By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg Marc Ferrentino: Well, going beyond the Salesforce app exchange and just to come to the space as a whole, I still think there are cloud management solutions. I think that is an interesting place and there are only a handful of solutions out there to keep the
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg Marc Ferrentino: Well, yes, when I am thinking of social CRM, I am thinking of communities; I am thinking of your own communities. But not just our own; I am thinking of also engaging customers on Twitter, Facebook, and a handful of other social media platforms out
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg Marc Ferrentino: Does that make sense? Sramana Mitra: Yes, that makes sense. MF: It is not easy. I am trying to make it simple but it really is not easy. It is an incredible technical challenge, but this is part of that of what we do. We
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg Marc Ferrentino: This is a very slick drag-and-drop kind of workflow tool that we were able to acquire, and that technology was then ported onto our platform. All of a sudden, that technology inherits everything underneath; it inherits our lasting database, and inherits the ability to publish
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg Marc Ferrentino: There is really no platform to bring together conversations between various groups; there is no platform for a really strong front office, in essence. There is no generic platform. It is very piecemeal right now, and because it is piecemeal it is hard to bring
By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg Marc Ferretino: Whether it is field services, even if it is even recruiting an HR person or [dealing with] IT services, they have basically built all these applications that they are innovating. They are trying new things, and in their case they don’t have to focus all
By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg Sramana Mitra: So, following your terminology, systems of differentiation is where software as a service is playing, and systems of innovation, the more experimental zone, is where platform as a service is gaining adoption?
Sramana Mitra: So, let’s talk about the concept of platform as a service a bit more. How do you view the world today? There are obviously different camps emerging. There is the Salesforce.com stack, so to speak, and then there is the Azure stack, the Google app engine and a [Google] stack emerging. But there