Michael Fauscette

A Look Back at 2010

As father time creeps toward rebirth I'm spending some time looking back at this year. It's something of a tradition now (okay, I've done it for 2 years, that's sort of a tradition) to take this time between Christmas and New Years to reflect on our predictions for the year and how things came out. For the past 6 years I've taken this week as vacation with my daughters, a time I really look forward to. I don't "work" this week, but this is the exception...although I don't really think of my blog as work anyway.

2010 was a year of change for business as we came out of a very tough 2009 and tried to redefine ourselves and what we called the "new normal". Tech and business trends that were percolating over the last few years started to have significant impact on the way business is done. The way we build and consume technology is changing. Maybe even more important the way many companies "do" their work is changing. The Internet has grown up and the resulting hyper connectivity and availability of real time data in ever increasing volumes offers businesses many new opportunities and challenges. And speaking of real time, communication and collaboration are both being redefined through social technologies. The next few years are critical change years as businesses restructure to compete in an information driven economy and move away from the industrial past. 

So what did my IDC group predict for this year and how did we do?

1. The social business movement gains momentum through the cultural shift that is enabled by social enabled applications that are formed from the intersection of collaboration, content, search, communities, CRM and the current web 2.0 tools like blogs, wiki’s, microblogs, etc. with 50%+ of the Fortune 500 initiating social business projects this year. Grade: "A", our surveys easily show that we met the 50% benchmark. "are we there yet", well, no, but social has continued to gain momentum and all of these elements, collab, content, search, community, etc. are converging at an ever increasing pace and creating a huge change wave in the enterprise.

2. Software vendors, recognizing that "one size does not fit all" with partner programs, will move to an a-la-carte benefit structure versus a long list of perks with diluted value. Grade: "B+", We're seeing this approach more and more in large vendor partner programs. A-la-carte / giving the partners the ability to choose those benefits that are most interesting to their business is popular with the partners and provides a much more efficient program.

3. The great divide will come to an end between horizontal and vertical applications for the enterprise. Grade: "F" Sometimes you're just wrong. I think this is directionally sound but in practice enterprise apps are complex and take many different approaches. More vertical focus is permeating all apps but some apps have a broad horizontal appeal and some need more vertical depth and differentiation, that's just the way it works for now.

4. As a fundamental part of the Social Business transformation businesses shift their focus from technology and process to people, who in effect become the new enterprise platform. Grade: "B+" That this is happening I do not believe we can argue. People are the center of everything from the new type of collaboration tools to the business networks that are growing into the new way of doing business. The question is one of where we are on the journey, not are we making the trip IMHO. We're not there yet but we've started the car, backed down the drive and are heading up the on ramp...

5. Cloud infrastructure computing moves squarely into the mainstream as a significant number of the Fortune 1000 companies adopt the utility computing model demonstrated by moving a portion of their “sandbox” apps into production on public clouds. Grade: "A" All the variations of cloud computing are getting a lot of attention in the enterprise. SaaS or cloud apps are certainly mainstream and seeing really strong growth. Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) lags this some but this past year saw many IT shops moving some or all of their operations into cloud based infrastructure. The approach is mainstream now and is spreading rapidly for new projects. The place that it lags is in existing deployments, where many companies are not spending money to make any changes for now. Over time many will make the transition to cloud for existing systems but this will take a backseat to new deployments.

6. In response to a productivity spike, VARs, SIs and ISVs will turn in force to contracting (virtual staffing) and partnering. Vendor programs will adapt to support these new models. Grade: "A" The human cloud approach is widespread and seeing a big uptake across businesses so it's no surprise that software VAR's, SI's and ISV's would leverage this as well. This hybrid business approach is a competitive advantage to business while also providing a better lifestyle for many workers. Look for this approach to grow substantially over the next few years.

7. "There's an app for that": Mobile becomes the new enterprise desktop with more than 50% of US workers accessing applications via a mobile device. Grade: "A" The explosion of smartphones and the success of tablets led by the iPad this year is a fact and employees are increasingly bringing them into the workplace whether IT supports them or not (we call this the "bring your own" workforce). The hyper connected, real time world is mobile and employees want to work where they are so it's natural that this trend will continue. Businesses are deploying and supporting more ways to access corporate assets from the mobile and software vendors are getting on board by providing better optimized mobile apps. Apps stores are accelerating deployment and adoption as well. Technologies like Citrix's mobile virtualization product, Receiver, also provide an excellent alternative for businesses by virtualizing corporate assets for mobile access.

