Dreamforce: She's back - and this time she means (manufacturing) business!

The Cloud Computing 'enfants terrible' may spend a lot of time talking about how they intend to supplant the enterprise computing establishment, but some of the old guard are welcomed back into the fold.

This week at Dreamforce in San Francsico, two veterans of the relational database market and traditional enterprise resource planning markets will make a pitch to showcase a new "social manufacturing" platform.

Kenandy is a Silicon Valley start-up that wants to encroach on the traditional manufacturing market dominated by SAP - backed by $10.5 million in first round funding from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Social manufacturing essentially takes traditional manufacturing systems that have been built inside a company and extends them outside the corporate borders.

Built on Salesforce.com's Force.com platform, the first offering from the new firm is the Kenandy Manufacturing Cloud. Salesforce.com itself has a stake in the firm, while Ray Lane, managing partner at Kleiner Perkins and former Oracle president who led some of the most aggressive sales pushes against SAP, is joining the board.

Heading up the company as CEO is another veteran of the relational ERP era, Sandra Kurtzig, founder and CEO of the ASK Group which pioneered manufacturing resource planning (MRP).

The advent of ERP put huge pressure on the firm and Kurtzig eventually sold ASK to Computer Associates in the 1990s and retired to Hawaii - where one of her neighbours is Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. It was Benioff who convinced Kurtzig to come out of her self-imposed retirement to lead the new firm. Kurtzig told US media:

“I thought I’d left on top, the Johnny Carson way, and retired never to be seen again. I’m a resident of Hawaii, and I enjoyed my retirement…and starting another company was not on my bucket list. I said, 'Marc, I checked my bucket list, and coming out of retirement to run another company wasn’t on it.' He replied, ‘You’re old and blind – check it again. ”

Kurtzig explains the rationale behind the new venture:

“A lot of companies…are manufacturing overseas—they have customers and suppliers all over the world, (and they need software that recognizes that) and who’s going to win in this market. Marc said, ‘You are,’ and I’m paying for it.” ”

Lane's vision for the new company is simple:

“Kenandy presents an exciting combination of Sandra’s proven ability to innovate and execute in a market space that has lacked any significant innovation for over 20 years. By horizontally integrating all aspects of supply chain management, Cloud Computing and social media will dramatically change the landscape of manufacturing business worldwide. ”

But this is very much "Sandy Kurtzig's New Company". Just as Workday has successfully made inroads into the PeopleSoft installed base by being 'Dave Duffield's New Company', so Kenandy's backers will be hoping that Kurtzig's fame in the manufacturing sector will pull off a similar trick. For his part, Lane cites Kurtzig's vast experience in the manufacturing market as a reason for backing Kenandy:

"If it was a 30-year-old trying to recreate ASK in the cloud, I’m not sure I’d be as enthusiastic. She’s more than half the value here…Somebody introduced her to a potential first customer, and from the time she met them to the time they went live was two weeks.”

The only potential snag here might be that Workday can pitch directly into the PeopleSoft customer base, whereas ASK's installed base was itself subject to successful attrition by SAP. So Kurtzig may well find herself talking less to her old customers as to her old customers who made the move to SAP - the ASK installed base once removed as it were.

Nonetheless it's an interesting comeback move. So when Benioff takes to the stage this week in San Francisco, Kenandy - named after Kurtzig's sons Ken and Andy - will be cited as a prime example of a firm betting the farm on Force.com and marking Kurtzig's comeback to the enterprise computing industry.