Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Marc Ferrentino, CTA Of Salesforce (Part 10)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Marc Ferrentino: Yes, thank you. I have one question for you; I wanted to ask this question. I like your Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series, but I actually like your insight and your strategic blog posts much better. The reason I like them is that while I love hearing from peers in the industry, the insights in your [other posts can take a broader] purview. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Marc Ferrentino, CTA Of Salesforce (Part 9)

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 cloud vendors honest.  There are opportunities in managing different cloud vendors. There are other cloud-based integration solutions, and I think there is little there in the industry. You have companies like Boomi. Capgemini has a Cog software offering.  I would like to see more and better solutions there.  There is single sign-on or journey management in the cloud. I would like to see more of those. I think it would be much more interesting. We need to have more of those. There is only one person out there who has been doing it, but I would like to see more of that.

There are a lot of management portions in the equation. There is room to play there, and they get funded pretty easily, too, in a lot of cases. Usually, it is easy to make an argument for them. So, as more people adopt more cloud services, there are going to be more cloud services to manage. Right now, we at Salesforce have our own way of managing the cloud. Amazon has their own way of managing the cloud. Google has their way of managing the cloud, and if you decide to buy many, then that is a lot of cloud to manage. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Marc Ferrentino, CTA Of Salesforce (Part 8)

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 there. Social CRM has also been going the other way; it has been engaging your customers and bringing them into the fold.  It’s part of the even product management process, that is why I think of social CRM and extending it out to your suppliers and distributors is, as I have mentioned before, is another example of more enterprise play. But it is still kind of comes in with the broader-based concept. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Marc Ferrentino, CTA Of Salesforce (Part 7)

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 have been doing this for the past 12 years. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Marc Ferrentino, CTA Of Salesforce (Part 6)

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 it within a website, publish it within a customer photo. It inherits multilingual email capability, and it inherits everything that is on that platform, so as we begin to bring this technology on, it becomes that much better, automatically. In this case, one plus one is three. And it has been an incredible thing to watch because we have our development team that is putting out features, and then we are acquiring and integrating new features. So our pace of innovation is incredible. The velocity of it is really staggering; I have never seen it before. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Marc Ferrentino, CTA Of Salesforce (Part 5)

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 those conversations together. So, our direction is to offer up what we are calling the social enterprise platform. It is a front-office platform. We have spent several years building up back-office platforms, [we and] the SAPs and Oracles and the like, and that is where we spent the money, and we rang that bell about productivity. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Marc Ferrentino, CTA Of Salesforce (Part 4)

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 the time on the basics, and they don’t have to worry about the engineering team. They just have to focus on the business innovation and the business process and not on the rest of the stack. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Marc Ferrentino, CTA Of Salesforce (Part 3)

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? >>>