Michael Fauscette

Facebook's Growing Web Platform

If you want to find something, anything on the web, you "google" it...I mean how ubiquitous has a company become when it's name becomes the verb for a common activity? Now I realize there are other search options, but according to the latest stats more many more people prefer (or default) to Google's search engine. It hasn't always been this way online though, once there were online services that dominated online experience. In the 1980's CompuServe (CIS) dominated the pack, with competitors like The Source and Prodigy, providing everything from the client software to the network to file transfer and email, even building an early form of chat. CIS was a pioneer and dominated until the mid-1990's when America Online (AOL) rose to prominence and replaced and/or bought most of the other online services. All of these services provided the entire experience and filtered the wider Internet. The consumer experience was basically a walled garden.   

In the late 1990's, with the growing popularity of the World Wide Web, companies moved away from closed online services and the people followed. The browser wars and the search wars played out and the web as we know it today started to evolve. Google, as we know, became the dominate search property and grew into a monolithic company on the backs of a new business paradigm around advertising and page views. The WWW became a place of pages as destinations and links became the motive force. We moved from the early static web to transaction web and into the era of social web. With the social web we saw an explosion of user generated content and learned new ways of interacting with and connecting to people. I doubt anyone would argue that the social web has had far reaching impact and has changed human behavior and expectations on a grand scale. Whew, I guess that's about the shortest history of the Internet that I can manage to share...anyway, the point is that things have evolved and that in the last great change Google came out as the dominate "on ramp" to the Internet.

The Internet continues to evolve though and now I'm starting to think about just how much of a disruption that the social web is creating. Last year after the Facebook f8 conference, I started thinking about the shift away from a link centric web and toward a people-centric paradigm...well, actually I called it the Facebook centric web. Part of this idea came out of the profile changes (among other things) that were announced at the conference. Well, not to disappoint, last week's f8 conference has brought these thoughts of disruption back up as Facebook rolled out this years' changes to the now quite familiar whining and complaining of some very vocal minority of Facebook users...most likely the same voices we heard last year (and notice none of them left last year...or will leave this year either).

There's been quite a lot written about the specifics of the many changes that were announced so I won't bore you with that recap. Instead I want to focus on the extension of what I started thinking last year, Facebook is becoming the new platform for the web...or at least wants to. Look at the progress Facebook has made since last year, building on the roots that were already growing of course. I think that Facebook's progress falls into 5 platforms:

1. Social platform - membership now ~800M, the next closest competitor...not close enough to mention.
2. Ad platform - revenue from ads should exceed $3.8B in 2011...enough said.
3. Marketing platform - As of Sept 2011, 87 of the top 100 retailers have Facebook pages with a combined total of 36M fans.
4. Commerce platform - 1 in 4 people have made a purchase from a brand's Facebook page. In revenue creation, ranking second to ads, Facebook is on track this year to do about $470M from Facebook credits. 
5. Media platform - The newest edition to the Facebook experience, although you could argue that Facebook was already a media curation platform with all of the information that is shared there daily. As of last week Facebook announced the new "streaming" timeline of a members activities and the OpenGraph which will allow applications to interact in real time with the timeline. The focus will be on media apps in music, movies, TV, news and books. Announcement partners included Spotify and Netflix (outside the US) on stage and also a list of others that ranged from Mashable, GIZMODO and Yahoo to USAToday, The Economist and Sporting News.

Last weeks changes certainly have the potential to draw more people to spend more time on Facebook and share more as well. It's an interesting circle, the more you interact and spend time, the more information you create about your preferences, the more ads can be accurately targeted and the more you can use the interaction and recommendations of your graph to find more of interest, which kicks off the cycle again...

So, is Facebook the new web platform or perhaps just increasingly the "onramp" of choice for more and more people to "do" stuff on the web. In fact Facebook is increasingly an important part of search, with people using the curated content and their own network to get information and advice. One thing's for sure, revenue is growing rapidly and the changes in just a year seem to be feeding even more growth in time spent and revenue...and also personal value? Can't wait for next year's f8?

