With Salesforce.com's annual jamboree Dreamforce in San Francisco just around the corner, expect the term Social Enterprise to loom high on the agenda for the next few weeks with the concept set to dominate much of the Cloud Computing firm's agenda for the conference. In anticipation of that, here are some teaser comments from CEO Marc Benioff that might provide food for thought if you're one of the 40,000 punters descending on the Moscone Centre at the end of the month.
On the advent of the social enterprise:
“ For our top 1,000 customers, we're defining for them at the C-level, what the social enterprise is. Every executive has multiple customers, and we're all out there positioning what is the social enterprise. We have really found a way to help companies go to the next level. They've worked a lot on their back offices. their ledgers, their payables, their receivables. They've got their Oracle, their SAP, all the horrible stuff in there, but in their front office, they just have not really evolved in a long time. It's not just about SFA or call centre, it's about rethinking their customer experience. That is the company we want to be. We want to be a company that defines what you do with your customers. The way you're going to interact with your customers and be more successful than ever before, is by becoming a social enterprise. ”
On being friends with your car:
“The CEO of Toyota came over to my house and he said, 'What am I supposed to do with my company?' And I kind of was, 'Well, I'm not exactly sure.' I looked down and I grabbed my hat and I pulled a rabbit out of it, and I said, 'You need a friend and your friend should be your car in the way of a Toyota Corolla and a Toyota Tacoma.' And the Toyota Friend should be a car on the social network that is talking to you. Then as we start to build it out for him, I started to lay out all the things that he should do for Toyota - build the Toyota Friend, put in Chatter and build an employee social network, get your sales force aligned, custom build his customer service, get his dealers onboard, get it rebuilt with these kind of legacy factory applications, and build this integrated environment. At the end of it, I'm like, 'Wow, what is this?' And after we looked at it, we're like, 'Well, are we building a customer Cloud? Is that what it is?' And we're like 'Well, that's not exactly it.' And then we're like, 'This is really the social enterprise. This is the next step in business'.”
How social networks are changing customer management:
“Companies realise they need to meet customers where they are today on social networks like Facebook and Twitter…Tyco ADT, the leading home security company. ADT will be taking the social enterprise directly to the customer by arming its 4,000 field reps with iPads. These iPads will be loaded with mobile apps that allow ADT to deliver as much more powerful service than ever before. And to think that at the beginning of last year, iPad didn't even exist. The pace at which these companies are embracing social enterprise is amazing.”
Why the social enterprise push is a differentiator:
“A great example is Chartis Property and Casualty, which selected Salesforce for 10,000 seats of the Sales Cloud and 40,000 chatter seats. Chartis's vision for the social enterprise is an employee social network that fuels a new level of collaboration between their sales people and other in global employees across 117 countries. The Chartis Social Enterprise will allow sales teams to engage customers in a whole new way and proactively reach out to customers before policies expire.”
On how the Force.com PaaS strategy empowers a social enterprise:
“One of the world's great luxury brands, Burberry, selected Force.com to create a social enterprise for it's employees, partners, suppliers and customers. They plan to create an employee social network tailored to Burberry's exact theme brand standards that will allow it's associates, creative teams, partners and vendors to collaborate like never before. Burberry will also be delivering next generation social apps that let customers experience the Burberry brand and culture anywhere on any device. It's an amazing vision, it's only possible to social enterprise platform. ”
On monetising PaaS:
“We're looking at new ways to be more deeply monetise Force.com…the way we charge for Force.com is, it's on a per user basis, and then you can get all the apps you can eat. I think that we would really like to move more to a per app model on Force.com. That was certainly a great way to get going with the product, but wow, we have seen companies, so many companies build so many apps on Force.com that I think we're ready to start talking about per app pricing, not just per user pricing. ”
On why the social enterprise is leading to enterprise licensing:
“We've seen Salesforce deliver enterprise license agreements, but it just has not been a big focus for us. As we've moved to the social enterprise, our customers are saying, 'What about social enterprise license agreements?' And when we look at these SELAs, we're like, 'Wow, how do we deliver to this customer a full social enterprise license?' I was in plenty of customers this quarter where they're like, 'Well, I don't know about this per user pricing over here, and I don't know about the Force.com pricing over there. And what about Radian6 over here? And what about the Jigsaw pricing over there, and blah, blah, blah?' And we're like, 'We've got to take this off the table and give these customers the ability to step way out with SELAs.'..One of the really great areas for us to optimise which is pricing, which we just have not touched in a long time and we can offer customers much better deals.”
