
Salesforce Developer Conference with Guy Kawasaki (Business Web Apps are becoming a big deal - My thoughts from attending yesterday) - gibsonf1

======
gibsonf1
My cofounder and I went to the Salesforce Developer Conference in Santa Clara
yesterday. The highlight was Guy Kawasaki's extremely entertaining talk. He
also included some very good advice on getting funding - specifically to keep
any slide presentation to investors to a total of 10 slides, and he included
what should be on them. (I'll be getting those in the email soon - if you're
interested let me know.) Also, his very humorous point that you should keep
your presentation point size to a maximum of 50% of the maximum age of your
audience, usually 30 points.

I think the technical highlight was seeing Adobe's Flex and Apollo in action.
Truly impressive. Salesforce has also opened their API for mashups and created
their own language, APEX, run on their "cloud" that developers can use. Their
idea is to create a high value platform on which business applications can be
built and communicate with other business data. Google was there as well,
demonstrating how to connect salesforce to Google apps.

Salesforce currently has over 600,000 paying subscribers at a price of $60 to
$250 per month per user, with some very large companies that have up to 20,000
plus users. They do plan to profit heavily from developers that work with
them, from 10% of any subscriptions by app exchange developers, to large costs
for exhibiting at their conference, etc.

One of the featured speakers at the event was the CEO of a 6 person company in
Toronto that develops exclusively for Salesforce's app exchange. They are
currently in line for making 2.4 million this year after bringing in 1 million
last year. Of those 6, only two are in the same location. He owns 100% of his
company with no outside investment.

There is no doubt that a seismic shift is taking place for businesses using
web applications instead of supporting their own IT infrastructure. I think
this is similar to the Lotus 123 explosion with PC's.

~~~
Tichy
What data leads you to the conclusion that a seismic shift is taking place? I
imagine it is a very big step for a company to trust a web service with their
data (I can't really bring myself to do it, and I am not even a company).
There is also the issue of reliability - Google probably won't go away over
night, but any other web application provider just might. How do you continue
to operate your business then?

~~~
gibsonf1
Those are good points. To be successful, any business web application will
have to have a very good explanation of why their service provides an
extremely high level of data security. To solve the potential of a web app.
going away, the application needs to provide a very easy way for the business
of extracting all their data in a form where they can easily deploy that data
using another application.

The seismic shift is being made possible partly by Salesforce. Their users
tend to be the top tiers of management and sales, and they have completely
sold that level of users in so many small and extremely large corporations.
This means that the rest of these companies' users are easy targets to shift
over to web applications if a meaningful service is made available as the
upper management fully understands web applications and their value. Having
that new set of web application operate seamlessly with upper management, and
feed financial data back to upper mangement for analytics is a very big deal.

The seismic shift is being made possible by reliable secure data platforms. We
plan to use S3 and have an xml option for extracting all data. For businesses,
the ROI of using web apps is growing tremendously. The cost of providing all
that infrastructure in house is huge, and the applications they currently use
are very poor at collaborative work, which is what most businesses need. So
the door is open right now in a way I've never seen before for business web
applications that work well and connect to other applications. The key is
interconnecting all of the companies data - something most companies have only
dreamed of until now that the web approach can provide in an elegant and low-
cost way.

------
ceresian
Please send those slides if you can to joefec@gmail.com. Thanks so much!

Joe

~~~
juliob
<http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html>

------
toisanji
I'd like the slides/info, thanks. toisanji _AT_ hotmail.com

~~~
juliob
<http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html>

------
udai
can you give me the name fo teh toronto company - might have some work for
them. udai00 (at) gmail.com

~~~
gibsonf1
<http://www.crmfusion.com/>

