 |
| There is apparently only one man representing Salesforce in Beijing, the 'Lone Ranger'. |
I thought a good barometer would be Salesforce.com and so I decided one day to meet up with a consultancy there that specialise in this area, Meginfo. I wanted to see if Salesforce has any foothold in China and also learn a bit about their offshore delivery approach in general.
Meginfo specialise in Salesforce for Chinese and overseas clients. they have done Salesforce work for some very large multinational enterprises and top tier system integrators. Their owner Aaron Lau has worked with Salesforce since 2005, firstly for a top 10 Salesforce end user then as a freelancer. This culminated in him starting Meginfo in 2008. The company now has 30 employees and has been consistently profitable.
I did also want to visit Salesforce in Beijing but Aaron said 'he' is out of town. One person to cover Beijing!? A mysterious 'Lone Ranger'? Digging deeper into this I found the perception that Salesforce could really improve their efforts to cover China. Anyway, here is my discussion with Meginfo:
NP - How did Meginfo start given that back in 2008 Salesforce was still pretty unknown, especially in China?
AL - I knew many foreigners and went to different countries such as Singapore, Australia, and also the Salesforce headquarters and salesforce online community. Many people had requirements, so i connected with them and put myself forward to do the work. Eventually there was too much work for just myself so I started building the company. We basically know everything about Salesforce and focus completely on it - we have a team that is able to resolve most difficulties without help.
NP - Are the companies you work for mainly overseas companies?
AL - Most of them are US companies, most do not have any people in China. We have 2 type of customers - Partner (SF consulting companies who have their own customers) and other are End Users. For our partners we are generally the offshore development team for them. For other customers we need to do a lot more work because we need to work with them to gather the requirements directly. US companies prefer not to have lots of documents, unlike companies from Japan, they prefer to have very detailed specs that the developer can read. For US companies we need to spend a lot more effort gathering requirements, do the spec then provide the quotes and options before we do the actual work.
NP - Quite often some kind of documentation can be handy as output to get the right level of thinking/architecture done before embarking on build but quite often a client only knows if the application is 'right' once they start using it.
 |
| Aaron Lau, Owner of Meginfo |
AL - Yes that is right.
NP - Do you buffer in some time for reviews and changes to the built application along the way to account for the fact not everything can be anticipated/captured by documentation?
AL - That depends on the size of the project. For many projects they are really small - 80 hrs, we use a very basic development cycle - we did the documentation then the development work then testing and deployment. But for some bigger projects, the onces we have been doing for years, we really need to have a process where customers can get involved and we are having updates every day. Also we have integrated Chatter into that so customers can have realtime interaction with our developers, testers and project managers. They review the system and whenever they have comments they can post them into chatter - our people are immediately aware.
NP - How do you communicate with clients - web conf etc?
AL - Skype, GotoMeeting, we recently switched to Webex as it has much better performance. For developers they can read and write english but not speak so much, so mostly they use email and Chatter.
NP - In terms of the projects that you have done, what do you think are most important factors
AL - Communication with customers, the right people to to the work, and the dedication of the team. There are so many companies providing offshore services but working on multiple projects at the same time. When the developer is working, they need to be to be focussed on the project, not distracted by some other work. Some years ago I worked for a company who provided very similar services but the success rate was not very high and a major reason was that people at the time were working on multiple projects.
NP - How important do you think the dedication and ability of a client is? From my point of view I may have a very good team, but if the client has not allocated a good project manager for instance or the client does not allocate time for the right people to be involved, then it can be difficult.
AL - When we are working on a project we need to let them know the importance of being dedicated to a project, we push them to reply to emails etc and sometimes client does not like that. But if we deliver the project successfully that makes everyone happy. In process of doing the work we need clients very involved in project. It is hard and sometimes clients do not like being pushed.
NP - In terms of the companies you are in competition with in China, what is the main differentiator for Meginfo?
AL - I think right now we are the biggest Salesforce consulting and development company in the Greater China region. There are many big companies in India. India is famous and popular for outsourcing and they speak English well. In China we do not have a lot of competition, not because others are not strong, rather that Salesforce is not used too much in China, there is not much awareness. Those companies focus more on MS CRM and SAP, some other technologies. Those other companies are really good at marketing and sales, dealing with people, they are very good at selling to clients and we want to get better at that.
NP - Are there any cultural differences between working for companies from different regions? A Japanese company vs an American companies etc?
AL - I thing that the culture difference is very big. Eastern culture is dramatically difference from Western culture and is one of the difficulties that our developers are having right now. American people tend to be very dedicated and very straightforward, and whenever there are mistakes that they make or we make, they point that out. In China, I am not saying it is bad for the Chinese culture, but it is just the culture, that when we make mistakes we do not say anything and try to fix it, we try to not show we made mistakes. We are not very good at being open. It is almost like an opposite of cultures, a conflict. When I brought my people to US to Dreamforce when, when we got out the airport everything was different, it is something that people living in China do not know. I send lots of articles and blogs that I read and I send them to our internal Chatter to help them understand the culture and the difference.
