PLATFORMS :: How Apple and Facebook Influence Salesforce.com

How Apple and Facebook Influence Salesforce.com

By Saul Hansell

I’ve got to confess that for the last 10 years I’ve largely ignored Salesforce.com. I knew it was growing through sales of its service, a very fancy Rolodex that helps companies keep track of customers and prospects. And I knew it evangelized the idea that applications for big companies can be delivered through Web pages rather than as software run in a company’s own data center.

Marc Benioff. (Credit: Peter DaSilva for The New York Times)

But I’ve tried to add just a bit of simplicity to my life by avoiding enterprise issues to write about technology used by consumers. When I sat down for the first time last week with Marc Benioff, the company’s chief executive, it became clear that Salesforce is now taking some interesting ideas from consumer-facing companies like Facebook and Apple. And it is also in the middle of a metamorphosis that could put it in the center of the development of services that consumers will start using.

Essentially, Salesforce is changing from a company that sells one suite of corporate applications to a platform on which many software companies can deliver applications. It has even added features to let its clients develop Web sites on which they can interact with and sell to the general public.

And, as I wrote on Monday, it is developing systems to let its applications trade data with other companies that offer cloud computing services, like Google, Amazon.com and Facebook. (My first instinct when talking about this sort of technology is to note the privacy questions that come up when clouds start talking to one another.)

As is so common these days, this strategy puts Salesforce in the position of trying to cooperate with the companies that are its biggest rivals in the world of cloud computing. Mr. Benioff has lots of reasons why Salesforce can compete with these companies, as well as I.B.M., Microsoft and all the others launching themselves into the clouds. I’ll leave it to others to write about the software architecture and data-center design of Salesforce.

But I do want to take note of how the company is connecting to consumers and the ideas emerging in consumer technology. One theme is how the sort of face-to-face sales effort that Salesforce has helped companies manage is now merging with the self-service ethos of the Web.

Mr. Benioff showed a high-tech, high-touch application developed for the Harrah’s casino chain to help the personal sales representatives it assigns to high rollers. It creates a Web site for the gamblers that lets them communicate about coming trips with their representative. It’s sort of like Expedia, but you don’t have to work out the details. You simply identify when you want to go, where you want to eat, and what shows you want to see. Your rep figures out the times and dates, then posts the resulting reservation back on the site.

As for drawing inspiration from the consumer technology world, Salesforce is just starting its own version of Apple’s iPhone App store, but for businesses. Until now, third-party software developers had to manually process sales for their applications that are delivered over the Salesforce system. Now there is an online store that lets existing Salesforce users click to buy add-on software themselves.

Perhaps most interesting to me was how the broad path that Salesforce is on mirrors that of Facebook (and in some ways that of Yahoo and Google).

Both Salesforce and Facebook started out as rather handy Web-based services for keeping track of contacts. And both have realized that these lists of people, and the underlying technology to manage them, can be central to a lot of different problems that their customers may want to solve. So both are now turning into “platforms” on which other companies can create and run a wide range of applications.

“We came into this by accident,” Mr. Benioff said. “We did not start the company as a platform company.” But he said that the process of creating one program that serves customers turns out to be a great way to build a more flexible environment. Other programs, like Lotus Notes and Microsoft Excel, evolved in a similar way. Even Microsoft Windows was first an add-on application for Microsoft DOS.

“All platforms started as killer apps,” Mr. Benioff said.

Yahoo! Launches Transformative Digital Ad Platform

San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News First Customers to Go Live

NEW YORK, Sep 24, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Emmy(R) Award nominee and Golden Globe(R) Award winner Jon Hamm of AMC's original drama series Mad Men(R), today joined Yahoo!'s Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang, President Sue Decker and Executive Vice President of Yahoo! U.S. Hilary Schneider for the 5th annual Advertising Week conference in New York to announce the launch of APT from Yahoo!. Formerly known as AMP!, APT from Yahoo! is an intelligent innovation in online media, a digital advertising solution that streamlines the process of planning, buying and optimizing display advertising. APT is designed to simplify the process of buying and selling ads online while connecting all the market players -- publishers, advertisers, agencies, networks, partners and developers -- from a unified platform to do business more efficiently and effectively. The platform is rolling out as planned in phases beginning with publishers the San Francisco Chronicle of Hearst Newspapers and San Jose Mercury News of MediaNews Group.

