It Is Not About Collaboration In An Island says Benioff

In today's Dreamforce 2011 keynote, Marc Benioff mentioned a realization about collaboration. He said that after two years of using chatter, customers told Salesforce.com that they do not want islands of collaboration. Salesforce.com has realized that they need to put collaboration at the core of business processes.

Another important thing is that collaboration needs to be part of ALL business processes, not just customer relationship management. In my opinion, it is hard for any one provider to become the only social collaboration provider. It is a bit like saying there should have been one internet application provider. No. That is not how it happened. There were multiple internet application providers. Similarly that is not how it will happen in the enterprise social collaboration space.

There will be Chatter that, I hope, puts collaboration at the core of customer relationship management. However there will be more enterprise applications that will put collaboration at the core. There will be Service applications, people management applications and many more. Salesforce.com is not going to provide all of them.

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Mad Money Loves SAP

Jim Cramer's view on SAP as a company. Bill says SAP is about cloud and mobility.
Bill also mentioned that the housing and jobs economy will take a long time to recover. But corporations have $ 1.7 Trillion to invest and SAP is in a good position to deliver solutions. That is interesting. Government and consumers don't have much money to spend. But corporations have a lot of money to spend. This is a great time for corportations to invest in the next 20 years of innovation. I believe that OnDemand applications that are designed for people and mobility are key areas for investment.

Prototypes appeal to a different part of the brain

Last week we had our quarterly product review sessions where we pitch our big bosses for more money and resources by showing them our plans for the next year. Instead of showing them slides, we showed them a very very early version of the prototype and talked about the research and the concepts. We did talk about facts, figures and potential market size and so on. But most decision makers were able to relate better to the prototype. Some of them even came over later and shared their ideas and volunteered to talk to us about the product even after the meeting. We took them up on the offer and picked their brains a bit more.

That is the power of a prototype. People can relate to it. It appeals to a different part of the brain, compared to spreadsheets and bullet points. Did we get the money and people? Is that even a question? Of Course we did. Who can resist a cool prototype accompanied by a magical story told by the one and only @enricgili

Image from Blasamiq.com

Marc Andreeson talks about the state of the technology economy

Marc Andreeson talks about the state of the technology economy.

Somethings that caught my attention

1. By the end of this decade 5 Billion people may be accessing the web from their phones. The technology industry has never handled a market this size before.
2. Enterprise software that is shipped to customers still is a big business. Companies spend more than quarter of a trillion dollars a year on enterprise software. 

Beautiful Budapest and Danube

The team that designs and develops the profile module of Career OnDemand is in Budapest, Hungary. Sometime back I spent a week with them. The SAP labs offices are on the shores of the river Danube. Here is a lovely view of the Danube. The ruins you see on the left of the first picture are of an old church. I took these pictures with my Blackberry and used Pixlr to add some vintage effects.