Salesforce and Demandware laid bare

Salesforce bought Demandware this week. It's about time Salesforce got serious about having a proper eCommerce platform, and also show come commitment to B2C. Of course web/mobile is a major channel (digital digital digital), and my thinking is that this acquisition filled a gaping void in their offering.

Who is the most Digital? "I am!"

Up to now you have a few ISVs and customers who have built eCommerce solutions on the much maligned Salesforce 'Sites' technology - the native on-platform quicksand. I guess this is ok for small-scale use but it can result in customer/prospect feel like they are caught in a blustery headwind. The Salesforce platform will punch you in the face if you throw a spike in demand at Sites, so given you are willing to accept the sub-optimal performance it deals you, you need to make sure the context is one of small/moderate demand. Today there is a lot of focus on, and associated tools for optimising the checkout experience to avoid dropouts, but you will only get so far with Sites.

You also have had the option of custom building something on Heroku and leveraging the most expensive sync job in existence to port your data into core Salesforce (Heroku Connect, would you really go near it?). Or custom integrating your eCommerce platform with core Salesforce which isn't a bad option if you are careful, many ways to do that in realtime or batch, but you need to be careful of API limits.

Now though, Salesforce will, down the line, offer Demandware as their 'Commerce Cloud', and increasingly it will be brought closer to the core Salesforce platform. Expect them to use the term 'digital' a whole lot more.

Indeed, with this acquisition Salesforce will be talked about a whole lot more in the 'digital transformation' circles. The Salesforce core platform is essentially a very flexible business back-end, internally facing, albeit one that slots in nicely with digital transformation efforts given the great API-first approach. So you can integrate your customer apps, websites etc into Salesforce without too much headache - Salesforce becomes the kind of 'brain of your business'. This across Sales, Support and Marketing.  At Hive we have done a lot of that, and Salesforce provides a great number of integration options to tie processes together. The end goal is to have a single/simple view of what is going on, implement business logic centrally/consistently, rather than hop around different CRM, eCommerce, ticket system etc back-ends. In terms of back-end, we are always looking to change processes and rationalise systems to simplify our integration architecture. Where we can't, we integrate.

Now, however, Salesforce have a beast of a 'front-end' eCommerce framework, quite a highly regarded beast. You read your Gartner, Forrester analysis, it's up there with Oracle ATG, SAP Hybris etc. They have an impressive client base - Adidas, Lacoste, M&S etc. This is proper 'enterprise', SMBs and the like will probably stick with lower priced offerings. It will be interesting if the pricing model will still be based on revenue share as that is counter to how Salesforce generally operate.

Digging a bit deeper into customer reviews by G2Crowd, the consensus seems to be positive - again, being a 'beast' comes with complexity, but in terms of capability it seems to be very much an 'all-in-one', covering multiple devices across online and in-store. Expect the term 'omni-channel' to be used a lot (more) by Salesforce, more in the context of Sales as they have beaten the Service one to death. That's 'digital' and 'omni-channel' now. 'Domni-channel'?

Architecture-wise it has a lot in common with the core Salesforce platform - SaaS, multi-tenant, customisable to some extent, frequent upgrades etc. It should slot in nicely. One major consideration, as with all eCommerce platform, is the overlap between this and the other Salesforce 'CRM' offerings, in that an eCommerce platform always provides CRM functionality of sorts, whether that be sending emails, order management etc. A front-end always has a back-end, as I always say (I do actually, when you are trying to rationalise systems it can be a problem). So defining the responsibility of the bits of the Salesforce empire you were bludgeoned into buying is important. ie where will your product catalogue be mastered? Where will emails be sent from? What back-end interface will your agents use, for what purpose? If you have Demandware and Marketing Cloud, which predictive recommendations engine will you use? All in the architecture definition.

A key point to make is that Demandware seems very 'retail' oriented, especially fashion etc. Shifting stock. I am not sure how it will fare in the ever increasing proliferation of service 'wrappers' around things in the IoT world - there is a bit more to that journey than just filling your basket, taking a payment and throwing the goods over the wall. I thought Zuora may integrate with them but no, it tends to be just payment gateways. There is something to be said for developing a buying journey that is more tailored to service wrappers and subscriptions, the 'subscription economy' as Zuora like to put it. Maybe something for the future, or demonstration of my lack of Demandware knowledge.

