The Cloud Lone Ranger and A Chinese perspective on Salesforce.com

There is apparently only one
man representing Salesforce
in Beijing, the 'Lone Ranger'.

I popped across to Beijing recently. What a huge place with tons of people. Takes a bit of getting used to, not quite the same etiquette as the UK when it comes to queuing or letting people get off the Metro train. Lots of 'scuffling'. Culturally it is certainly a bit different and if a day went by without me getting zapped by a static electric shock it was a surprise. Anyway, besides 'holidaying' and all that, I was curious where they are in terms of the current shift to Cloud Computing. The move to the various cloud computing models is quite well advanced in the US and UK, how would China compare?

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.

Oracle MightNow FightNow with RightNow

So Oracle have bought RightNow. Ahh, RightNow. Memories. See my proud certificate to become RightNow certified. Not many people can say that. The RightNow approach to wooing partners to implement their product was far removed from Salesforce.com, possibly explaining why it is seen as more of a niche product with not much of a partner ecosystem.

My experience in 2008 was one of being an extension to their in house Professional Services at the Euro HQ in Maidenhead. The training I was given by the PS guys there was second to none, and it was clear there was a passion not only for the product, but for 'best practice' in implementation. To this day I have never received better training in a product.

From a technical point of view, having come from a Siebel background, the thing that struck me was the speed of configuration (and of course 'no hardware'). In a similar way to Salesforce, UI and data model changes were very fast to implement. There were also very powerful routing, escalation and knowledge base elements too. The best way I can describe it is a set of service contact centre building blocks, with rafts of 'configuration settings' to turn functionality on and off. This, as opposed to the 'prettified database tables but not much else' approach of some apps. What this resulted in was incredible value, incredibly fast. The whole application, including web knowledge base could be set up in as little as a week or two. Longer timelines would apply for integration/migration etc as usual, but that takes the same amount of time regardless of SaaS/On-Premise/Cloud/whatever.

When compared to Salesforce, Oracle CRM OnDemand or Siebel, the Service functionality RightNow had back THEN was superior to what those platforms have in this area NOW. It frustrates me when certain products are hell-bent on bells-and-whistles before they have got the basics right. Get the internals of routing/knowledgebase/escalation/workload management etc right FIRST, then dabble with Twitter and Facebook. Or you could just do nothing. Ever. As per Siebel.

In 3 years since I last saw RightNow it will only have improved, so it is no surprise that Oracle have come in for them. Oracle CRM OnDemand is woeful in the Contact Centre area, Gartner do not even see it as a player. Salesforce charge separately for their Knowledgebase (crazy) and are somewhere over there in Social Fairyland (though they acquired Assistly which looks good), and I would need to ask my Grandad about Siebel.

What does confuse me though is what the next step for Oracle is. I would expect it to be an extension of their Fusion applications, but are they going to skin/integrate it as such or leave it as-is?  Kate Leggett has just done a great blog post on this topic, including an important point about the culture of the two companies. Oracle is a lumbering behemoth of a company, RightNow has been known as agile, friendly, well quite modern really. Cool. When I was there they had free cans of pop in the fridge. For instance.

What I can conclude, is that this is the first time Oracle have managed to position themselves with a superior offering to Salesforce in the SaaS space. You want an SFA solution? Go to Salesforce. You want an extendable enterprise platform? Go to Salesforce. You want a best practice, pre-built Customer Service Solution? Now at last you can consider going to Oracle.

iPhone 4S, Knight Rider, and refusal of Siri to talk dirty.

Regardless of the murmurings of disappointment regarding the iPhone 4S release, I was always going to get one to replace my 3GS, just makes sense. In fact the tide is turning now and everyone is saying, along with IOS5, that in fact, all is fine, all is still great with Apple. 

So, after wading through a few reviews, I swallowed my pride and the day after release joined a queue of equally keen people on Oxford Street outside the O2 shop. This really did look quite sad, and indeed I was trying to pretend that I was 'just looking in the window', but it didn't fly. Even random passers by were asking me 'what is the queue for'? I was tempted to say that David Beckham was doing a book signing in there or something, but I just told them straight: 'We are all spending our Saturday queuing for a mobile phone'. Actually, the queue was not that long, which kind of made it worse as we looked like the dregs who could not manage to get it on the actual release day. Anyway, I stood firm, I didn't care. After all, I was only hours away from being able to talk 'with' my phone so how cool would I be by the end of the day!

