So let’s take a look at the top 3 takeaways, which was not a too difficult a task as Salesforce did not announce too much, but more about that later.
1. The Customer Success Platform – Slogan or Credo? – The leitmotiv of this year’s Dreamforce is (the conference is not over as I blog this) and was all about Salesforce positioning its offerings as a Customer Success Platform. Last year it was the customer customer pitch. Some time ago it was Social Business. So every year Benioff and team need to come out with something new (and ideally bigger) – but as an analyst covering next generation applications – platform matters. And Salesforce thinks that with its 6 clouds (Sales, Marketing, Service, Communities, Apps and Analytics (new see below) it has all the ingredients to ensure customer success from a platform perspective. And certainly Salesforce has a formidable collection and market share of CRM capabilities, I leave it to my colleague Alan Lepovsky to comment on the attractiveness of the Community cloud, and I will comment below on the (new) Analytics cloud.
As far as the vehicle of a customer success platform I’d say there are many more business functions that need to fall in place to make a customer successful, notably the ‘back office’ functions that Salesforce does not have but partners for. And more importantly, in my view, people make the difference – they are part of the equation of customer success, too. But let’s give Salesforce the benefit of the doubt, it would be great to see one of the yearly leitmotivs stick more than 12 months for the vendor, and platform should be to a certain point timeless and always matter.
2. The Analytics Cloud – This is the 6th cloud that Salesforce has added – and was the most substantial product announcement of the conference. From a minimalist point of view one could say that this is the next generation of the existing reporting capabilities of Salesforce. And these were by no means bad, did the job, were included in the license and were (and are) good enough to power millions of users in their reporting needs every day. But one key challenge for Salesforce’s existing reporting has been the addition of 3rd party data and most of CRM information becomes only meaningful when put into context of all information the enterprise produces and uses (incl. the ‘back office’ – see above).
The Wave technology that powers the Analytics Cloud puts that concern away, it’s easy now to import 3rd party data, put it into context and visualize it. For the latter, visualization, Salesforce has done a superb job – the graphical rendering of data is fast, smooth, responsive and almost dazzling. Not sure how much of that performance was demo – especially on the mobile devices (yes it was again build mobile first – what else) – but if performance will be only half as good in real life than what it was a Dreamforce – then kudos to the Salesforce engineering team behind the Analytics cloud.
On the flipside, the Analytics cloud is not ‘true’ analytics, those class of software that takes actions or at least recommends them in a priority sequence (more here). As a matter of fact – following that definition – it is not analytics at all, but visualizations and reporting. Nothing wrong with that and it certainly creates value for Salesforce customers. Critical is the high list price of $125 for a regular and $250 for a power user per month – that is a lot of money for a first version product, but we all understand it’s before discount.
Salesforce was also very uptight on the technology behind Analytics Cloud, the versions going from open source (Cassandra, Riak, HBase), to existing platform (Oracle) all the way to proprietary (a row format store with flexible pointers). Not sure why Salesforce has been so secretive in this area – the product launch is imminent and the cat fill be out of the bag soon. It’s a first version, and by default capabilities will only be upgraded. Talk about dimension tables wakes up good old Data Warehouse memories – and the product is not ready to handle large amounts of non-SQL data. Equally predictive analytics capabilities are missing, but I was repeatedly was assured they are on the roadmap.
Finally Salesforce is leaving all the ‘heavy’ lifting to partners, and with that I mean the ETL functions to get data from 3rd party systems. Using the OData protocol opens the Analytics Cloud well for SAP and Microsoft applications, not so much for Oracle applications, but it’s a good start. Involving all these partners make the Analytics Cloud powerful and allows to move it to market fast, but in day to day life it will make it hard to purchase license wise and operate complexity wise. But then Salesforce realistically did not have a chance to build 3rd party interfaces themselves – so partnering is a good and smart (short to medium term) strategy.