Tags: facebook, media, entertainment, curation, people-centric, network, spotify, netflix, google, search

Momentum for Enterprise Mobile Apps - Workday, Salesforce.com and Box.net

Mobile is fast becoming one of the key ways that many employees choose to do work. Tablet computing devices are proving to be very flexible and functional for mobile workers and open up a much broader set of capabilities that could be accessed on the larger form factor. The limiting factor, at least from the enterprise use of mobile, is the software. Apps designed for smartphones have in many cases been severely limited in functionality, mostly because enterprise vendors were skeptical that the limited smartphone form factor could be used for the broader list of tasks that mobile workers wanted to accomplish. Smartphones are excellent for communication activities like email, IM, social networks, activity streams, etc., light web browsing and for some simple data entry / processing / approval activities like filing / approving time and expense records, but when it comes to "real" work, the screen size is very troublesome. Some great productivity tools are available like Evernote and iWork, but accessing true enterprise functionality on any mobile device, for the most part, isn't possible. The notable exception has been access enterprise resources through a virtualized mobile client like Citrix Receiver.

This trend is starting to reverse as more vendors build and launch mobile apps that allow full, or near full, enterprise capabilities utilizing the tablet form factor. To accomplish this we're seeing two distinct approaches, the native mobile app and the web based mobile app.  In my recent Dreamforce recap I talked about Salesforce.com's new web based mobile app touch.salesforce.com, a full function HTML5 based app optimized for tablets. Web apps were tried early on for the iPhone version one but quickly gave way to native apps. Two factors seem to have converged to make web apps much more interesting than the 1st generation, increased fast connectivity (3G and 4G) that makes performance more acceptable and the move to HTML5, which provides a much richer experience and greater flexibility in supporting multiple devices.

Taking the native app route, Workday recently launched an iPad app and updated its iPhone app. I had a chance to take a look at the iPad app (disclosure, Workday provided iPads preloaded with the app for evaluation) at the recent Workday analyst tech summit just prior to Dreamforce. The new app includes:

"Organizational Swirl" - lets users navigate organizational hierarchies and drill into employee profiles to view job info, talent info, job history and compensation history.

"Workfeed" - Workday's version of an activity stream that includes alerts and approvals

• "Real time business intelligence" - real time reports and analytics that support workforce planning, compensation management, financial management and talent management including drill down capabilities.
• Google maps integration that provides employee work locations

The app makes good use of the rich visual interface of the iPad, particularly in it's drill down capabilities. In the updated iPhone app Workday added the ability to capture receipts with the iPhone camera. For all mobile apps Workday extended its SAML framework which makes authentication consistent across all Workday clients.

Box.net is taking a hybrid approach to enterprise mobile with both some native device support and web apps.  In August Box added a native Android  app optimized for tablets, an app for RIM's Playbook and a HTML5 mobile web app, m.box.net. These solutions add to already released iPad, iPhone and TouchPad apps, and provide a mobile portfolio that covers all existing mobile OS's.

Overall these three vendors are providing mobile access to a much broader set of functionality than ever before. In the case of Salesforce.com it is a significant improvement over its existing iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps, which have a very limited feature set. If vendors want to get wide enterprise use they have to find an approach that provides most laptop functionality optimized for the specific mobile experience. More and more workers want to have the ability to use and access enterprise resources from a diverse set of mobile devices. The tablets are particularly good at displaying and interacting with data, so are proving to be in high demand among executives as full information systems. This of course is dependent on more and more robust real time business analytics, optimized for the tablet experience. Expect to see more vendors taking advantage of those unique display and analysis capabilities as well as increasing features and functions to match much of the full client experience.

Tags: mobile, enterprise, tablet, iPad, iPhone, Salesforce.com, Workday, Box.net, Android

IBM Partners See Upswing in Profitability - Guest Post

This guest post is from Christine Dover, an IDC analyst in my SBS group. We are launching a new Channels and Alliances blog here, and this is it's inaugural post. Also,  many of my colleagues write on the topic of Social Business on our blog here.

On September 6, the IBM Software Group held an analysts' update call to review the progress of the software business partners in the first half of the FY2011, as well as review some new PartnerWorld programs and offerings. According to IBM, the trend for business partners is UP, UP, UP across multiple areas. For example, total business partner revenue is up 14% year over year, while transactions are up 21% for general business, 33% for midmarket, 30% for the business partner led model, and 33% for system integrators.  So how is that happening?