Anyway, after a reasonable 20 mins of queuing I was led inside the shop by a very professional O2 person, and inside to my surprise was a further waiting room of 6 more people. It was like being in a doctors with an L-Shaped couch and some iPhone accessories on a table for you to muse over buying. You know, cases for £12.99, well worth paying for what equates to a bit of rubber. 

Anyway, I finally got my call and sat down opposite a sales guy who said 'what would you like'? I thought about trying to be funny and surprising him, but I gave the stock answer "4S, black, 16gb". "And that bit of rubber over there I suppose". Then after a bit of chat about my favourite football team I got the phone. Brilliant. Back home for setup........

Setup was super easy, restored from my 3GS. I was already familiar with the main IOS5 functions and quirks having installed it on the 3GS. Basically to get everything to work amounts to ensuring you do the following things :

-iCloud Backup - both on your phone AND on iTunes when you connect your phone, then synch in iTunes and all subsequent backups will be via iCloud.

-Work out what gets backed up to iCloud - Settings, contacts, apps, SOME photos (last 1000 in the 'Photo Stream' thing), Apps and Songs can be re-downloaded on demand, but not movies, or podcasts....takes a bit of working out.

-Siri - off by default on the phone so needs switching on, more about that in a bit

-Contacts - looked like they were deleted on my phone but switching iCloud option for them off then on sorted that

-Auto iTunes store downloads - off by default, needed turning on in the settings

-Podcasts had disappeared - this whole change does not have much respect for podcasts - still need to manually synch

Anyway - most improvements of the 4S and IOS5 are quite incremental, but the most interesting is of course Siri. I have a huge grumble about the fact that we still need to use keyboards, it is such as legacy tool and not very well suited to mobile devices. So I think this is the first step towards a big progression away. Will take some time, but I would expect keyboards to be gone in about 10-15 years.

On the night of purchase I did the standard thing of asking it random questions. There is loads of that on the web now, I just tried 'Can you talk dirty to me' and it responded 'I can't, I'm as clean as the driven snow'. Nice.

I then tried a few more useful things (generally it supports requests related to 'standard' Apple apps):

-Text Messages: 'Text Michelle Procter, Hello Michelle I am texting this from Siri'. Effective and probably faster for short texts, propensity for errors increases if you try longer ones

-Emails: No-go for me, need to have email addresses in my address book. I use gmail so they are all stored there so not much use

-Creating appointments / reminders: Works well. You can also say 'what appointments do I have this afternoon' etc and it will list them.

-Facts: Good for facts: "Who is the president of the United States", or "what is ten divided by three".

-Music: Probably faster using Siri to play individual songs that you know the name of: "Play Better Than Today by Kylie" worked perfectly
-Directions / local information / traffic - Siri admits to you that this only works in the US (via Yelp integration). Hopefully they will sort this out in the UK soon, am sure they will.

-Anything it doesn't know: It defaults to a web search generally. Some things like asking it to 'Tweet' it acknowledges it cannot 'Tweet' but I would expect that at some point.

It is a good start. And ok if you are by yourself. Kind of. But what about if you are in public? I wonder how long it will take before this is acceptable in public without looking like an idiot. I tried it walking down the street in Shadwell, and although you can kind of mask it by holding your phone to your ear to pretend it is a call, the way you speak to Siri is certainly not like you would talk to a human. It's very stop-start and 'clipped'. I tried 'Create reminder for 2pm: Put the rubbish out' and 'Change reminder for 2pm' etc while walking past and opposite people in the street. You just get funny looks. 

I think the only person to help with this is David Hasselhoff based on his experience in Knight Rider! I have 'met' him before (bottom pic) and am sure he will remember me from that 2006 book signing (his book, not mine). So I have tweeted him:

The Tweet:

@DavidHasselhoff I have just got my iPhone 4S and it is voice controlled. Any tips for making talking to a computer publicly acceptable?

I am sure any tips The Hoff has for this will be much appreciated by 4S owners and will update this blog post should I get a reply, which of course must only be seconds away :-)

Bootleg Salesforce? Trojan Horse? Investigating the CRM App at the heart of Salesforce's China Investment in 800apps.com

Looks like Bootleg Salesforce, but
probably 'heavy respect'

China is interesting. Certainly when I was over there, some of the things I was being offered at markets such as the 'iPhone4' were suspect to say the least. Completely serious sell, but on close inspection it looked like something from Toys-R-Us.

A few days ago I read an interesting story about Salesforce.com investing in a Chinese CRM company called 800apps. After looking further into this, I found something particularly interesting about the CRM app they have developed. At first glance I thought it was salesforce.com itself looking at the distant screenshots. Then I got a trial, and the iPhone4 incident popped back into my head...

