Last week at Dreamforce I had a deja vu moment. It felt like SAP’s Sapphire in 1999 with Deloitte and Accenture and Wipro logos on big booths, on conference bags, on party invitations.
In the Marketing Cloud session, I wondered what value these traditional IT/ERP centric service providers would bring customers compared to digital agencies. Likely, they will continue to focus on Sales and Service cloud opportunities – for example, Siebel to Salesforce SFA migrations. But by now, that service should be priced much more reasonably than it was say, in 2007.
And that is where the 1999 risk comes in. These providers can hype up even a soiled brown bag.
Fortunately, we are dealing with a new CIO like Vail Resort’s Robert Unwiler:
“Because the EpicMix app deals directly with customers, it has pushed Vail's IT team to think more like a commercial software company. That means working closely with the chief marketing officer and her team. Urwiler's using outsourcers much more selectively now, and he's adding people with software vendor experience to his team. And Vail is benchmarking EpicMix against the likes of Facebook and Foursquare in terms of design and ease of use.”
1999 expectations, say hello to 2012 realities.
