Ian Hendry

Salesforce.com's First Foray into Financial Apps, Joint Venture

Interesting observations Jeffrey.

I also wonder what this will do for the other financial apps developers listed on AppEchange and already using Force.com. I knew of a developer of Salesforce.com connected apps who wound back their dependency on SFDC some time ago when they saw that at any time Benioff could buy up someone else and push them first. In a press release you can see your market dry up.

There may be some interesting lessons in what happened to Facebook developers. In a way that is part comparable, the healthy Facebook micro-economy ofthird party developers goy shafted overnight when Facebook changed the layout of the website and no-one could find the apps any more. Then they changed the API. The developer community to angry and Facebook realised that making those developers dependent on Facebook as the platform was holding them back.

Their answer? Facebook Connect where third party apps and websites can be easily integrated to Facebook, but thdevelopers can build them using what they like and wherever they like. Now, the impact of Facebook is spreading across the rest of the web as other sites start to use Facebook authentication, or social elements or whatever.

Salesforce.com and its partners are facing different challenges of course, but perhaps the answer is the same -- to make use of Salesforce.com (data sources, code extensions, application directory) without exposing yourself too much by riding piggyback on Force.com and its PaaS.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
www.wecando.biz

The Future of Online Social Networking

An interesting piece.

It's very interesting that you should consider LinkedIn the bext monetized of the three. Litlle doubt it is, but it still isn't doing a great job: only a fraction of its 40m members are premium networkers, and those are mainly in recruitment (and benefitting from access to 40m resumes). This is a poor result when you consider that it's European competitotr XING has 8% of its total base paying for the service. And XING is already public.

People may have a perception that social networks are free, but theyll pay when they are getting value. This means either getting something they can't get elsewhere that helps them with their task; or providing a better and more cost effective way of doing something that already costs them money. Forrester recently suggested that CRM is a worthwhile add on to social networks: build you contacts through the network, manage them through integrated CRM. People will happily pay for CRM today, so there's a revenue opportunity straight away.

It's one we plan to add to our UK-based social network for business next month.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
www.wecando.biz

MySpace CEO Jabs Back at Yahoo's Bartz

Bartz's perception is most people's perception. When people mistakenly think an actor is dead, he invariably ends up getting no work. The myth becomes the reality. I don't hear any talk of MySpace these days.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
www.wecando.biz

Platform Plays and Players: Signs of a Shakeout?

Before Salesforce.com launched their Service Cloud, there were 186 vendors in their AppExchange with customer services applications, all vying for customers amongst the SFDC base. I wonder how many of those feel shafted now SFDC has pushed its way to the front of the queue?

In a similar way, Facebook had a large third-party developer community all building apps on its social network. When Facebook changed the UI all their apps disappeared to a new tab where no users could find them. In a stroke they cheesed the whole developer community off. Zuckerberg is now hoping all those developers will start working with Facebook Connect to integrate other sites back to Facebook...

The problem is, of course, that if a single vendor owns the platform, then the micro-economy that grows off the back of it is entirely vulnerable to any decisions made by the platform owner. It hasn't worked well for Facebook partners in the past and it doesn't appear to be working so well for Salesforce.com partners (customer service guys this time, but it's been knowldedge base and wireless apps venfors in the past when SFDC bought companies in this space and started pushing those acquired technologies in front of all others).

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
www.wecando.biz

Salesforce.com's Outage: Will It Derail the SaaS Market?

An outage at Salesforce.com doesn't spell doubt around the feasability of SaaS, in much the same way that the odd duff application on Windows doesn't have everyone buying Macs.

Fortunately, not all SaaS vendors aren't trying to take on what is arguably proving too much for Salesforce.com, so there isn't quite the same impact on the rare occasions when something fails. I pointed out when Marc Benioff's aspirations went beyond hosted CRM to becoming a platform for all business applications that it meant they'd have to ensure their service levels matched their CEOs ambitions. When you have a sales team unable to use their Sales Force Automation system for 40 minutes you can get them on the 'phones. When the WHOLE organisation is tapping its fingers and counting the minutes away you have a different scale of problem.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
www.wecando.biz