I am particularly interested in this because I have been trying to follow the Chinese Cloud Computing market to see how it stacks up in relation to the West.  Stories of 20kmx20km datacentres being constructed, billions of money pouring into it, it seems they are getting together one hell of a capability. This interview with Reuven Cohen of Enomaly gives as good an insight as I have seen.

Anyway, I have done some digging around over the past few months to see if salesforce.com have any traction there. The general impression that I got was that there are companies who do great salesforce.com work over there like Meginfo in Beijing. I had the pleasure of chatting with their director, Aaron Lau when I was over there: a dev at Meginfo goes through 8 months worth of training! But companies like this are more likely to service overseas companies, the US etc - I don't think companies that originate in China buy much into procuring a SaaS solution from somewhere like the US.

Ok, now back to 800apps. Like I said, I looked at the screenshots on the website and it looked like Salesforce.com. However reading some background information on the website, it gave the impression it is a different product:

 "Launched World first Chinese PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) on-line application software development platform 800APP Native. Just one month after Salesforce.com's launch of a similar product."


Right, so it's not Salesforce then. But I was curious so I signed up for the 'free version' so I could have a click around. After a healthy bit of missing around with Chinese forms and Google Translate, I finally completed the basic details to get an account, and got an email with my login details. Like Salesforce, there is a login link on the 800apps website which takes me to a login screen:

Once logged in, the home screen is quite familiar:

It looks very much like an older version of Salesforce. The thing that made me certain that there is no co-incidence in similarity was when I went to create a new record:

Its just too similar. The way a mandatory field is highlighted, the convention for Lookups, even the positioning of the 'Save' buttons. But it is NOT Salesforce. I had a quick check of the setup area, and although extremely similar, proves it is not the Force.com platform as I know it:

Can't create custom objects. 'Supply and Demand' standard object? 'Set Indexes' button? Not Salesforce, but not far off! 


So what IS this? Does it include any Salesforce code, or is it just heavily influenced by the platform? And interestingly, why have Salesforce chosen to invest in this company? If there is no existing link between 800apps and Salesforce, it seems that rather than Salesforce getting annoyed, they have chosen to invest. After all, Salesforce themselves tend to take heavy influence from Facebook etc, so they can probably empathise here. It may be a very clever way for Salesforce to get a footing in China in a kind of Trojan Horse way, and maybe one day the 800apps customers will receive an 'upgrade' to what is actually the latest version of the 'real' Salesforce.com? 

Cloud Computing, Agile...and Dating Women

How does dating women relate to whats happening with Cloud Computing and Agile? Only through loose analogies that pop up in my head so read on....

I am very keen to make sure that this current move to Cloud models and more Agile methodologies at enterprise level does not make people ditch best practice that WORKS, or common sense in favor of 'Fad Thinking'. Everything is moving at such a pace that it is an easy trap, and the barrier to entry is so low that people of more variable skill/experience levels than in the traditional enterprise picture are getting on board.

At the moment I am probably working in one of the most forward thinking environments I have experienced, but there is a big challenge to get the right balance between old and new world. For instance, a complete Cloud model does not negate the need for support or IT skills (especially in terms of design), just as Agile does not negate the need for documentation (um, especially in terms of design). As boring as it sounds, the answer often lies in the middle ground.

This kind of got me thinking about when I first started dating my girlfriend (I may be going into risky territory here, but lets plough ahead regardless). We 'found' each other in London via an iphone app / website called 'Lovestruck.com'. (Hopefully this route is credible in the modern day :-)) This abstracted away the chatting up that can of course go so badly wrong though too much alcohol, or simply lack of attempt due to priority banter and/or antics on a given night out. Or is that just me? It is at least a great entry point to a first date. Anyway, just as Cloud development abstracts away nuts and bolts through a few clicks, Lovestruck allowed me to set up a first date as easily as setting up an Amazon AMI. (Of course, this mental analogy introduces a risk of subconsciously picking the 'most attractive AMI' next time I am setting up an instance for my project, must watch for that.)

ANYWAY....The point I am trying to get to is that although the process of provision was easier, um, not provision, I mean setting up the first date.....the downstream 'best practice' is the same. I made an awful error on the first few dates of not walking my girlfriend home, she reminds me of that quite often these days, though never said anything at the time. She thought at the end of each date "Why does this stupid guy not walk me home??". This is a schoolboy error. Basics. I see the same disregard for best practice in the Cloud/Agile world to a certain extent. Vendors will claim that developing in the cloud is 'easy', anyone can do it etc. It is certainly easier to get started, as per my online dating experience (I am not saying my girlfriend is easy though....I need to squash this analogy dont I?), but in the Enterprise Cloud world the ongoing best practice is the same - good design, good prep, good/experienced people, the RIGHT level of documentation/testing etc will lead to a successful project. The technology is just a bit easier to work with now, so it means we can focus less on the traditional problems we had there.