8. The 'new normal' will give rise to increased end-user buying power causing extreme pressure on existing vendors to mold offerings and giving opportunity to aggressive suppliers. Grade: "C+" There was certainly price pressure on software vendors this year from businesses that exercised their increased leverage but I don't think this played out to the volume level we expected.

9. A software industry shift toward subscription models will result in a nearly $7B decline in WW new license revenues in 2010. Grade: "A" What can I say, SaaS and other subscription pricing models are taking money out of the traditional license pool. Companies chose subscription models much more often during the downturn and have continued to find this method of payment attractive. Capital budgets are still tight and so paying for SW from the operating budget continues to be popular. I don't see this changing anytime soon, let's call this the new enterprise SW buying paradigm. 

10. Cloudsourcing becomes a major alternative for companies looking to outsource non-core business processes (software-in-a-service). Grade: "B-" This is happening but I'd not call it mainstream yet. Cloudsourcing got a lot of attention this year and many companies are looking at it as a viable option for outsourcing processes. I think this will continue to be attractive as companies reassess how they get work done in the new competitive information driven environment.

So there you have the look back, all in all not bad for 2010. Look for our 2011 predictions early in January. Happy new year everyone!

Tags: social, mobile, predictions, 2010, technology, software, partners, subscription, cloud, SaaS

Happy Holidays!

2010 is winding down and hopefully you all are spending some much deserved time relaxing and enjoying family and friends. It's been a crazy year but thankfully better than the one before for a lot of people.

I always like to spend a little time during my end of year vacation thinking about what happened over the last year and also start working in earnest on predictions for the next year or so. Look for a couple of post shortly on a look back in detail and on our predictions for next year. In general this year saw a lot of tech trends solidify and start to really bring change to the enterprise. In many ways this is a very exciting time as thing like cloud computing, social business, social CRM, e2.0, enterprise mobility, the Internet of things, organic business networks, the "new" converged commerce, real time web and many other factors start to gain traction and create an atmosphere of change that will transform many businesses over the next few years.

It was a year of growth and personal change for me and I am truly lucky to continue to do something I love and to see my networks expand to include so many of you. I'm amazed to be associated with some really exceptional people both at IDC and through my association with the Enterprise Irregulars and the Accidental CRM community.

To all of you I wish a peaceful and restful holiday season, and a very prosperous, healthy, fun and engaging new year! Here's to you, thank you for making my world so much fun and so much richer.

The Changing World of Communications

This week in the New York Times an article and a follow on post on the NYT Bits Blog talked about online email use and a report from ComScore that shows a sharp decline in email use among several age groups. Email, which has steadily increased since the early 1980's, is in decline across all but the oldest segments of the population. Now if you know me, you know that I hate email, so this news was well received, but as I looked at the numbers and thought about what it might mean some interesting possibilities jumped out at me.

Email was conceived in the early 1970's and hit it's current form in the transition from ARPANET to Internet in the early 1980's. Not that there haven't been some improvements to the original standards, there have, but in basic form and function the system is "mature." Email was conceived to mimic offline mail or snail mail, so basically is an electronic letter and has a certain formality, the most formal of current online communication modes. Okay, enough email history.

I found the ComScore data interesting, especially in context to all of the changing tech trends that we are following today. Here's the summary chart:

The first thing to note is that the survey is web-based email on desktop computers so some of the decline is most likely related to the shift to mobile computing. Our own (IDC) research shows that email on mobile devices is growing rapidly and that growth will continue for the next few years (~13% CAGR through 2014) as the smartphone and tablet explosion extends throughout the enterprise.

Growth in the over 55 groups is easy to explain, as more older adults go online for the first time email is an easy transition from more traditional communication methods. The fact that it is more formal, asynchronous (allows more time to collect thoughts and less opportunity for embarrassment) and easy to use makes it particularly attractive for the newly computer literate. It's a little ironic that email growth in this segment is somewhat similar to the growth of facebook in the same group. Both tools are good for connecting / reconnecting with family and friends, and sharing things like photos and other information.

Likewise the drastic reduction in email use for the under 17 segment, or digital natives, is not surprising. For this segment email is seen as old fashioned and does not fit in with a real time, always connected world. My 15 year old daughter communicates by SMS and facebook messaging and IM but rarely checks her email. Email's formality and asynchronous nature simply doesn't fit their lifestyle.

