“Marc's exact words weren't 'I have a job for you'; they were 'I have an idea',” says JP Rangaswami as he reflects on one month in his new job. Marc is of course Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and that idea was that Rangaswami should become the firm's first Chief Scientist.
With a long and successful career behind him – most recently at BT – Rangaswami was in the market for a new challenge when the two men talked. “I had a good time at BT, four really exciting years. I had never been exposed to an organisation that big before. You know there's big and then big gets redefined at BT,” he notes. “But I knew that I had made as many large scale changes as I could at BT and my season was over in about 6 months or so. So I was thinking what to do.”
What Benioff proposed was effectively an extension of Rangaswami's personal interests. “For quite a while I've been personally involved in trying to visualise and articulate and drive what the right model is for the enterprise of the future,” he explains. “A lot of great work was done on this at the turn of the century by people like Tom Malone. The blogosphere has given me an opportunity to articulate my view.
"Salesforce.com is a young enough company [to make a difference], even though the vision and values are set. This is a role with a macro engagement with the market and micro engagement with customers to know what works in smaller and more granular ways. About 70% of my time will be taken up in this way with the remainder taken up by assessing and synthesising feedback and playing that back into the product development communities.”
Not that Rangaswami always appreciated that Salesforce.com was playing in the enterprise space. “Historically I had pigeon-holed Salesforce.com as being for SMEs. I had drunk the KoolAid that grown men didn't use it, this was for 'mom & pop shops,” he admits. “I am personally clear that my role is to raise the game for Salesforce.com when it comes to dealing with large enterprises and some of the artificial barriers that have been there when it comes to the Cloud.”
Barriers coming down
Coming from a major enterprise like BT, Rangaswami has an appreciation for such barriers and also the particular approach taken – or not taken – by telcos to the Cloud. “Another way of looking at Cloud is that it is a nice modern word for convergence – and IT people need to learn that,” he advises. “The Cloud is nothing more than telcos killing distance while IT kills time. We need CPU cycles and storage and in that context you see the converged telco. BT married networking and IT and called it BT Design, but they might as well have called it Cloud.
“But telcos had the 'innovators dilemma' so they were pushing out stories about security and problems. A smart thing for telcos to do was to separate infrastructure from services so there was a drive away from building Cloud services towards building Cloud infrastructures. They would play the public-private hybrid card to allow the waste to continue a little longer. It wasn't that they didn't do Cloud Computing, but it was certainly no skin off their noses to see a delay to the Cloud. We talk a lot about hype cycles, but these can hold things up as well as build things up.”
This can't continue, warns Rangaswami, and there's a shock coming to those who think it can. “People are underestimating the collapse of value in the market when the Cloud takes off properly,” he predicts. “Look at Skype and what happened to the international telephony market. For a long time it held up, then it just collapsed. It's now about a 16th of what it once was. The same thing will happen. Not so long ago a plasma screen TV was outrageously expensive, then suddenly overnight it wasn't. I can't remember the last time I saw a TV with a back.”
Ragaswami points to the changes in cultural attitudes that such shift inspire. “If a 3 year old put a palm print on your plasma TV a few years ago, you'd tell her not to because it was expensive. Today you quickly realise that she thinks the screen is going to do something when she touches it because we have so many touch screens,” he argues. “I travel with an iPad and a MacBook Air. I am perfectly fine with the idea of having no disk storage. The storage I have is a USB Flash drive. That's a change.”
No more on premise?
So will companies as large as BT for example eventually no longer have on premise applications? “On premise will exist only by exception,” argues Rangaswami. “In markets where latency is important and you need a footprint very close at hand, for example, or where there are regulatory requirements to hold local data. But subject to those sort of exceptions, yes, on premise will largely disappear.”
How long it takes to get to that stage remains to be seen, but Rangaswami reckons that things are changing fast. “We are at the inflection point between the 'why?' club and the 'why not?' club,” he argues. “I think the best way to assess that is just by talking to the developers [at Dreamforce] and asking them why they have come. I hear phrases like 'fresh' coming from them, which is not the sense you get from enterprise software events usually.
“If someone had told me that 400 C-suite executives would be turning up here, I would have expected that. If someone had said that 28,000 people – and counting – were coming...well, I'm still getting to grips with that.”