My concern is that people are sometimes too 'Cloud' or too 'Agile', and therefore blinkered to what actually worked well in the old world, or reluctant break the 'rules' sometimes through common sense (ie, I may just throw my laptop at the next person who says "THAT'S not Agile"). So, I say lets take a level headed and common-sense approach in the new world, and pick the bits of progress that are applicable to the situation in hand (which will as always vary by client, requirements, timelines etc), but don't forget traditional best practice. Certainly if I was going to do some more dating, I would now definitely walk the girl home, so all credit to my current girlfriend for pointing that out. But, um, of course that is 'by the by' because I am happy with my current girlfriend. Hole dug.



**Disclaimer - I have had this post vetted by my girlfriend, I am not THAT stupid**

The IaaS Challenge: Amazon EC2 - A Layman's Experience

The left hand side of my cloud compass has been craving attention. I admit that I have been pretty ignorant of IaaS because I think the future leans more towards the more abstracted cloud technologies long-term for end-users. But, at the moment, I admit, in the majority of circumstances we still have to bother with hardware, servers, and all that hassle, and my ideal of it all being abstracted away is years off. Now I know that many people in the infrastructure world have been using services like EC2 for a while, I am not claiming to break any new ground here. The purpose of this post is to see if a layman like myself, someone with very little technical infrastructure knowledge or experience, can register for Amazon Web Services and set up an enterprise grade Windows 2008 Server with SQL Server 2008 installed. That's it. Now this is all motivated by the hassle I have had in the past getting through the process for provisioning hardware and software - forms, teams, people, licensing, procurement, logistics, installation team, configuration team etc etc. Wouldn't it be great to press a button to magically produce the hardware/software that I need? And how long would it take?

Timer at the ready...lets see if Amazon can meet my expectations, here's what I did:

• 8pm: Registered for Amazon Web Services. I just used my regular Amazon Id that I use for shopping (!) and ran through some basic screens to register, including entering my card information for billing.  AWS bill for what you use, so no initial payment, no fee for hardware, software, anything.

This gave me access to my Amazon Web Services Account screen.  Here I can view usage reports, billing information etc. But no time for that. I am against the clock, need to create my server!

•  8.05pm: Quick quick! Must create server. I see a link 'AWS Management Console', ah, that looks a likely candidate so I click on that.

Interesting, lots of options. Based on my knowledge 'EC2' is what I am after to create my server. I click on the tab, but I get a message saying that area is still provisioning, but should just take a few minutes. Doh. Well, I may as well see what the other tabs are, all included with my account:


Elastic Beanstalk: Great name. Basically you can deploy Java apps here and Amazon will sort out the hardware somehow.
S3: For storage. I create a 'bucket' in here just for fun. Ah, can upload files up to 5 Terabytes each. I feel the power I am wielding is pretty significant.
EC2: Now, I know a bit about this. Create virtual servers in the cloud. Can create them based on templates, so the one I am gunning for is some kind of beast of a server with Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008 pre-installed. But still waiting for this area to be provisioned.
VPC: Virtual Private Cloud: Allows Amazon infrastructure to be a logical extension of a company internal infrastructure - ie extend their firewalls to the Amazon infrastructure etc.

Oh, you can read about the rest at http://aws.amazon.com/......back to the story...

• 8.56pm: I get an email saying EC2 is ready, so I dive in, click on the tab and find an appropriate server template (AMI in Amazon speak), this one looks like what I want:

So I click 'select', run through a wizard and launch my instance, within seconds it is ready. I get a remote desktop shortcut to download to easily access my instance and a password. I double click on the shortcut. I am in.

• 9.10pm: Whoah, I have accessed my server. The spec looks good, I am sure someone with a bit more infrastructure know-how could interpret better, but 64 bit, 7.5gb, 2.25 ghz Xeon processor sounds reasonable anyway:

• 9.20pm: And now I have accessed SQL Server, created my table, and started creating some columns (granted, not the most thrilling of climaxes, but stay with me). Experiment complete!