There seem to be two primary drivers:

• Solution Value Plus Authorizations for Industries and Capabilities
• Partner Business Led Model (BPLM)

Launched in November 2010, the SVP Industry Solution, and Cross-Capability Authorizations have quickly made an impact with the business partners. While there is a high hurdle for the partner to qualify for the Authorizations the results seem to be well worth the investment.  Partners around the world are reporting increased profits and software revenue and are attributing the positive impact on their profitability to these SVP Authorizations. An IBM Business Partner in Brazil reports "positives are better margins, protection of companies that invest, opportunity record, and the availability of training."  Ascendant, a long-time IBM Business Partner which has earned Industry Authorizations in Retail and Healthcare, reports that they are seeing increased number and quality of leads, as well as a realized margin improvement of 12.5% as a result of their participation in the IBM Software programs.  Many software vendors are establishing similar programs (e.g., specializations) and this is an excellent industry trend. Customers want to work with partners who have met a robust and standard set of qualifications to ensure that they are working with the vendor's most qualified partners. It makes sense that the partners who are earning these qualifications are then first in line for customer consideration and attention from the vendor. The partners are then truly rewarded with increased market opportunity and profits.

The other factor in increased IBM partner profitability is BPLM where business partners lead the route to market. BPLMs are defined by geography, type of account (e.g., Midmarket), brand, or industry. For example, a business partner may be the BPLM partner for a specific geography (e.g., Southern California and Arizona) and brand (e.g., Rational), setting them up as IBM's go-to partner in a very specific target market. IBM reports that the BPLM program has seen 30% revenue growth YoY.  IBM Business Partner, Newcomp, described BPLM as being similar to a franchise model and say they have seen over 200% YoY  growth in IBM licensing. IBM added more than 40 BPLMs in the first half of 2011 and is looking to add another 40 in the second half.  Again, other vendors have established similar programs but I haven't heard from them as to their level of success, which leads me to think that they haven’t put enough effort behind these programs. The current success of IBM's BPLM program seems to demonstrate that partner led models, when really supported by the vendor, are very important to driving growth.

The IBM team, Mark Register, IBM Software VP for Business Partners and Midmarket, and Shaun Jones, IBM Software VP for Business Partners and Midmarket Marketing, also laid out their 2H2011 priorities for continuing the business partners' roadmap to success:

• Simplification
• Accelerating Acquisition Integration
• Sales Execution

Simplification has two components – Software Value Plus (SVP) and the Software Story. For the SVP program this is a convergence of Software Value Net (SVN) into a simplified SVP program that consists of an Open Portfolio and an Authorized Portfolio. This change eliminates much confusion as business partners were being recognized as both SVP and SVN partners and then had to explain to their customers what that meant. So now there are only SVP partners who can sell and implement  the Open Portfolio products and solutions (generally midmarket solutions). The SVP partner can then choose to earn an authorization for a product (e.g., Cognos, Filenet), an industry solution e.g., financial services), or a cross-capability solution (e.g., security). IBM is also creating a number of new sales and marketing resources on PartnerWorld to scale the IBM Software Story through its business partners. These resources include a unified IBM Software portfolio overview, quick reference guide, and client facing presentations, quarterly sales kits, and market opportunity & product maps. All welcome additions to PartnerWorld to help the partners sell more IBM software more quickly.

IBM has made a huge number of acquisitions in key growth areas over the years that have helped IBM leverage its global scale and reach. But making those acquisitions available to business partners has often been a slow process. IBM is now working to accelerate the integration of its acquisitions into its Passport Advantage program which covers software license acquisition under a single, common set of agreements, processes, and tools. IBM has already incorporated Sterling Commerce, Coremetrics, Unica, and other acquired companies into Passport Advantage and will soon add Netezza and TRIRIGA as well. This is great news for IBM as well as its customers and partners as acquisitions often disrupt the sale of products through the channel due to uncertainly of where the product fits into the overall portfolio and continued support of the product. This move will also help IBM better monetize its acquisitions as it increases the opportunity for its business partners to sell and provide solutions for these acquired products.

