ARC Advisory Group has just published a study of how Supply Chain Management applications are moving to the SaaS model

Salesforce.com is rolling out their Spring ‘10 release that includes a whole variety of new capability, as per usual.  One in particular has caught my interest – the Process Visualiser.   This product enables you to visually represent and map your business process components ranging from forms to activities to approvals to design and simulate the process flow before deployment.    The possibilities are endless, but given the flexibility of the force.com platform, might include processes such as:

• Sales: Call scripting and sales methodology automation
• Service: Customer issue resolution and product returns
• Finance: Billing and collections
• HR: Employee onboarding and performance management
• Legal: Contract management and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance
• Operations: Surveys and supplier management

The full Salesforce.com press release is here

I am looking forward to trialling this capability with a customer soon.

I just returned from Salesforce.com’s annual conference – Dreamforce, in San Francisco.  Something like 15,000 people attended and the scale and hype were impressive.   Marc Benioff launched the Collaboration Cloud with Salesforce.com’s next product, Chatter, which is essentially a Facebook-like collaboration application.  I think it may have some opportunities inside an enterprise as a way to share information with your teams, but time will tell.  As many observers have noted, the “cloud computing” hype has reached a near crescendo, which can only result in unmet expectations in the short term.  It’s interesting though, when I mention the term to non-IT people, most of them have never heard the term.   Even Salesforce.com is a company that a lot of people are unfamiliar with outside the technology sector.

Regardless, apart from the “Chatter” hype at the conference, there were a lot of incremental product announcements that should render the core Sales and Service applications even more useful.  And I was impressed by the range of vendors marketing applications around the Salesforce.com eco-system.  I’ve wondered about the consulting model around these products, as it doesn’t always seem practical to have the same sort of leverage that you could build a business around with typical Enterprise Applications  (and pre ‘ERP’).   But in talking to some of the large integrators in the US, it appears that it is much the same in the enterprise.  Although configuration times are shorter and there is less IT infrastructure to worry about, that extra effort can be re-focussed in business process design, change management, and user adoption which traditionally got short-changed.  This will be an area of emphasis at in the CLOUD

In The Cloud is my new company – we focus on helping enterprises increase agility and reduce costs through the deployment of software-as-a-service and cloud based applications.  Initially we are providing implementation and development services with Salesforce.com, as well as working with organisations to identify components in their application architecture that may suit development or replacement with internet delivered applications.  We will be adding competencies in Google Apps, Amazon web services as well as some other specific niche SaaS applications in the near future.

I have been working with the team at LoyaltyTech, a company that delivers business and technology solutions in the demand chain – e-commerce, loyalty programs, customer analytics, and social network integration – paticularly in multi-channel retail environments.    Australian retailers have lagged behind North America and Europe in their adoption of these strategies.   DTDigital recently posted on how important it is for Australian companies to pick the pace and predicts that this will be the year it happens.

In recent visits with customers and prospects,  I’ve found that many of them don’t have an appreciation of how cost-effectively some of these initiatives can be implemented to provide a measurable increase in revenue and lifetime value of customers.  Improving your customer’s experience doesn’t have to cost $1m and can provide multiple opportunities for increased loyalty and cross/up sell.  Contact LoyaltyTech to learn more.

I’ve recently started working with eOriginal, a digital signature and vault solution that has had great success in North America, particularly in consumer lending but also in government, health and transport/logistics.  This sort of product offfers some fantastic benefits for companies that generate significant numbers of agreements or other documents requiring signature.  In addition to reducing the cycle time for execution of documents, the cost savings on printing, couriering, filing and retrieving documents makes for a pretty compelling investment case, particularly since eOriginal is an on-demand SaaS offering.  It’s easily integrated with loan origination and other document production systems.   The electronic vault technology is the only solution accepted in the U.S. for purposes of securitising pools of financial instruments and is covered by an impressive portfolio of patents.  It ensures that the electronic originals are tamperproof as well as providing for transfer of ownership of documents.

Australian legislation, through the Electronic Transactions Act (1999), enables electronic signatures as a mechanism for execution of most kinds of agreements, but we seem to be in the very early stages of adopting this technology.  I’d be interested to hear your thoughts about why the adoption has been so limited?  And of course,  if you are interested in the solution feel free to contact me!

At dSales we have been looking a lot at web chat technologies and their application as another sales and service channel – LivePerson is a particularly successful provider that we have been working with especially because of their integration with salesforce.com.   It seems that this chat has not really caught in in Australia like in many other countries and I’m trying to figure out why – it can provide significant uplift in sales conversions and increase in service agent productivity.

Anyone got any thoughts?

Recently saw salesforce.com’s presentation on the Service Cloud, which included discussion of integration with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  The concept of monitoring what your customer base is saying about you in the cloud and reacting appropriately is  getting a lot of attention at the moment.

Certainly the ability to find out more about your customer contacts through the various social & professional networking apps makes a lot of sense – a lot of us look up people on LinkedIn before making initial contact to get some idea of who we are dealing with.

And I also buy in to exposing solutions to customer issues on the web in a way that is easily searchable – if you have a problem with a product, you are more likely to search for a solution in Google than to start with the manufacturer’s knowledge base, so if your company’s solutions are out there in search engine land they are more likely to find them.

But I’d be interested to hear other ways that people are using their customer relationship systems to interact with social media…

Once upon a time, I started a consulting business providing services to implement large accounting, HR and manufacturing systems, later called ERP. We started the business focussing on Oracle Applications, and then, when PeopleSoft came to Australia we signed up as their first implementation partner here. PeopleSoft was started by Dave Duffield, and moved from an upstart challenger to Oracle and SAP by entering the HR & Payroll market first (now called HCM for Human Capital Management) and then expanding into accounting and other applications. The company was very successful and after a long battle were eventually swallowed by Oracle.

Now Mr. Duffield is back, doing it again with Workday, an ERP application delivered using a SaaS or on-demand model.  The company has raised several substantial rounds of capital and already has started accumulating an impressive customer list include some Fortune 500 companies.  Interesting, they list on their customer list some of the major SaaS players such as salesforce.com, Xactly and Astadia, who are using Workday for their back office functions.

I am watching with great interest.

I read an interesting post on the SmothSpan blog about the relative importance of multi-tenant architecture given the ability for cloud scaling.

It also references the Atlassian blog post from today which is really interesting as it makes the case for single tenancy.