"The advertising landscape has changed dramatically since the days when Don Draper was roaming the halls of Sterling Cooper," said Jerry Yang. "While Mad Men celebrates the Madison Avenue of 40 years ago, APT from Yahoo! clearly represents the future."

As a Web-based solution with the potential to allow unprecedented ease of cross-selling across the largest open network of publishers, advertisers, ad networks and agencies from a single integrated interface, APT is a single platform for connected digital advertising, including ad serving, ad network and ad exchange. It is designed to streamline advertisers' ad-buying process for multiple accounts across multiple publishers, and enable creative testing and campaign optimization. It is also intended to help advertisers precisely yet easily identify audiences through geographic, demographic and interest-based targeting while enabling publishers to better monetize their content as well as making better connections across the Web.

"One of the major benefits of APT from Yahoo! is the fact that it's an open system, designed to enable advertisers to reach their audiences in their favorite places across the Web, and publishers to monetize inventory across the broadest possible demand channels," said Sue Decker. "As we transform the advertising marketplace, we're excited to have key members of the Newspaper Consortium, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, lead the way in this historic journey."

For publishers like the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, APT is designed to improve monetization capabilities and increase advertising revenue with solutions targeted at accelerating the ability to take advantage of premium brand and performance-based advertising. Key benefits include:

-- Fostering a more transparent marketplace through the ability to connect to new business partners for cross-selling;

-- Providing ad selection and inventory management tools to match relevant ads to marketers' target audience; and

-- Allowing publishers to manage their own private networks.

"The Newspaper Consortium's open, collaborative and exciting partnership with Yahoo! is enabling a crucial transformation in the newspaper industry," said George Irish, President, Hearst Newspapers. "With this next-generation platform we can realize the powerful combination of Yahoo!'s technology innovations, national reach and partner network with the Consortium's rich local content, sales forces and local market expertise."

"When Yahoo! showed us the platform's potential in February this year, the Newspaper Consortium was impressed by Yahoo!'s commitment and investment in a game-changing technology that would significantly advance our efforts to monetize the Web," said William Dean Singleton, Vice Chairman and CEO, MediaNews Group. "Seven months later, I am very proud to announce that Yahoo! has executed, and we are jointly accelerating toward fully using the platform to aggregate inventory, target relevant audiences and drive revenue growth."

Some of the initial capabilities featured in the new platform include:

-- Guaranteed cross-selling with pre-defined selling rules

-- Ad Exchange for non-guaranteed inventory

-- Advanced audience targeting techniques based upon behavior and geography

-- Inventory lookup and forecasting across individual and partner sites

-- Creative workflow automation and personalization

-- Powerful rate card tools for improved yield management

-- Filters for better controls around creatives

-- Flexible and powerful APIs

-- Federated ad call to support multiple ad formats

Yahoo! has developed a systematic integration plan for adding other Newspaper Consortium partners onto APT throughout this year and into next year. APT is a significant component of the unique and deep collaboration between Yahoo! and America's newspapers. Launched in 2006 with 176 newspapers across the United States, the strategic partnership to create one of the largest and most comprehensive advertising networks in the online industry now comprises 35 media companies spanning 784 newspapers.

Yahoo! will start to make the platform available to other parties including advertisers, publishers, networks and agencies in 2009.

Additional information on APT is available at http://apt.yahoo.com. For press materials including executive bios, APT screen shots and images visit http://apt.yahoo.com/newsworthy.

Back from EC-TEL07

September 28th, 2007

Another week, another conference :)

This time, it was the EC-TEL07 (European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning) in Crete. Elisa Dalla Vecchia and I presented the MACE project (slides, video 1, video 2) and besides, met a lot of nice people.

The conference itself was really well organized. The keynotes (Hermann Maurer and Bruce Sterling) were excellent and big picture, covering a wide range of digital lifestyle topics and wild ideas. Digital quacks & charlatans, why Google is not so non-evil after all, telepathy is trivial, flying cars. No kidding. Many of the session talks, on the other hand, were not that exciting at all. I have the feeling many people in this area first build a “framework for…” before actually trying out some ideas on real learners.

