Salesforce.com heralding Cloud 2.0 Date:   Thursday , December 09, 2010 With the industry reeling from the financial crisis and businesses still facing uncertainty about their futures, the need to rationalize cost is the top priority on a CEO’s agenda. And one of the areas that is identified to rationalize the cost is IT. With developments like cloud computing becoming a very natural reflex to the CIO’s who were challenged to do more with less, a new wave of opportunity has opened up for Salesforce.com. In an exclusive conversation with The SmartTechie, Jeremey Cooper, VP – Marketing (Asia Pacific & Japan), Salesforce.com talks about the trends, market opportunities, new products, challenges and more. What are the factors that helped Salesforce.com to grow rapidly in India? What were some of the initial hurdles? Salesforce.com has been present in India over a decade through our customers, which include US and European companies that have their presence in India. We first launched our direct presence in India in 2006 as we saw the market has a huge potential for Salesforce. India today is one of our fastest growing markets worldwide and we are actively investing accordingly. For Salesforce India holds humungous promise due to following reasons: 1. Cloud computing represents the first opportunity for companies of any size in India to be able to use technology because it’s not costly. 2. Provides a large opportunity for India to leap frog the initial hardware investments the companies have to make and go straight to mobile devices. 3. The reaction that we are getting from the developer community. Cloud computing provides the first real opportunity to create globally recognized Indian software brands. In the past entrepreneurs have tried to bring U.S. business models in India and at times it had failed, how do you make sure that you succeed in this? What are the innovations that you are bringing to this market? We have observed two things that are happening at macro level in India; first, the bandwidth is getting better and second, several small or medium size companies in India do not have a lot of hardware or data centers and can get into Cloud computing easily with a very low budget in contrast to that needed for loading a data center. We build applications that are extremely fast over the web and deliver over a billion transactions a month where each of these transactions are delivered in less than the 3rd of a second. How do you see the CRM landscape currently? And how big is the market right now? We have invested heavily here in the last two years as we see an enormous opportunity to improve what’s going on in the CRM. The market is as big as any company that can afford a static price of about $5 a month for contact management. Tell about Salesforce ‘Chatter’. Launched in February, Chatter, a collaboration service that heralds the arrival of ‘Cloud 2’ is a mash-up of social networking and collaboration features to form a new class of enterprise services hosted in the cloud. Chatter uses existing web-based tools such as Facebook, Google and Twitter to “collaborate around more than just documents”. Users will be able to follow people, business processes and data while allowing administrators to place enterprise level controls. The software also enables Force.com developers to easily integrate social networking capabilities into applications. Typically intended for deployment on mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad, Chatter will allow users to view status updates, profiles and get real-time feeds from the cloud. Since its launch, the demand for Chatter has been huge. In the first week 10,000 companies signed up for Chatter, by the end of the first month 21,000 companies, this shows the market demand for it. The reason for this is very clear, 50 percent of the world’s population is now below 30 years of age and 96 percent of these people have already signed up in a social networking site, for somebody who grew up in social networking sites, suddenly having to come and use emailing will be pretty confronting. Since we deployed Chatter in Salesforce, our internal emails have gone down by over 30 percent. How has the social networking sites helped to change the mobile CRMs? We are going through another major computing cycle; the 60s was about the mainframe, the 70s about mini-computer technology, 80s and 90s about client server, 2000s about desktop internet, we think the next 10 year will be all about mobile internet. Today, more data is being consumed and transacted on mobile devices than on desktops and on laptops. How has the year been for Salesforce? We realized earnings last month and there has been 25 percent revenue growth, which makes us the fastest growing software company of our size. At $1.6 billion, Salesforce is the fourth fastest growing technology company as per Forbes. We believe we are the first enterprise software company to address the importance of social networking inside the enterprise. With Chatter we have completely removed the barriers that distinguish the consumer web experience with business web experience. The customer count today stands at 82,400 worldwide. What are the main concerns of the CIOs from Indian companies? There are seven things; 1. Is the product secure? 2. What is the performance? 3. Reliability 4. Scalability 5. Integration 6. Ease of use, 7. Is it future proof? This is pretty typical checklist of CIOs and is consistent with all CIOs across the world. Is cost not an issue to CIOs? Cost is most certainly an issue; an eighth thing on the list can be cost. When it comes to security the big thing that we point out is that the world’s largest banks run on Salesforce. If you are a manufacturing firm in India do you need a better data security than City Bank? Probably not, but if you come to cloud you will get it for a monthly fee.