3. The Lightning framework – Once you have a new platform like Salesforce has with Salesforce1 – then you need to work on getting developers more productive. Enters Lighting, which allows to easily build mobile, tablet and desktop applications on Salesforce1. As a matter of fact it is so easy, that Salesforce has probably empowered business users and system administrators to build some Salesforce applications. If Salesforce can really make this user community productive building applications, it has achieved a breakthrough in the industry and re-invented how (simple) business applications can be build. And though the demos have that potential and Salesforce has realized that – we will have to see in real life how many non-programmers are up to the task. But certainly there is a lot of potential here.
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| The Lightning Frameowork Overview |
On the flipside out of briefings with the relevant development execs – it has become clear, that Salesforce has not thought (yet) about layering access in Lightning. Usually you see vendor proprietary, vendor vertical, ISV and then customer customization layers. In this version one, users will copy components, which quickly can become an oversight and code maintenance problem. But it is early days, first version and Lighting starts out with a lot of promise.
Tidbits
- Industries – Salesforce has launched a common industry product group under the leadership of enterprise software veteran John Wookey. We attended a briefing on the new effort and Wookey and team can hit all the vertical messages well (we heard healthcare, finance and government) but it is not clear how all will be build (consider the layering concern from above) but a roadmap will come soon.
- Europe – It is clear that Salesforce needs to grow beyond North America and Europe seems to be the prime target, with European customers being show cased in the keynotes and even executives from the German Coca-Cola bottler on main stage. And we heard that the UK data center is coming very soon, the German one later, all good moves to overcome the European cloud angst.
- Developers – Developers were central users Salesforce needs to woo in 2013, but that was less a topic this year. Nonetheless the developer zone in Moscone West is vibrant, developers are excited, another hackathon is under way and I had a chance to see Adam Seligman launching the new Trailhead know how transfer tool. As with any new platform - training and education are crucial.
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| More platform innovation that helps attract developers |
- Work.com – With Wookey off in charge of verticals, work.com has become part of the ‘platform’ which is managed by Linda Crawford. We had the chance to meet with Crawford and it is clear that if Salesforce ever had any larger Talent Management ambitions, they are gone by now. The focus now is to improve CRM user performance, natively embedded into their transactional applications. The quid pro quo argument would be, that Salesforce needs to build or acquire learning capabilities – something to be seen. And it is certainly a worthy and valuable cause to improve sales performance while not reducing sales active time for CRM users.
MyPOV
It all fits well where Salesforce is right now, as we have seen it many times in enterprise software history: First you need the platform (Salesforce1), then you build reporting on it (Analytics Cloud) and then (or in parallel) you think of developer productivity (Lightning), next comes horizontal product (in 2015) and verticals (roadmap coming soon, see above).
The cookie cutter approach of re-platforming, something Salesforce (and most other vendors) does not talk about publicly, but that’s what is happening behind the scenes at Salesforce in my view. As such Salesforce is going through a building year with little new and additional business functionality to show, but that should change in 2015 and 2016. As usual roadmaps would be good to have, once the cat is out of the bag (it almost is). And a little more transparency how things are build would also be good, being in the ‘cloud’ is not a good enough answer for technical architecture details anymore.
It’s 2014 by now, not 2004 anymore.
Earlier today Alan, Natalie and me recorded our takeaways in a hangout - watch it here:
More on Salesforce.com:
- Constellation Research Summary of Salesforce Dreamforce 2014 - read here
- Research Summary - An in depth look at Salesforce1 - Better packaging or new offerng? Read here.
- Dreamforce 2013 Platform Takeaways - All about the mobile platform - or more? Read here.
- Platform ecosystems are hard - Salesforce grows it - FinancialForce shrinks it - read here.
- Our take on Salesforce.com Identity Connect - from three angles - Identity, CRM and PaaS - read here.
- Takeaways from the Salesforce and Workday Strategic Partnership - read here.
- Act II - The Cloud changes everything - Oracle and Salesforce.com - read here.
- How many Pivots make a Pirouette? Salesforce's last Pivot - read here.