More info on the conference blog, wiki and the flickr stream.

Greetings to Martin Memmel from DFKI, who I met to talk about the ALOE project and Christian Glahn, who presented nice work on Smart Indicators for learner feedback, and Joris Klerkx, who is quite into information visualization. I am looking forward to future developments, guys!

And just for the record, here are my favorite insider nerd joke conference memes:

Magic doesn’t scale.

Minigolf? Ouzome!

“Everything is a platform” - freaky!

Telepathy is trivial.

“Anyways - back to me”

conference , ectel07 , presentation , technology enhanced

Platforms, Applications and the Future of Digital Marketing

REST APIs, Rules and Relevance
In the user controlled medium that is digital advertising success is predicated on delivering relevance. Nowhere is this exemplified better than the success of search where there is a data input (rule 1) and multiple additional rules (geo and behavioral) that results in the delivery of content believed to be most relevant to the goals of the user. There is no question that the race to gain access to more implicit and explicit input data from users and from publishers to create rules will continue to increase the ability for marketers to deliver relevance in the coming years.

There are three components of this that marketers need to understand.

1. The tools for gathering and structuring content into a marketing corpus (ads, articles, products, whatever)
2. The tools for creating rules based delivery (testing, targeting)
3. The methodologies for executing and presenting optimized creative

In the next 12-24 months online marketing success will continue to be less and less about banners and websites and more and more about the dynamic experience everywhere. We need to look “under the hood” at content as being a database platform that improves our ability to present and deliver content. The changes this effects with the strategic and creative use of data through APIs and algorithms is profound.

Pull it Forward
Once content is free from the restrictions and limitations of site architecture and reliance on traffic sources marketers are empowered to create more compelling and relevant digital solutions. This can take the form of advertising unit widgets, dynamic landing pages, microsites, search interfaces and a host of new and useful applications.

Increased relevance will be delivered in the what (messages) but more impact and success for advertisers and publishers will be felt in the where -- bringing tools to deliver relevance closer to users creates better experiences. The same basic principles that apply for search should be your guide and inspiration to create an API that you can use to deliver relevance anywhere, especially in display (where successful ad units are increasingly more dynamic and interactive) or the emerging use of widgets/gadgets.

Distributing user controlled functionality into your business at multiple touch-points is the core idea behind the distributed web or web as a platform. Though this is not new for search engines or publishers (think toolbars or syndication) we are just beginning to scratch the surface of it as a highly optimized advertising solution. Just today Union Square Ventures announced funding of a platform based company that doesn’t even have a website!

Relevance Breeds Emotion
The net result of all this is that deeper and more engaged user interactions are taking place and breeding higher levels of emotional connection to digital -- as the web becomes more intelligent it becomes more relevant. This connection with intelligence leads to higher returns both in transactional measurements and brand value. It’s how Google has built one of the strongest brands in the world while at its core it is the greatest direct marketing platform the world has known. Platform marketing allows you to apply these same principles to achieve success with your online business.

There is one important last piece that can’t be overlooked to ensure success. Marketers and creative folks must begin to understand technology and learn how to use it creatively. This will be the biggest hurdle to success. The days of siloed IT and Marketing, of Creative Directors that don’t know their clients Content Management Systems will end in a fiery furnace filled with ashen businesses and agencies.

In the first decade of the commercial net access to data smote a number of verticals like travel and music. In the next decade far greater access to data will continue to destroy a number of now successful businesses and advertising models. It will also create many revolutionary opportunities and digital success stories. Which will you be? The answer probably rests in if you have or will create a plan in the next 6-12 months for creating the platform, rules and delivery of your marketing content.

NOTE 1/16: Paid Content has an interview today with Google's Andy Berndt where he touches on creating marketing platforms.

"all new platforms give an early advantage to those who can best manipulate the technology itself, the best technicians. After the platform becomes user friendly, when it is opened up to the best storytellers and designers and communicators, they tend to add another level to it. The rare time when you find people who really appreciate both sides of that coin (innovation and storytelling) is where truly amazing things happen."

It's a good read. More here