Email is still an important business communication tool and currently none of the potential replacement technologies can replace it. Even so you can see that use is declining among the core business user ages. Now as I said some of that is simply a shift to mobile over other device types. I wonder though, if the decline might also be related to the growth of social tools.  In a recent IDC survey the top five reasons for conducting social initiatives are all related to communication:

• Acquire knowledge / ask questions
• Share knowledge / contribute ideas
• Communicate with customers
• Create awareness about company product or service
• Communicate with internal colleagues

The ComScore numbers would seem to support the idea that new social collaboration tools are replacing email use for peer to peer and group collaboration. This is good news as we deploy tools that are people centric and purpose built for enabling collaborative activities. This leave email use for communication, you know, what it was actually designed for. Take a look at some more of the data from our Social Business survey:

Tags: mobile, email, social business, e2.0, enterprise 2.0, communication

Product Success and Innovation

I've written about innovation a few times and I admit it's a subject that intrigues me and that I think about quite a bit. We're in an industry that is driven by innovation, although I suppose that's true of most industries, I'm just more familiar with tech. Anyway, there are a bunch of dimensions that you can use to look at innovation. I posted before on one, continuous versus discontinuous or disruptive innovation, a dimension that I think is particularly important in software. I won't rehash that post today.

Another dimension is first mover versus fast follower. Intuitively first mover seems like a natural advantage but history doesn't always support that. In fact some software companies have used fast following as an overarching  business strategy, Autodesk with it's 3D CAD products for example.  Some of the current market leading products are actually results of fast following, although in some cases the follower is arguably the more innovative product. For example,  JumpStation and the World Wide Web Worm were the first search engines and Excite was the first to build a search ranking algorithm but no one would argue that Google is the dominate innovator in the search market. Even having the "best" technology doesn't guarantee success though, Betamax / VHS is a popular example of that concept.

Innovation can also take the path of business model innovation. A product might not be innovative at all but could capture share purely based on the way the product comes to market. The concept that value creation can be moved around in a business model is a huge innovation that directly fueled Google and many others. Indirect revenue through ads, promoted Tweets, freemium products, etc. are gaining lots of momentum and are seen as "respectable" business models.

Looking at innovation from a competitive angle its arguable which results in the biggest advantage, the first mover or the fast follower. It's getting to market with the right product (the right feature set) at just the right time, which when written down sounds more like art than science. Some of the more dominate products today are second (or third, forth, etc) generation products that offered a follow on innovation. Specifically I was thinking about the iPod, not the first MP3 player by any means but certainly the market leader. I always felt that Apple's innovation here was iTunes, not the iPod, at least the first generation iPod. The combination of good design with Apple's famous ease of use paradigm through iTunes simplified the process and opened it up to non-techies. Now you might argue that later the iPod Touch was it's own innovation or I actually the iPhone / iPod Touch together. The shift to touch interface for smaller form factor devices is a clear innovation and for me, changed the way and the amount I used the device. I wouldn't want a device without the touch interface now (I have a company provided Blackberry that I almost never use because of that issue).

Look at touch computing in general. The iPad is the dominate product and for the first time, much like the iPhone, is a main stream acceptable tablet device. Now it's certainly not a first mover product, although Apple itself was the first mover in the tablet market with the much maligned Newton (at least I think they were first, if not first then loudest). Other vendors tried tablets, there were a bunch of Windows based tablets and convertibles in the early 2000's which were a horrible failure. In that case the interface, a stylus, and the operating system, Windows, did not create an acceptable user experience (I'm being too nice, the user experience was awful, even worse than the regular Windows experience). The iPad, building on the innovations of the iPhone / iPod Touch, has the optimal user experience available on a tablet, touch interface with an OS that was build for mobile, touch devices.