NP - Salesforce as a company is very big, bold and open and very much has this 'Social Enterprise' vision. This is about being more open and sharing things internally and sharing things externally with customers over Twitter and Facebook. Salesforce isn't big in China now, but I get the impression that this kind of vision would never be something that Chinese companies would aspire to.
AL - I think they would. There are a few Chinese companies that are providing very popular social networks and there are hundreds of millions of people using the micro blog services. We have customers who want to integrate their system with social networks. Chatter is going to be a big one - its going to change the way that people interact with other people within a company. We use Chatter to talk about tech stuff and daily lives - people review and post comments. In my company I have a few opponents - they point out my mistakes and it is totally fine using email, chatter, any way - as long as their voice can be heard i am totally fine with that. We are trying to build a company that is more like a US company.
NP - Is a typical Chinese company very hierarchical?
AL - Yes, that is right. Lots of bureaucracy and people at different levels telling people below what to do and the end result is people down below they prefer just to listen, they cannot express their ideas, and that is something I believe is pretty bad and we do not want that to happen in our team.
NP - In terms of Salesforce what do you think the major strengths and major weaknesses are?
AL - A major advantage was the free edition but hey have stopped that now which is a pity, we did set up a few free editions before it was shut down. I think the free edition has lots of potential in China. It was a way that companies could start feeling the benefit of the salesforce platform easily.
There are so many companies providing cloud computing platforms that are essentially 'fake clouds'. In china there are so many companies saying their services are cloud computing services but they are really not. So the free edition was a good way to promote Salesforce advantages and get as many companies as possible to start using Salesforce. I think Salesforce need to do some more marketing activity in China because at this time I don't believe salesforce put any major effort into marketing campaigns in china.
NP - They do everywhere else...
AL - Yes, but china is not a market they care about. The companies using Salesforce in China are generally US companies and for local companies they still do not know salesforce, they do not know what Salesforce can do.
NP - They buy their own servers, have their own data centres etc?
Al - Yes. Though the is a Chinese company which provides very similar services as Salesforce does.
NP - 800apps?
AL - Yes, I think so. They even have the same user interface.
NP - I talked about that in another blog. That must have some Salesforce code in there, the similarities are too striking.
AL - Yes, I also tried it myself. It is not a company that can provide the same level of services as Salesforce can do however.
NP - No.
AL - So I believe the chinese market has lots of potential for Salesforce but again Salesforce need to care about that, they need more people promoting their advantages and they need to support Chinese customers.
NP - Is Salesforce perfectly accessible within China, no problem with access given the Great Firewall?
AL - No problems. There were a few cases in the past when the earthquake happened in Taiwan when the internet between China and US was broken at the time but it did not last too long, a few days. Also Salesforce moved their data centre from Singapore to Japan, so the connection between China and new data centre has been great since the move. It is almost the same as US people get.
NP - Where do you see Salesforce and Cloud Computing in the next 5 years?
AL - I think Salesforce will finally become a very popular system not just in the US but also in China. It is a platform that is so flexible and easy to use and very powerful so a company can use Salesforce to manage almost everything. We are using Salesforce to do project management, to do financial work, manage expenses, invoices, salaries, everything is managed within Salesforce.
NP - China is maybe how the UK was about 5 years ago in terms of the adoption of Salesforce, 5 or 6 years ago most companies would say 'no way am i using that', not secure etc.
AL - I think another reason is 5 or 6 years ago Salesforce was not really as powerful as it is today. Now it is a fully fledged cloud computing platform that is really really flexible
NP - I keep hearing about China building massive cloud computing data centres as big as many football pitches etc. What is going on there?
AL - I think most of these projects are sponsored by big companies like IBM, but they are not being used by companies. I am not a person who can say they are failures but there are really not people using them. They are not as popular as those cloud computing providers in the US. But you are right, as far as I know there have been so many projects in China that claim to be cloud computing but again they do not have users.
NP - Where do you see Meginfo in 5 years time?
AL - Our goal is to become the best Salesforce consulting and development company in Asia. We have succeeded with every project. So in 5 years we are going to be an even bigger team and will be able to work with a greater number of customers.
So, looks like Salesforce either are not too bothered about the Chinese market right now, or are biding their time. Rest assured I did not spend all of my Beijing holiday debating this. No, I also spent a good amount of time doing my Service Cloud and Sales Cloud certifications as well. That's the life.
Just as an addition - see this video of the Meginfo office - silent. Big difference between this and a typical UK development team (which can be fairly boistorous) , and emphasises the difference in culture that Aaron talked about.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment