Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Marc Ferrentino, CTA Of Salesforce (Part 2)

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 are missing pieces in the Google stack – and the reason we know a lot about that is because we have a company in One Million by One Million  called OrangeScape that is actually filling one of these gaps. So, how do you see this world evolving? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Marc Ferrentino, CTA Of Salesforce (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

About Salesforce
Salesforce.com is an enterprise cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco that distributes business software on a subscription basis. Salesforce.com hosts the applications offsite. It is best known for its customer relationship management (CRM) products and, through acquisition, has expanded into the area of social enterprise. It has been one of cloud computing’s biggest champions through devising and delivering its cloud-based CRM, collaboration, and platform services to its customers.

Salesforce.com has its services translated into 16 languages and, according to Wikipedia, currently has 82,400 customers and more than 2.1 million subscribers. Its CRM solution is broken down into several broad categories: sales cloud, service cloud, data cloud (including Jigsaw), collaboration cloud (including Chatter) and custom cloud (including Force.com).

About Marc Ferrentino
Marc joined Salesforce.com in February 2007. His responsibilities included early-stage product development and marketing, evangelism of the Force.com platform, and promoting Salesforce.com’s open source initiatives. Marc is also involved with developing Salesforce.com’s collaboration and platform strategies. Prior to Salesforce.com, Marc served as the vice president of Engineering at Vettro Corp, a global leader in mobile on-demand applications. Prior to Vettro, Marc served as vice president of development at InternetCash.com. Over the course of his career, he has held technology positions at Goldman Sachs and Westinghouse/Cutler-Hammer.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Marc. Welcome to the Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series. Would you please give us some background on your role at Salesforce and also on Salesforce’s perspective on the cloud today from where you are. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Jay Leader CIO, Of iRobot (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra:  And whom do you expect would be solving that problem? Or is solving that problem or is trying to improve that situation? Is it the product life cycle management (PLM) vendors?

Jay Leader: In part. There are a whole bunch of them. I am sure you trip across lots of them – people who would like to sell into the PLM base, right? And the PLM vendors are investing to the extent that they can sell more of their own software or keep more of their license based with them. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Jay Leader CIO, Of iRobot (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What about customer service; how do you handle this?

Jay Leader: We do have customer service, and we have internal applications we use for this. We use RightNow technologies to manage customer service operations. Part of the call center is outsourced, but we do oversee service issues, obviously, and we mine the service database for quality problems and customer issues and those kinds of things. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Jay Leader CIO, Of iRobot (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

About iRobot
iRobot designs and builds robots that make a difference. iRobot was founded in 1990 when Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticists Colin Angle and Helen Greiner teamed up with their professor Dr. Rodney Brooks with the vision of making practical robots a reality.

In 2010, iRobot generated more than $400 million in revenue and employed more than 600 of the robot industry’s top professionals, including mechanical, electrical, and software engineers and related support staff. iRobot trades on the NASDAQ stock market under the ticker symbol IRBT.

About Jay Leader
Jay Leader has nearly 25 years of international IT management experience. His areas of expertise include IT management, strategic planning and financial management, and infrastructure and security management. Prior to joining iRobot, Leader was CIO at Nypro Inc., a $1.2 billion injection molding and contract manufacturing firm with 66 locations in 18 countries. He was responsible for worldwide IT operations, managing support and development organizations in the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and China. Earlier in his career, Leader served in IT management positions at Coopers & Lybrand LLP, Groundwater Technology Inc. and Data General Corporation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in government and international relations and a master’s degree in business administration, both from Clark University. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 9)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana: Yes, you can’t have a baby crying at the top of its voice and be able to maintain a professional environment where you need to maybe be on phone and such. There are some issues.

Frank: Right, and not everybody is in the situation where they have created that personal space. I think we are in a transition, because I don’t think it is as simple as you might think. There is a great deal of stigma that also come over time. For example, I have a telepresence unit at home. I did a telepresence meeting with one of our clients. The client was in Europe. I was in North America. The call was at 4:00 a.m. in Chicago, and it was something like 11 or 12 in Europe. You have an interesting dilemma. They know you are in Chicago, but it is a formal business meeting. Do you put on a suit? Does a suit at 4:00 a.m. look weird? I don’t know. I put on a suit. They were amazed with the technologies a couple of years ago, but you get into this kind of funny question of, well, how should I show up? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Frank Modruson, CIO of Accenture (Part 8)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Siddharth Garg and Rahul Nagpal

Sramana Mitra: Whenever we see discontinuities in terms of technology in our industry, this opens up opportunities for entrepreneurship. It opens up what’s happening at the cusp. I would be curious to hear your thoughts on blue-sky opportunities that you see that playing to this trend of behavior at home merging with behavior at work and people’s expectations influencing what things should be like at work. What do you consider to be open problems? What kinds of applications would you want to see that you don’t see today? >>>

Customer Service And The Social Web

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece called Top 10 Social Web Trends For The Decade. In it, I suggested that the way various business functions are done will change owing to the impact of the social Web, crowdsourcing, and so on. The areas that are seeing the most upheaval are customer services, which spans customer support, technical support, and related services. Below are observations from two 1M/1M entrepreneurs working in this area.

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