What a growing number of CIOs are realising is that Cloud delivery makes it very much easier to develop, make available and consume application and business services.
This is part of a realisation that the evolution of Cloud platforms is potentially game-changing for CIOs, the IT service delivery they oversee and the organisations they serve.
The key enabler for all this is the Cloud platform, which is the tool to enable the IT Department to act as an internal service broker for the organisation. Let's take the Salesforce application development platform Force.com as an example.
Until the acquisition of Heroku by Salesforce.com, it was a closed development environment with limited scalability, but now it has the potential to be a far more useful enterprise tool.
We've observed before that CIOs should re-think their view of Salesforce.com – it has much more to offer than web-based salesforce automation. At a recent Salesforce.com analyst event this was demonstrated by presentations from several customers, such as the Alzheimer's Society.
Phil Shoesmith, Head of Infrastructure at the Alzheimer's Society runs a Microsoft shop with 1600 clients and 40 servers. However, he took the tactical decision in 2008 to use Salesforce.com for development work. As Shoesmith comments, "Security is a big issue for us. We need to be on top of the data protection issue, but we worked with the Cabinet Office and others regarding Cloud. And they have no issue in us using Salesforce.com from a data protection point of view."
From 2008 onwards the Society used Salesforce.com for more small projects, e.g.: tracking lobbying interactions with Members of Parliament, tracking properties, and health and safety. In 2009 Shoesmith set up a proper CRM system for healthcare contracts, which took two months to develop and is now used by 200 users.
Salesforce.com is now also used for managing tenders, tracking aid to 100,000 people each year, and is now the Alzheimer's Society's strategic platform for outward facing processes. It links into the HR system for users and locations, and Shoesmith is currently exploring migrating paper-based processes such as Expenses and PO management to the platform, using AppExchange to source solutions.
Shoesmith is pleased with Salesforce.com as a platform because of its quick development time, reliability, lack of on-premise software and infrastructure, as well as access to AppExchange to enable his team to piggyback on other's development work. For an organisation such as the Alzheimer's Society, Salesforce.com offers not for profit pricing, a not for profit community of users, and the ability to use an expanding portfolio that enables not for profit organisations to have access to significant technology developments they otherwise would not be able to access.
No relationship is ever perfect and Shoesmith is slightly concerned that the Salesforce.com licensing model is getting more complex, lacking clarity, for example, about whether an organisation needs to buy licences for external Chatter users. And there is still no information about when and where the Salesforce.com EU data centre will appear. Also Shoesmith notes that there is a skills shortage in Salesforce.com development in the UK, which makes use of external developers very expensive.
On the whole, however, Shoesmith is clear about the benefits that Salesforce.com brings:
- You make the business case once for development and then additional projects can be delivered much less expensively so that the Alzheimer's Society is able to do many more things than it could otherwise afford.
- It is rapidly becoming the enterprise data store for things outside finance and HR and having a central application for CRM reduces data protection risks as this is much more secure than having data scattered in different spreadsheets.
- Working with Salesforce.com enables a not for profit organisation to access technical innovation that it would not otherwise be able to access.
But is Force.com only a viable strategic Cloud platform if you are an SMB? The next challenge for Salesforce.com is fielding large enterprises that are prepared to use it as their strategic Cloud platform and talk about it.
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