SM: Yes. I think one of the points that you raised earlier was that keeping on top of your email is no longer enough because messages are coming at you from all over the place. Even with Facebook messages, you can have them forwarded to your email, or you can have your LinkedIn messages forwarded.
Sramana Mitra: Absolutely, that makes sense. Who else in the real-time data access and analytics space plays in the ecosystem? Ari Zilka: In the real-time analytics space, there is a lack of clarity as to what tools to use in the market. The vendors have started to paint fences and mark out territories like complex
Sramana Mitra: In my research so far, I have not seen a lot of great offerings in the social media analytics space that do a good job of taking a lot of data. I agree with you that yes, the relationships can easily be struck with the firms that are producing data – the Twitters
Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that topic for a second. You’re absolutely right. That is a platform that is going to be very difficult for a startup company to bring to market. What’s happening is that there are several camps that are trying to do that and don’t have a full solution yet. Salesforce.com has
Sramana Mitra: I’m going to share a trend that I’m seeing right now, particularly in companies where the number of customers is very large. [Red Hat] has a large number of customers. The number of support calls can be very large. You know how customer support organizations are set up as level one, level two, level
Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have in total? How many customers do you service from your entire IT infrastructure? Lee Congdon: Internally or externally? SM: Externally. LC: Certainly, [we have] hundreds of thousands [of customers] around the globe.
Sramana Mitra: Definitely. Let’s talk about collaboration. What is your current collaboration configuration, let’s say, or infrastructure? What are you using? What trends are you seeing? Collaboration is one of the areas where we are seeing the most adoption of cloud computing. Lee Congdon: We attempt to use open-source products. Our email infrastructure is Zimbra. We use
Sramana Mitra: The 33% that you have moved to the cloud already, what is the organizing principle of that? What have you chosen to move as the early steps? What have you chosen not to move yet? Lee Congdon: A strong partnership with Salesforce.com; we’ve been using their technology for more than five years for sales automation.