While Marc Benioff reeled off a series of new innovations - Force Sites, integration with Facebook and amazon web services, several ISVs who have used Force to re-platform their applications, for me sessions salesforce arranged with Polly Sumner and Bobby Napiltonia highlighted 2 innovations that deserve mention.
The first is the ecosystem of next-gen systems integrators salesforce has
cultivated including Appirio, Astadia, Bluewolf and Model Metrics. They
are dwarfed in resources - most only have 100-300 resources - by firms like
Accenture and Deloitte who were also represented at the show. But their fees are
also dwarfed - they offer much more reasonable software/services cost ratios
through use of iterative development and offsite "virtualized" teams. They also
offer more web savvy than the bigger firms. The new Scients and Razorfishes.
With one big difference - they don't make their revenues from dot.coms, but much
bigger corporate customers of salesforce. And in a sea of corporate T-shirts, Bluewolf ladies stood out with their baby blue scarves, and their gents with their blue ties.
The second was how salesforce is moving into verticals. They are targeting ISVs in retail, healthcare and others that do not want to be acquired by Oracle and cannot compete effectively with SAP, and using product engineering firms like Symphony and Persistent to "SaaS-ify" their old architectures at surprisingly low investment. They are also using corporate customers to drag such vendors along. Dell, a big salesforce customer, nudged Glovia, which it uses as its ERP platform at a number of plants, to make the move. At the conference, salesforce.com had booths for verticals where its CRM products have had traction from financial services to media.
I have a feeling next year, these booths will showcase a much broader range of applications beyond CRM. And there will be many more verticals represented.