So, I have provisioned an enterprise grade server, ready to use, with SQL Server 2008 installed, in under 1.5hrs. And I have no expertise in this area really. Am I impressed with AWS? You bet. Of course there are all kinds of questions over cost and issues for actual use in anger which I am not in a position to answer. But an area worth exploring to take away the can of worms that is infrastructure provisioning? Definitely. 'Click click click' and our servers are ready...get me there please.

**Update 14/03/2011: At approximately 11.30pm on the night of 13/03/2011, my experiment AWS account became self-aware and charged me through the nose (or I may not quite have understood the pricing model).....laymen be aware.

Salesforce.com Service Cloud 3 - WINNER? Tiger Blood?

Charlie Sheen has recently redefined the concept of 'Winner'. At least he is taking a radical and different approach to being a WINNER, which is entertaining, if not entirely sustainable.
In a similar way, salesforce.com love to be a winner, and have some innovative (maybe not as innovative as Sheen) ways of going about it. Service Cloud 3 has just been announced by salesforce.com in their latest attempt to steamroll the service call center market. With my experience of RightNow Technologies, I got a pretty good grasp of a best practice service call centre solution. RightNow is great at the service call centre stuff. Salesforce has been lagging behind for a number of years, but recently they have invested heavily in catching up. Have they bolstered their offering enough to eclipse RightNow? My verdict is that they have maybe concentrated too much on the bells and whistles and not quite enough on some core concepts. But at the same time, love the long-term path they forging. So, without further ado, 'The Good', 'The Bad' and 'The Ugly'.

The Good

• Social: Well, this is where it's at isnt it? Facebook is king, and so at last they have developed a link into that channel via 'Salesforce for Facebook'. They already have 'Salesforce for Twitter' which I am mighty impressed with having implemented it recently, and now they have covered the Facebook channel this is complete as far as my view of social is concerned. Why would you bother looking at any other 'social' platforms? Actually Twitter has a way to go to become mainstream (domain of nerds, analysts and celeb stalkers really at the moment), but is fast getting there (cheers Sheen). Facebook IS mainstream. So well done salesforce for filling the Facebook gap. Radion 6 integration looks promising also.
• Cost: All credit to salesforce for providing the Twitter and Facebook add-ons for free
• Chat: Again, a big gap filled here by what they are calling 'Salesforce Live Agent'. Salesforce bought Activa last year, and it seems by all accounts that they have a pre-built solution here that will sort out the Chat space.

The Bad

• Matching to an existing customer: Social is all well and good, but you grab these tweets, or facebook posts, and how do you match them to a customer within your existing database to maintain the 'single view'? Unsure about how the this will be achieved through Facebook, but with Twitter, you need the Twitter ID. And if I am a company, with my database of customer, I have very few, if any, Twitter IDs against them. To get there, will require a gradual, and likely MANUAL build up of Twitter IDs within the current customer database. Painful, gradual, manual, but inevitable.
• The basics: This annoys me release after release. Salesforce love the bells and whistles, but they fall short on the basics. For instance, Cases can come in and be assigned to a queue, but there is no round robin or ondemand pull from the queues to the agents. The only option is to have the agents cherry pick (call centre managers hate that). You can talk about grabbing appexchange 'black boxes' to address this all you want, but having standard config flexibility in these areas in a similar way to RightNow would solve a lot of headache. RightNow supports so many common customer requirements which can be configured with the flick of a few switches. The response 'write APEX' is not good enough from a salesforce.com point of view.
• Cost: The Knowledge module adds on additional cost to the base service platform. Knowledge is a fundamental part of a successful service call centre, and an effective way of deflecting calls and making the customer self sufficient. The cost of Salesforce Knowledge is prohibitive when you compare to RightNow where that is not only included, but is the central pillar of the app. Deflecting calls via their public facing knowledge module is such a powerful and measurable sell, I cannot understand why salesforce do not just bundle it in their standard Service Cloud license.
• Support: Salesforce for Twitter is not officially supported by salesforce. Got a problem? Legally, you are on your own. I suspect Salesforce for Facebook will follow a similar model - "It's free, so off you go, bye."

The Ugly

• Agent Console: Salesforce have introduced the brand spanking new agent console with a focus on multitasking (a bit slow to be honest), but they have left the old one, which is more 'single task' focused behind. Single Task or Multi-Task? It depends on the call centre, but both are common. Being currently involved in an implementation with a 'single task' agent focus, using the old console with ugly old UI is frustrating.

So, that is my high level verdict on Service Cloud 3. Overall, full marks for innovation effort to Salesforce as always, it is coming together. I am now going to tweet Charlie to see if he thinks if Service Cloud 3 is a "bitchin rock star from Mars". Only then will it get the proper stamp of approval.