Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Dayon, Executive VP of Applications, Salesforce.com (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Right now you’re talking to thousands of entrepreneurs. You have the ears of thousands of entrepreneurs. Many of them are working on cloud startups and social startups, things that are very much in your ecosystem. What guidance can you provide for them in terms of what you are looking for? Where do you think your other blind spots are? What areas are you looking at?

AD: It’s an excellent question. How do we measure success when we look at a startup? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Dayon, Executive VP of Applications, Salesforce.com (Part 2)

SM: Right. Given that that’s what’s going on in the world, how do decide what to acquire, what to bring in to Salesforce.com?

AD: Salesforce is, obviously, not an early stage company. We are a $3 billion company today. We’ve hundreds of thousands of customers, pretty much of all sizes. My position at Salesforce is to continue to grow and find emerging opportunities as well as to grow our existing businesses. So, my role in terms of acquisition is to look at the market coverage and make sure that there are no blind spots. For example, when we decided [in 2011] to acquire Radian6, it’s because we felt we had a blind spot for marketers of companies of all sizes. In the marketing space, we realized that whether you are a five-person company or you’re the largest consumer goods company, you need to engage in social media. You need to monitor and connect that to your business processes. We had a blind spot. We decided to make a buy. When we look at what it takes to monitor millions of tweets every day, to monitor billions of blogs every day, to be the Google of the social world, you have to buy the best in class in the space, which is what we did with Radian6. That has been a super successful acquisition. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Dayon, Executive VP of Applications, Salesforce.com (Part 1)

We’ve talked a lot about Salesforce.com on this blog. Those of you who follow it know that I talked to CTA Marc Ferrentino in July 2011 for my Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series. Once a company that focused primarily on facilitating customer relationship management for its clients, Salseforce has started branching out into platform as a service and other areas. My conversation with vice-president of applications Alex Dayon will focus on his perceptions of the mobile and social worlds as well as Salesforce’s evolution. >>>

2012: Top Trends and Opportunities

New year. Fresh energy. Time to take stock of trends and open problems for 2012. The most notable change this coming year is that Steve Jobs is dead. In death, however, he has become even larger than life, and his legacy will drive this decade’s technology movement for a while at least. One of his key legacies is the marriage of technology and humanities, which I believe will shape the next phase of evolution in the IT industry. I elaborated my vision in Silicon Valley: The Next Decade.

In Top 10 Tech Trends For The Decade, I outlined a set of key movements which are pretty much the driving factors for the time being:

>>>

Social Contacts: A Hairy Open Problem

Our audience of readers is full of entrepreneurs. And what do entrepreneurs do? They market and they sell. Well, at the very heart of the marketing and selling problem is the concept of lead generation. Once upon a time, it was a rather straightforward exercise of collecting names and mailing addresses, and then running direct mail campaigns. As the Internet became mainstream, this was largely replaced (at least in the universe we live in) by email marketing campaigns, so the key information was the email address of a lead.

Today, the problem has once again changed definition. Suspects and prospects are everywhere in the vast realm of social media, watching, reading, commenting, engaging. And to engage effectively with them, we need to reach them through all those various channels.

So, the definition of a lead database has expanded from being Name, Address, Email ID, Phone No, etc. to include Twitter handle, LinkedIn profile, Facebook profile, Blog URL, and more.

Yet, the process of generating such lists with all the Social Contact data remains cumbersome, time-consuming, and necessarily manual. Very little by way of technology has been applied to the problem thus far.

It needs to be.

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Social CRM and Crowd Sourcing

There are many trends hitting large enterprises at the moment right in their bellies. Within the broad sphere of cloud computing, with the adoption of the social Web, one of these trends is crowd sourcing. The business function that is most acutely impacted by this trend is CRM. All the way from marketing to sales to customer support, the social CRM trend is becoming an avalanche, and for some industries the implications bear particularly serious consequences.

>>>