IBM is also offering incentives to partners who displace specific competitors such as Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft, TmaxSoft (AP/Korea), and HP (additional competitors are expected to be added to this program). If the business partner substantiates that the win is indeed a competitive displacement, then IBM will pay the partner an additional fee, which can increase if the customer also provides a reference. Another interesting sales program is the Cost Buster Solution which targets small and midsize businesses. There are 30 solution bundles available, which are configured for 100-employee sized businesses. The program also includes IBM Global Financing for 36 months and qualified clients can finance their entire solution. As it can be tough for small businesses to get bank financing today, this is a good opportunity for partners to work with their customers and continue to sell solutions.

As usual, the team at the IBM Software Group has pulled together a solid set of program enhancements to support its business partners.  IBM Business Partners heard hear this same information on Tuesday, September 13on "The Business of Being Bold: Driving to a Strong Year End" webcast.  Click here to access the replay as well as find more information on IBM Business Partner events.

Tags: IDC, IBM, partners, channels, VAR, program

The Social Web as a Customer Support Channel

I just had an experience that to me, typifies what I expect out of companies these days for product support. I returned to my desk and noticed that my Evernote app on my Mac Mini had not synced (had an error, actually). I had taken some notes earlier on my MacBook Air and wanted to review them on the other computer, one of the best advantages to using Evernote for all note taking (actually staying in sync across Mac Mini, MacBook Air, iPhone and iPad). Manual sync didn't work, my network connection was active so I tried my iPhone, which also wasn't syncing. Thinking that there might be a status posted online I tried the Evernote homepage, which wouldn't load. My next step was to run a Twitter search on "Evernote". Immediately in the results I saw the following tweet from @EvernoteStatus:  

The link takes you to a Tumblr site, status.evernote.com, which provides a feed of system status messages. My point, though, isn't really how Evernote is keeping user up to date, but that they are keeping users up to date using a combination of social channels. In the SaaS vendor world, it's not unusual for vendors to publish status somewhere online. Salesforce.com, for example, has long maintained trust.salesforce.com, where it publishes a very detailed status page with multiple RSS feeds that a customer can use to turn the pull model of a web page into more of a push model. I've seen many ways that SaaS vendors update status ranging from web pages to blogs to social media sites. What I appreciated about the Evernote experience was this combination of pull, the status page, with push, the Twitter feed. 

SaaS vendors have a high service level with their customers, of course, so having some public way to update status and maintenance downtimes, is essential. Using social channels for support isn't just limited to software vendors though. The concept of opening up social communication channels to reach customers "when, where and how" they choose, applies across a broad range of industries, BtoC and BtoB. I talked about the changing expectations of customers and the use of social for customer support here, so I won't go back through all of the details. What this incident reinforces to me though, is how powerful simple changes to your support strategy can be.

When it comes to social customer service there are really two basic techniques that you can add. The first is building and operating customer support communities. The second is opening up social channels in addition to your "normal" channels like voice, email, web form, chat, etc. Channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tunblr, when added to your existing channels really increase your opportunity to delight customers in ways that the customers finds comfortable. Often the biggest win from a support standpoint is simply keeping customers up to date in a very transparent way to problems and how you are working to resolve them. Openness and transparency go a long way toward building and maintaining trust...and remember trust is hard to build but very easy to lose. Have you seen other ways that companies are using the social web for customer service?

Tags: SCRM, socbiz, social, customer, customer service, support, Twitter, Facebook, Evernote

The Three C's of Social Business

Einstein said "everything must be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler". That concept, often tied to Occam's Razor, is very powerful when looking at new theories and models. I decided to apply this process to social business and in so doing something emerged that I believe is very useful in understanding social in the enterprise. In a document that we published last year called The Social Business Framework, we explored the two key levers that can be applied to socialize business, content and community. A year later and after quite a bit of research on social business, I now believe that there was a missing element beyond content and community that is critical for building a complete enterprise social strategy. This third element is collaboration.

The overall diagram represents the social business, but each of the intersections has some interesting implications on various parts of the business. First thought, let's define each area:

Collaboration:

Collaboration is people or organizations working together to accomplish shared tasks / goals, facilitated by the effective combination of communication, tools and processes. Collaboration can occur between individuals and organizations (although you could argue that organizational collaboration is still really individual). Tools designed to support the collaborative process must be focused on connecting people first, then providing access and availability to required content, data and information. Unlike some of the "collaboration" tools of the past that were designed to control content / files, true social collaboration tools are people-centric, with content sharing and communication as a secondary function.

