour de Force“, a few months ago, is that today enterprises can let the general public access their applications written on the company’s Force.com platform.

So far these applications were “internal facing” and restricted to employees, partners or anyone with proper authorisation i.e. a username and a password.

The difference is subtle and does not really merit all the buzz it got though.

Force.com Sites is a cloud for business and enterprise applications. “Those applications that are data centric like form or workflow applications. We also provide services needed by enterprise applications, like a database, a mobile framework, administrative capabilities, etc.,” explains Adam Gross, vice president of platform marketing for Salesforce.com. “You won’t see applications that just need raw compute power like a video streaming service or a photo sharing site on Sites.”

Force.com Sites will most likely host self-service applications that lets consumers enter information onto an enterprise system.”Applications that deal with customers,” adds Gross.

Paying per pages views rather than usage

In another interesting twist, Salesforce.com chose to price its cloud based on the number of pageviews a site will get rather than storage or bandwith. “Customers have no idea of how much bandwith they will use but they understand the notion of page views. That’s why we chose this metric. It’s much easier to grasp,” said Gross.

All Salesforce.com customers will receive a number of “free” page views based on their subscription level; from 50,000 monthly page views for the group edition all the way up to 1 million for the unlimited edition. Additional page views are also available for an extra fee.


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