So successful product innovation can build on previous failure, in fact maybe that's one of the best ways to get to this magic combo of right product at the right time. Innovation can also be purchased, okay that sounds a little flippant but it's true. It can also come from outside the mainstream of the company through subsidiaries. Sometimes the culture that stifles innovation is so strong that the innovations must come from outside.  Look at motion video gaming, the Wii had first mover advantage and captured solid share. Although there was no fast follower, this year has seen Sony rollout Move and even try to mimic the Wii party game approach to pull in new user types. Even though it does add in a camera (Playstation Eye), it's a clear Wii follow and as such is not innovative (nor does it seem to be making much headway in the market). The real innovation in a follower in motion gaming comes from Microsoft with it's Kinect add on for the Xbox 360. The technology was developed by 2 organizations, Rare, a subsidiary of Microsoft Gaming Studios and PrimeSense, an outside firm. While I've stated before that there's a strong link between company culture and innovation and that in general Microsoft's culture does not allow innovation to thrive, in this case the use of outside sources to the innovation process resulted in a game changing product (pun intended). And by the way, it's also an important talent to recognize when to use partner technology as a part of the "right offering at the right time".

The other source from innovation that gets a lot of coverage lately is innovation through co-innovation relationships. In a world where social is moving into the enterprise and where businesses are learning to live in a hyper-connected economic environment, co-innovation offers some interesting opportunities where the sum of the parts can equal more than the parts themselves. In a new generation networked business innovation could come from any node or combination of nodes in the business network. Leveraging partners, suppliers and customers to help drive innovation into an enterprise is a powerful concept and a logical extension to the social business. In the network each node depends on the success of the whole so is incented to participate in the innovation process, producing the most successful products and services possible...system health is key to the health of each node.

The event that started me thinking about innovation this time was a statement from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently when talking about bring to market (next year) a tablet / slate computing device that would be an iPad killer. Now I could jump into one of my rants on why this is a ridiculous statement, but I'll contain that, no one really gives it much credibility anyway. The thing that jumped out to me was, why waste time on being a slow follower into a market that's already crowded, instead wouldn't it make more sense to try and compete from strength and go after the "next" innovation? Rather than trying to copy someone else's innovation with technology that's not optimized for the contest wouldn't a strategy of using your own corporate strengths to find a place in the market where you can really differentiate your business give more chance of success? Companies that already have category killer products have a tendency to use their resources to try and get into markets where others have innovated, the fast follow approach. They don't have the same resource constraints as companies that are trying to break into their first killer product. That's fine as a strategy but the problem lies in culture and understanding the unique strength of the company. Just because another company has the right product at the right time does not indicate that you can reproduce that event by following, each opportunity and company is unique and should be examined in that light. Does the opportunity play to your strengths, then go for it...if not, find your own innovation (or buy it, partner for it, co-innovate...you get the idea).

The Human Cloud

I spent the past week in the clouds attending Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference. Salesforce likes to categorize its products into different "clouds", like sales cloud (sales force automation), service cloud (customer service system), data cloud (crowdsourced contact data), etc.  In fact almost every conversation on the future of IT these days includes some conversation on cloud computing, although often the definition is somewhat in dispute. IDC has a very specific cloud definition; cloud services are consumer and business products, services and solutions delivered and consumed in real time over the Internet with these attributes:

• Shared standard service built for a market not a single customer
• Solution packaged turn-key offering
• Self-service admin
• Elastic scaling
• Use-based pricing
• Accessible via the Internet / IP
• Standard UI technologies
• Published service interface / API

The cloud services can be deployed in a public or private model as well (although this is one of the areas where there's a bunch of debate, particularly between the pure-play SaaS vendors and the hybrid vendors).

Oh well, that's not really where I was going with this post anyway. After Dreamforce I had the opportunity to stop by another event, GigaOM's Net:Work conference. I only had half the day to attend and spent most of that time meeting with a couple of companies but the topic and my conversations that day sparked a few ideas that I want to examine more closely. One of those conversations was with Elance CEO Fabio Rosati. Fabio and I have chatted a few times about the changing nature of work and workers in the post-industrial information economy. A lot of what Elance and Fabio are seeing in this space are in line with a post I did a while ago on virtual workforce and then followed up in another post with a trend I called labor as a service. At the conference they were using the term human cloud and the more I think about it, despite being a bit over-exposed to clouds last week, I think this one might be a good fit.