As an aside, at Hive we currently use an open source framework called Spree as a basis for the Hivehome shop and integrate the web checkout journey with Salesforce. We log the journeys in Salesforce. If someone drops out and calls the call centre, the agent can pick up the basket from within Salesforce and progress the sale. It has worked well, and the Salesforce team works closely with the web team to continually develop this. I bought some window/door sensors through it at the earlier in the week, smooth. Over the course of the year this will be changing and expanding quite considerably, exciting times ahead.

So, in summary, your 'opportunity' to go 'all-in' with Salesforce has just increased. If you are a retailer, I would hide under the counter as the sales guys will hunt you down, they will find you, and they will throw 'Domni-channel' at you.

Anyway, in summary it looks to me like Demandware would be most appropriate for heavy duty Retail/Enterprise needs, with more mid-market / open-source solutions appropriate for more moderate needs. But don't use Salesforce Sites. Let's see where they go with Demandware, but all in all, for the continuation of the Salesforce story, it's a logical and positive move.

Delivering CRM in a Consumer IoT Company - Intro

Wow, it's been 4 years since I last did a blog post. I guess then I got all excited by the 'cloud' thing then it wore off as that all became pretty standard. Though I still see a lot copy about cloud still as Oracle etc grapple to catch up in that respect, sad times.

Anyway, after spending a lot of time grappling with the world of consumer IoT for Hive (British Gas 'Connected Homes' business) in the last 3 years I thought, actually, there is something interesting to talk about again.

I am not afraid to say it, but over the last 3 years helping grow an IoT business within British Gas, I have probably been more out of my comfort zone than in the previous 10. On occasion I have felt similar to Roberto Soldado below (yellow one) when he was completely done by Firmino in that recent Europa League match.





Part of this is because IoT is a pretty new field when it comes to the consumer mass market - when thinking about some of the business and tech challenges, in a lot of areas there have been limited reference points. Part of it is due to being part of a 'startup' for the first time - Hive was kicked off as a 'lean startup' within British Gas (agile etc - the intention of Bimodal mode 2). On the first point, there will be subsequent blog posts drilling into the business and related tech challenges. On the startup point, I want to elaborate here.

On the majority of CRM-related projects I had been involved with before prior, a company had an old CRM system/process which they wanted to replace with something more modern. Some vision to move the established business from old world to new world. So there was a decent amount of context. In a startup, there is no 'existing' business to start with, no existing systems, so the world is your oyster. Blank canvas. In 2013, we ventured into the world of consumer IoT and not many others had gone there at that time. It's still early days now.

What I found at the start was that it was great being part of such a intentionally hand-crafted small 'Connected Homes' team. Co-located with startup veterans - entrepreneurial types who had exited their own startups, commercial and marketing teams, operations and the tech teams. As standard in this kind of 'digital' startup you have various tech teams which CRM needs to work very closely with nowadays. The 'CRM' system isn't managing all customer interactions these days, not like it used to, we all know that. It's a close cross-team effort with the web (site/shop etc) team, mobile apps team and in the case of IoT, the team that owns that IoT platform (more about that in a subsequent post).

All of these platforms touch the customer in different ways. Then you have the proliferation of tools around the edge - social marketing tools, ESPs etc - it can be complex to align to ensure a good end to end customer experience. The responsibility for the 'CRM platform' (in this case Salesforce) needs to be agreed - ie you don't want to be actually storing all device interactions in Salesforce, for instance, or surfacing high volume web pages from Salesforce etc etc. Equally you don't want the web team building a bunch of custom support tools which replicate Service Cloud. Salesforce has it's place and I think from the word go we have done a good job of blending that platform well with the other tech that exists at Hive. Architecture basically (oooh, don't say that out loud in a 'lean' environment). More on that in another post.

An interesting observation from starting to work with these teams back in 2013, and people with a startup mentality is that to some extent, you feel very 'enterprise' being the owner of 'CRM'. Or maybe a bit of a dinosaur. You know, Salesforce is great, and UI-wise may be getting there with lightening etc, but you show it to someone and compared to the funky stuff they are doing with web/mobile UX or the funky IoT tech, they will quickly switch off! Also these guys are all in 'open-source' land (a land sometimes needing a decent amount of containment, another post for that) so anything 'proprietary' is best case seen as 'boring', worst case 'evil'.

So, the challenge awaits, it's Feb 2013, and we need to go live as a new business in September 2013. We need a system to run this new and undefined business, to enter a new and undefined IoT market. And I need to work out my purpose in life in relation to the other teams. Salesforce and I are NOT dinosaurs, no we are not...that's the intro, more to come in the next post.