Content:

Content in the social context is most often social media, although it can take other forms as well. Social media is a mechanism designed for sharing through social interaction and using the Internet as a highly scalable and highly accessible platform for distribution. The socialization of media democratizes content creation, and broadly distributes content curation, and information access. Because social media is distributed over the Internet, information, news, and content can become available in near real time or even real time and on any device that has connectivity. Content creation and consumption have become highly available on any device and at any time. Forms of social media include user-generated content (wikis, discussion forums, blogs) and rich media (video, photos).

Community:

Community most often manifests itself as a social network. Social networks are a group of individuals or organizations, either public or private, that are connected to each other through some common thread and share information with one another on topics of interest. Social networks are not new or unique to the Internet, but the nature of the relationship created is somewhat altered in an online setting. In the past relationships were generally defined by proximity and length of exposure, which was fundamental in establishing a trust bond between the individuals or groups involved. In an online setting, relationships tend to be defined by interaction and connectivity, which can make value and trust very fragile. Often because of the unique online environment, trust is aided by the network effect, making trust relationships transferable 1:1:1 through trust filtering.

Collaboration, content and community are the building blocks of the social business. Each of these elements can be combined to create functions that support some social process. Here are a few examples:

Collaboration - Community:

• Peer to Peer Customer Support Communities
• Partner communities
• Crowdsourcing product / service feedback

Collaboration - Content: 

• Crowdsourcing contact data
• Crowdsourced (employee) product documentation
• Crowdsourced training material (employee sourced)

Community - Content:

• Product / service issue resolution and support documentation that is the output of a peer to peer support community and is harvested by the business as an addition to its corporate knowledge base.
• Customer loyalty programs

Collaboration - Content - Community:

• Co-innovation on product / service development (could be partner - company, customer - company, supplier - company, etc.)
• Supplier networks
• Partner selling / lead management

These are only a few examples of the many use cases that can be defined using the three C's. How is your company using content, collaboration and community?

Tags: collaboration, content, community, socbiz, social, social enterprise, customer, innovation, SCRM, social CRM

Dreamforce 2011, the Recap

The multitude of clouds floating around on light poles, buses, and buildings in San Francisco are coming down and the sounds of Metallica have stopped echoing in the streets as people (over 40,000 of them) flock to the Bay Areas' three airports for their journey home. Hopefully some are even taking the opportunity to spend Labor Day exploring all of the many attractions in and around San Francisco. You have to give the Salesforce.com crew a lot of credit, once again the week was filled with energy and excitement, something I've had the pleasure of observing for the last 6 "editions". This year was the largest ever and with the massive numbers of people running around 5th and Howard, it felt a lot like Oracle OpenWorld in its sheer size.

This year saw a new face of Salesfore.com, with much messaging and buzz around what CEO Marc Benioff is calling the social enterprise. The concepts seem to map pretty closely to what we at IDC call social business and have been talking and writing about for the last 3 years or so. All across the Salesforce suite of applications, and even in its Force.com platform, they are rapidly building, buying, integrating and partnering to get more social functionality available as quickly as possible. In particular many enhancements were announced for Salesforce.com's core social offering, Chatter, that were much needed and, IMHO, are a significant improvement in the product's overall usefulness and relevance.

Let's look at the Chatter announcements, then. The next generation enterprise is based on a networked ecosystem paradigm, and connectivity across the business, not just an internal employee collaborative network, is an essential component of the model. This was the most limiting issue with Chatter, it was build for internal collaboration only and couldn't be connected to other networks nor be opened up to customers, suppliers and partners. Salesforce addressed both of those issues with two of the most important new features, Chatter Groups and Chatter Connect API. Chatter Groups gives employees the capability to build groups that include external constituents in a secure and controlled manner necessary to meet external collaboration needs while protecting corporate information and meeting IT security and access requirements. The Connect API is the second piece necessary to create a connected enterprise by bringing in other social networks, content repositories (like Microsoft SharePoint), communication channels (like email) and other data to the chatter feed.