In the new networked economy businesses are realizing that people are the center of and the essential nodes that make the business work. Connecting those nodes has never been easier with the proliferation of new mobile devices from smart phones to tablet computers and increasing broadband speeds. Web 2.0 social tools and the hyper-connected workforce is eroding many old work paradigms ranging from work "location" to work "hours".  The virtual workforce trend, from both the companies desire to get the best talent with the least downside exposure, and the workers who are enjoying the increased flexibility and freedom the model affords (even if their initial trip into the virtual workforce was involuntary) is gaining momentum. Companies like Elance and oDesk are seeing rapid growth in both high quality resources available for assignments and in companies looking for talent. The nature of sourcing the work is changing. Project based work is a natural for the virtual workforce (or labor as a service model) and effectively gets high quality talent engaged on the critical project tasks. Even highly repetitive task based work is finding online support from business models like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

So if businesses are in reality becoming the network and people the critical nodes it makes sense that we start thinking of the workforce as the human cloud I think. The human cloud is:

• Flexible in model (direct employee or contract; task based, project based or position based; various pay models from pay for task, pay for project, salary, performance based, etc.), location (work where you are models when appropriate), and time (in a global business environment time and time zones will be under stress and businesses will look for employees to work when it makes "sense").
• Utilize mobile technology to stay connected to one or several business networks.
• Utilize web 2.0 like people-centric collaboration tools and techniques to increase productivity and engagement
• Associate personal brands with business brands to gain synergy and greater influence and reach
• Agile
• Elastic

To me cloud services and the human cloud seem to have extremely similar components. The human cloud joins the other enterprise clouds to form the next generation business, or organic business network.  

Tags: human cloud, cloud computing, salesforce.com, collaboration, e2.0, web 2.0, SaaS, work    

Dreamforce 2010

Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference opened last Tuesday morning to the driving beat of WILL.I.AM and the showmanship of its flamboyant CEO Marc Benioff. Dreamforce is always a lively event but this year the energy level was over the top and only overshadowed a little by Benioff's much discussed rainbow socks. I suppose you have to accept a bit of the hype as a sign of Salesforce's and Benioff's continuing role as lead evangelists for the rapidly expanding "cloud" movement. Cloud computing and its sister "everything as a service" are a part of the leading IT trends today and a key element in most of the other key trends, everything from mobile to social business. Okay, back to the subject at hand, Dreamforce 2010. To make this easier let's break the week and conference up into these section: 1. What's new in the existing apps and platform, 2. What are the new products, 3. Other happenings of interest.

Before we dive in though, maybe it would be useful to look at Salesforce as a company because maybe they are at a different point in their evolution than many believe...or said another way, your perception of them may still be tied to a company image that is rooted in their start up past. First don't get me wrong, they are still helping to lead an important change in the IT landscape, it's just that they are much more mature as a company and because of that they have to make product and business decision differently than an immature software vendor. As an apps vendor Salesforce is a mature vendor and has a mature, 10+ year old sales force automation product. Other parts of the product are less mature of course, but in all, the CRM apps are at a point where customers need incremental improvement, not radical, discontinuous innovation and change, something Salesforce.com is delivering. There was a time a few years ago when it was not rolling out as many incremental CRM product innovations, a time when it was focused more on the new platform offering, but that time has clearly past. At a $1.7+B subscription run rate, Salesforce.com is a major software vendor and from a business model standpoint the apps end of the business is established and stable, with nice, continuous double digit growth. The platform side of the business is somewhat less mature and the model and products are changing more. Salesforce.com is also expanding its business model to include more ways of creating revenue streams and experimenting with partnerships, acquired products and ways to expand and grow a healthy ecosystem.

What's new with the existing apps and platform? Salesforce.com a few years ago started breaking out the products into "clouds", which is actually an easy way to look at the product portfolio, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Collaboration Cloud, Data Cloud, etc. For the base product clouds the current release, Summer 10, added new functionality and across the board Salesforce.com is calling them 2nd generations of its product set, or Cloud 2. The following slide shows the complete portfolio:

Chatter or the collaboration cloud got a lot of attention during Dreamforce this year and for the second year in a row (it was announced last year at Dreamforce 09). In fact Salesforce.com made extensive use of Chatter during the conference (over 14K users and 740+ groups) and showcased several customers that have deployed Chatter including Dell. Dell has over 100K users on Chatter and attributes its successful deployment to three things, training for all users, alignment with the corporate communications group and executive support and buy in (sounds like a solid implementation approach). One new use case for Chatter, by the way, is in the Service Cloud, which now has integration to Chatter for escalations management and collaboration. For internal collaboration Chatter seems to be getting a lot of attention from existing Salesforce customers. For me, there seem to be two limitations to the current release of Chatter, the biggest being the fact that it is organization limited and cannot connect to anyone outside of the "firewall". The other issue is something that I'm becoming more and more convinced will be a limitation for adoption of activity streams in general, that is the idea that everyone will be willing to use a tool that is outside of their normal enterprise SW / workflow. While I think many will be willing to use the tool, for some the interruption to daily workflow won't be comfortable and at worst will cause them to reject using the tool. I believe that over time we must embed activity streams at the point of work for them to gain widespread adoption, but that's just my opinion at this point and maybe Salesforce and other activity stream vendors will prove me wrong.

