Zoho

Zoho is under-rated, not sure why. Perhaps it has to do with the name. No other platform has the breadth and depth of vision as Zoho. It's an amalgamation of Google apps and Salesforce.com.

Read what ReadWriteWeb has to say on this.

Force.com as a development platform

I recently had a discussion with attendees at a Salesforce.com administration module training course. It struck me that many of them commented on and were excited with the prospect of extending the CRM functionality or simply creating new custom objects for other purposes.

What was more surprising was that such a topic was discussed at an administration training session rather than a development course. This implies that extending the platform, at a basic level, can be relatively easily achieved at the admin level or through clicks rather than having to resort to code.

I wonder how this will play out at the interface between traditional IT teams and those business users who have knowledge of business requirements and processes? I think there is going to be a big shift towards business users doing rapid prototyping-type work while the formal implementation may be left to the developers. Having said that, a number of quick and dirty functional enhancements could easily remain as enhancements.

So it would appear that what is happening in the internet consumer space is beginning to happen in the internet business space on the back of the growth of cloud service providers. Platforms such as force.com are driving this shift in behaviour and are therefore exceedingly well placed to benefit from this including in regions such as South Africa and the rest of Africa.

Thoughts on choosing a saas provider

Have been trying to unpack some of my thoughts on saas and saas providers. Here's the first pass.

1. Are the requirements met by the existing offering? Are add-ons, third-party modules required?

Understand how much of the native platform's functionality will meet your needs and how much will have to be added on (and at what cost)

2. How open is the saas platform to integrating with other applications?

If you have existing an application, say, which holds your master customer data like a CIF then you'd want to integrate the data rather than maintaining multiple databases

3. Is the platform extensible? Can new functionality be added and/or existing functionality customised?

You don't want to invest in a niche-platform which will be limiting should you want to extend functionality later

4. What is the track record of the saas provider and what is the vision?

Have a quick look backwards and forwards, you want a platform which has been around for a while and has a roadmap for growth.

5. Are you considering saas because you really need and understand the benefits or are you caught up in the cloud hype?

In my view there are a couple of compelling reasons for going saas: you don't want the hassle of managing infrastructure, you want to be up and running quickly and you need access from geographically dispersed regions (the common theme being avoiding effort and investment in and management of I.T. infrastructure)

Gatorpeeps: do we really need it?

I'm all for new South African 2.0 sites. Have just heard about the launch of Gatorpeeps which is a twitteresque microblogging site with a focus on communities in Africa (or at least this is what I can gather). I haven't signed up and so can't comment on actual functionality but that's part of the problem. Do I really need another microblogging account?

Somebody called kilps asked the question "is this really needed over twitter? why not just sit on top of twitter as an african filter of sorts?". I have to agree. Voracious social media consumers and contributors may disagree but we're in danger of diluting the value of social media, ironically, by launching sites which are similar in function to existing properties which have critical mass.

Of course, this is not meant to be anti-innovation, simply anti-emulation if the value of the new site to a clearly defined niche is not defined and/or if the new functionality it brings is similar.

Saas adoption

For all the benefits of saas, enterprise adoption may be hampered by a number of factors. These may vary from region to region but are mostly generic. These include total cost of ownership, trust and privacy, and application performance.

Total cost of ownership

While infrastructure capital costs and subsequent running costs are avoided in the saas model. In an on-premise model, assume hardware, software and implementation comes in at $100k with recurring annual costs of $25k. For a SMBs/SMEs the saas subscription model is virtually a no brainer since it can be up and running in weeks and can scale as users grow assuming a modest user base of 40 users and say, a subscription cost of $50 per month. The annual cost is still under the annual cost of the on-premise model even before taking the initial costs into account.

In a corporate environment the numbers are amplified but the cost progression is the same. At some point, as user numbers grow and the application is enhanced to cater to specific business processes, the subscription cost nears and then may surpass the on-premise cost.

The discussion with the executive then should be based not only on the TCO threshold but also on whether the enterprise is willing to develop and maintain a competence in IT infrastructure management. The case can be made for core business application infrastructure management while other functions such as CRM, billing, HR and marketing can be saased-out.

Next time we'll discuss trust and privacy.

Salesforce.com

I have been working with Salesforce.com for some months now during implementation. There are some massive benefits as well some issues to consider based on early impressions.

Have no doubt that for many applications SaaS or software-on-demand is the way to go. It's great to instantly access the app. and get going. Basic configuration changes are easy enough to make. A large proportion of users should be able to perform basic functions with minimal training. All this without having to be concerned with procuring servers, lead times, amortisation schedules, power and NOC constraints, etc.

Inherent scalability and extensibility are major benefits. SFDC are running hard with making the force.com platform attractive and have a head start with a captive user base of about 1.1m users at last count. This means that CRM functionality can be enhanced and new functionality can be relatively easily added.

In South Africa, the most common concerns relate to data privacy and performance. Both are important. Protection of personal information legislation is in the works and clients/customers (whose data will be stored on SFDC) will have to provide consent, usually through terms and conditions when signing up with an organisation using SFDC.

The bandwidth situation is improving but there is no substitute for rigorous testing to ensure the user experience when adding, editing or running reports is acceptable. User adoption can quickly deteriorate or fail completely if response times due to poor bandwidth management.