Collaboration in the social business, with its people-centric versus the traditional file-centric collaborative approach, needs to include the ability to connect people across many different communication channels. Leveraging technology that Salesforce.com acquired earlier this year with its acquisition of DimDim, Chatter Now provides presence and instant messenger (IM) functionality to the Chatter stream. While the presence is limited to Chatter today, it does provide a base for expanding into what has been the territory of unified communications (UC) solutions in the past. 

Adoption of social collaboration systems is essential for the success of the solution, as the network effect is a key component to the usefulness of the system. In other words the more people in the collaboration network the more useful it is, and thus the more people want to join, which is in effect a bit of a double edged sword. Getting people to use systems like Chatter is in part a function of how valuable and how much happens inside the system. In that vein Salesforce has added workflow approvals into the Chatter stream, called Chatter Approvals. This functionality increases the usefulness of the system and thus should increase its use.

The final Chatter announcement, Chatter Service, is tied into the broader push by Salesforce to expand its footprint in social customer support by enhancing its Service Cloud. Chatter Service is a key underpinning for the Service Cloud and its ability to open up social channels for scalable support delivery. The Service Cloud in general received a lot of attention at Dreamforce as Salesforce is adding functionality and broadening its efforts at socializing the Service Cloud.

Mobile also received it due share of attention at Dreamforce this year. In the past Salesforce's strategy for mobility was tied to native mobile apps with limited functionality. This year marked a departure from that strategy with the announcement of touch.salesforce.com, a full function, cross platform HTML5 based mobile web application. The application is basically a full web client redesigned for touch and should get a strong reaction from customers, who have been clamoring for more mobile functionality.

CRM systems are quite naturally based on a core customer record. That record contains the customer details ranging from location and contact to transactions and support issues. Salesforce's customer record, while more than adequate for collecting and maintaining the data traditionally considered necessary by CRM users, does not capture the next generation of social information available on public social networks and across other systems. With the Winter 2012 release this will be corrected as Salesforce.com incorporates social information into the customer record through open API's and by leveraging the recent acquisition of social listening post and socialytics vendor Radian6 to build Social Profiles. Social data, which is growing at a exponential pace, is becoming business critical for understanding and predicting customer behavior. Also related to the customer record, Salesforce announced Data.com, which is based on the acquisition of Jigsaw, with its crowdsourced data, and combined with Dun and Bradstreet's new D&B360 offering.

Salesforce.com started as a sales force automation (SFA) vendor and has since expanded across into customer support, crowdsourced data, database in the cloud, cloud development platforms, social collaboration platform and platform as a service. It is not, though a full enterprise business system vendor. The more reach that Salesforce can get the greater its growth potential. To expand reach Salesforce has placed its bets on partnering and investing, in addition to its growing platform. For example, in the day 2 keynote Benioff featured Kenandy, a new cloud based manufacturing management vendor that came out of stealth mode at Dreamforce. The announcement included a $10.5 million round of funding led by Kleiner, Perkins and joined by Salesforce. Kenandy positions itself directly into Salesforce.com's vision both as a cloud vendor and as a collaborative manufacturing platform. The investments weren't limited to new ventures either, as Infor CEO Charles Phillips joined Benioff on stage to talk about InForce,  Infor develop Force.com applications that received investment from Salesforce. Other partner announcements included enhanced integration with Workday and a robust mobile app from Loic Le Muir's Seesmic.

Benioff presented a strong vision for the social enterprise, a vision that is one of the most complete I've seen. Building on a data foundation that starts to aggregate essential social data, enhanced with a strong partnering strategy, aggressive investments, a growing social platform vision, and growing social functionality, one can start to see a formidable social platform strategy. The enhancements to Chatter in particular go a long way to address some of the short falls of the past. That said Salesforce.com has to move well beyond its CRM and SFA focus and into some uncharted areas very quickly. In particular Salesforce must expand its relationships and get closer to CIO's, well outside of its line of business past. One has to wonder if a company named Salesforce.com can become the social business platform of choice...or perhaps Force.com is a better fit?

Tags: socbiz, salesforce.com, dreamforce, 2011, kenandy, Infor, collaboration, chatter