The Service Cloud 2 also got a fair bit of air time with a few interesting new features and integrations. Salesforce.com for Facebook, which has been out for a couple of years added several key features and most importantly is tightly integrated with the Service Cloud. It's Twitter integration also got a facelift and is tightly integrated into the Service Cloud. One of the criticisms of the Service Cloud product, that it didn't accommodate high volume call centers seems to be closer to a non-issue with the addition of a console for high volume call centers in the latest release. Overall the Service Cloud is now the fastest growing Salesforce product at 106% y/y growth. Motorola is one of the customers making use of the Service Cloud with over 600 agents now on the product.

As you would expect a lot of the real action at Dreamforce was focused around the new "stuff, which mostly affected the Force.com platform. In summary those announcement were: a new database cloud, database.com; the acquisition of Heroku, a Ruby on Rails development platform; the availability of VMforce announced earlier this year; and the data cloud built from the acquisition of Jigsaw, also earlier this year. The one outlier announcement was a joint one with BMCsoftware of a new product built natively on force.com, Remedyforce, more on that in a minute.

Database.com and the database cloud is an interesting announcement on several fronts. In the simplest form, developers should find the offering of interest since many are looking to deploy apps that provide ubiquitous access, multi-device, multi-OS, etc. Having a cloud ready database to use for development could speed up that process. Database.com is the latest in Salesforce utilizing assets that they already had developed by putting a public front end on the asset and offering it as a product. If you think about it, when Salesforce.com started in 1999, building applications for SaaS was new and they had no available cloud platforms including the database tier. They had to develop all of these assets and now that they are mature Salesforce is opening them up for other ISV's to use, starting with the Force.com platform and now with the Database.com offering. Database.com supports any development platform, any development language and any device. With the offering ISV's get a scalable multi-tenant database with automatic upgrades, tuning and backup. Pricing for the new offering is the first 100K records / 50K transactions free then $10 per month per 100K records. Here are a couple of screen shots:

In an attempt to open up Force.com to other more popular development languages Salesforce.com did a partnership with VMware earlier this year to incorporate VMware's Spring Java platform into it's Force.com offerings as VMforce. That product is now available in Beta. Continuing in the vein of opening up to more popular languages Salesforce.com announced its intent to acquire Ruby on Rails platform company Heroku for $212 M. This in my opinion is one of the most exciting announcements of the week. Ruby is by far the hottest language these days and will open up Force.com to a lot of ISV's in my opinion.

One of the new clouds that joined the Salesforce.com sky is the Data cloud, based on Jigsaw, a product acquired earlier this year. Jigsaw provides crowdsourced contact data and is now tightly integrated into Salesforce.com. With millions of contacts and a self cleaning data set, Jigsaw embedded in the Sales Cloud could prove a very welcome and useful addition, providing significant value for sales people on the go.

On the partner front Salesforce.com extended its relationship with BMCsoftware. Last year at Dreamforce BMC announced that it planned on building a native Force.com app from its Remedy franchise. This year they jointly announced a new product offering, Remedyforce which will be sold by both companies. This go to market model provides BMC an excellent distribution channel through the proven salesforce.com direct sales force and provides salesforce.com an interesting test case for a model that could be expanded to include other ISV's. In fact this could signal the addition of a new business model leveraging the growing partner ecosystem although when asked in my meeting with him, EVP of emerging products, Brett Queener denied any such plans at present.

On day two of Dreamforce, Wed morning, I had a somewhat disconcerting experience that ended up being directly related to the Wed pre-show. As I was leaving my hotel I entered the elevator by myself and a few floors later the elevator stopped and to my surprise G.W Bush walked on the elevator. Now remember this is at 7am and I'm completely without caffeine. I didn't collect myself soon enough to say anything but I was surprised that Bush was sans entourage so I began to doubt my sighting, I mean I suppose someone could look exactly like the ex-president. He got off the elevator ahead of me, was greeted in the lobby and quickly ushered into a limo. Of course later that morning during the pre keynote show out walks Bush... Okay, actually a very good Bush impersonator but I have to say, he looks real, even close up.

