Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Steven John, Strategic CIO Of Workday (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: Yes, absolutely! So, Workday is kind of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) in the cloud solution, right? It does financial management as well as human capital management and a few other things. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Steven John, Strategic CIO Of Workday (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

About Workday
Workday’s mission is to build the next generation of enterprise business services—human capital management, financial management, and payroll—and deliver its solutions through a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Founded by former PeopleSoft founder and CEO Dave Duffield with former PeopleSoft vice chairman and head of product strategy Aneel Bhusri in March 2005, Workday aims to offer a fresh approach for today’s global businesses. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Marc Ferrentino, CTA Of Salesforce (Part 11)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: And we are building – now I am putting my computer scientist hat on and we are designing scalable distributed systems. So, we have One Million by One Million entrepreneurs from all over the world. This is a completely virtual program that we envision as something that is going to teach this kind of entrepreneurship to millions of people, and that is a very complex system to design, right? >>>

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. >>>