Just a few other points of interest and I promise I'll stop rambling. The Dreamforce concert act this year was Stevie Wonder and as anticipated he put on a great show. What was not anticipated though was his appearance on stage with Marc during what was supposed to be ex-president Bill Clinton's keynote. It seems that Clinton's flight was delayed by bad weather and so Stevie agreed to join his friend Marc for a little Q&A. Stevie's warm, genuine and caring nature really came through in what was a truly amazing session. I Tweeted many of his comments so you can check them out or check out some clips on YouTube. When Clinton showed up Marc asked Stevie to introduce him. Clinton opened with a great quote: "I've been a mediocre musician all my life and I never dreamed that Stevie Wonder would open for me". I won't recap all of Clinton's speech here, but I will say he continues to be a great speaker and his message really resonated with me. The concept for the speech was built around what Clinton identified as the three biggest issues facing the world today, that it is unequal, unstable and unsustainable. Take a look here for some clips of his speech.

Tags: Salesforce.com, Dreamforce, Heroku, BMCsoftware, RemedyForce, Force.com, CRM, SCRM

The New Face of Commerce; Local, Social and With a Unified Experience

Twice this year Google has attempted to buy a leg up in the local commerce arena and twice they have failed. Last January they made a run at Yelp and last week the target was Groupon. Google, it would seem, is convinced that the small business local market is the next source of growth for them and they really haven't come up with an effective way to get a piece of the local ad business. They do have some assets that could be useful in the local commerce battle, specifically maps and places but certainly those assets aren't enough to get the big gun engaged, the Google ad platform. Anyway, the point is that Google once again validated that local is one of the important trends in the new world of commerce that is rapidly gaining momentum and I'd say validated in a "big" way considering the almost $6B offer Google made for Groupon, a company with somewhere between $500M - $2B in revenue (depending on who's report you believe).

I started talking about the new world of commerce in this post a few weeks ago and it's getting clearer to me just what trends are coming into play to create a new approach to commerce. The first trend is the move to a hyper-local approach to business as evidenced by Google's attempts to get engaged somehow in the local ad business. Here are what I believe are the key technology and behavioral shifts that are driving "new" commerce:

• Local: which of course includes location as a part of context to the shopping experience. Groupon and Yelp have both cracked a part of the local market. Yelp combines community with crowdsourcing and user generated content to gain influence which it then leverages to sell ads and ultimately get customers in the door. Groupon is similar in that it also is focused on getting customers in the door although it does that through managing promotions / offers. According to Hitwise Groupon generates 79% of the group buying business (it's closest competitor is Living Social, at 8%) and according to Comscore saw a ridiculous increase in traffic of 657% year over year (based on October traffic).
• Social: connecting your social networks to your commerce experience is a big opportunity to change the shopping experience. Enabling the use of trusted filtered networks for recommendations, validation, etc. makes for a much richer shopping experience.
• Mobile: Yes this is very obvious but mobile and the resulting hyper-connectivity is key to the new connected shopping experience. Things like QR codes on items, bar code apps for research (including sustainability information) and price comparison, mobile payments, managing loyalty programs and promotions (including location triggered offers), video and photo sharing and connecting in real time to social networks make mobile a critical component.
• Internet of things: Extending connectivity to things in addition to mobile devices opens up some interesting possibilities. For example what if stores could provide connected inventory maps to your mobile devices? So all I'd have to do is tell my phone I want some 1/4" bolts the next time I'm at the hardware store and the phone would know that I'm in a hardware store, it would know where things are in the store and it could provide a map to guide me to what I need...
• Converged or unified experience: I think the boundary between online and offline shopping is eroding. Putting the Internet in your pocket opens up all sorts of opportunities for better experiences, and add in the other trends and you start to see a very rich and new experience is possible.

Converged experience is the complicated part and currently doesn't exist. Pieces of the puzzle are coming together though, but as always hooking different technologies together is the complicated part. This new converged commerce experience is rapidly coming together though, with pressure from both merchants and customers and a lot of incentive for tech vendors to sort out their offerings.

Tags: commerce, social business, Groupon, Google, Yelp, technology, eCommerce, shopping