At the company's media summit in San Francisco this morning, Bass told a crowd of journalists, analysts and customers gathered in the company's slick design gallery (see pictures below) that the combination of mobile devices, cloud computing and social collaboration is more profound than the shift to PCs.

Bass sees the world changing from a PC-centric model where workers promise to "email you that file when I get back to the office," to an environment where mobile devices and the cloud make where ever you are the computing center of the world.

It's already happening, he claimed, citing a list of impressive usage figures:

• 2 million unique visitors a month to Autodesk 360, the company's cloud offering


• 30 files a minute uploaded to AutoCAD WS, the company's cloud-based AutoCAD editor


• 10 million downloads of SketchBook in 2 years, now averaging 150,000 per week on PC and mobile platforms


• 13 million unique visitors - more than Pinterest - to the company's Instructables community


• 21 million unique visitors a month to Pixlr, its online photo editor

On the low end, naysayers like to denigrate the importance of mobile products, Bass said, calling them "juvenile" "toys." But he pointed out that "consumers by night are often professionals by day."

He also claimed that professionals can do serious work on today's portable devices. "I think we're underestimating these small devices... in the work that we do. They can run serious apps" for engineers and other demanding users, and they are getting more powerful all the time.

Meanwhile, on the high end, the cloud lets anyone take advantage of analyses that used to require dedicating expensive workstations for days at a time. Now, "You can do it in the cloud in an hour," he said.

The cloud, Bass added, "is an infinitely scalable resource," limited only by how much you're willing to pay. For urgent jobs, you can pay more and get it done faster. Other tasks can be done more cheaply over time. And that raises a fundamental question: "What would you do differently if you could compute answers faster?"

Autodesk may be a bit ahead of its time. The vast majority of serious design work is still being done sitting at powerful workstations, just as it has been for a while. But Bass couldn't be more correct about the trends. It's hard to argue that more and more computing tasks are going to stop moving away from the desktop. Big, data intensive jobs will move to the cloud while smaller, more UI-focused tasks are going mobile.

There will always be some things best done sitting at your computer. But the number of those things is clearly shrinking, not growing.

Tomorrow, I'll write about Autodesk's cloud-based PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) offering. But in the meantime, enjoy a couple more shots of some of the cool designs on display in the Autodesk Gallery:

"The idea is actually pretty simple," explained Dr. Herrod to attendees of the Cloud Security Alliance Summit at RSA. "You have your phone that you go out and buy, and you go to an app store and download a level 2 hypervisor that's going to be in place there. Then when you show up at work, what you're able to do is, rather than get a work-issued phone, you're going to get a work-issued virtual phone."

VMware is currently developing the concept for Android phones, but did not show a working model Monday. The virtual phone may contain company-approved apps, which would still be downloaded to the device over the air, though they would then reside on the virtual envelope.

"Basically, think of it as having two personalities on that phone, separated by a hardware virtualization layer. What's important is that, the corporate phone is owned by my company, not by me. I'm in charge of everything that's on the personal phone, but when I start up that application, it's all encrypted, it's all communicating over automatic VPN... and only those applications approved by the corporation can actually fit on that corporate phone."

A virtual corporate phone could revolutionize the way mobile devices are secured and administered by companies, and it could also have an impact on purchasing choices. Apple's tight control over the apps distribution process makes it an unlikely candidate for following up on Android's head start toward this feature.

But it also would give incentive for administrators to deploy some kind of corporate device virtualization portal, which sounds more like VMware's bread-and-butter. Herrod didn't specifically mention such a product, though he did allude to its existence with respect to another open experiment the company revealed today, one which would absolutely require such a tool for its existence.

It's part of VMware's multi-faceted "Project Octopus," the existence of which was first revealed at VMworld last September. Think of Octopus as providing (among many other things) an alternative for DropBox, for all those enterprises that have come to realize their employees are storing corporate assets in public clouds through their private devices. Octopus, whatever it ends up being called, would give employees a cloud they could use instead, while staying within the policy boundaries of their employers.

"DropBox is an incredible app, a great way to get access to your files wherever you happen to be. It's very convenient," acknowledged VMware's Herrod. "And enterprises don't have an alternative for that right now." Octopus would offer corporations the same file sync and share service as DropBox, while maintaining the data behind their own firewalls, and enabling richer policies. For example, admins would have the ability to revoke access to specific files within a set number of days. Or, if an employee leaves the company, the admin could make certain that person cannot use the company's apps or access corporate data.

"I think you'll see a lot of solutions like these that become different ways of containing the applications and the data, ultimately fitting into this broker concept that has to be third-party aware, but also with unique aspects that each company might need," added Herrod. Obviously there will be more arms to the proverbial Octopus than just the two.

This is not science fiction, nor is it even sophomoric prediction. Oracle's acquisition of talent management service Taleo two weeks ago makes it the storekeeper of what has already become the largest and most utilized global database of talent resources and data. And in a webcast this morning, Oracle executives spelled out in no uncertain terms how this portable talent profile will become the thing that determines whether you attain and hold a job in the 21st century.

"Imagine if you had the capabilities of a manager to look at your organization chart, and browse the organization chart... but find the people within the organization chart using a talent browser," stated Thomas Kurian, Oracle's executive vice president for development. "So you can quickly and effectively find the best talent for a position or need that you have. Secondly, we also want to create a talent directory. [It's] basically a portable talent profile that's attached to every employee or candidate, that's then integrated with recruiting and sourcing, so you can look outside of the company and look at all the pipelined candidates that are out there, and where you're considering sourcing from, to get a view of what the talent outside of the organization is. This allows you to find, recruit, and retain the best people."

As Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (who may retain that title as chief of an Oracle division) explained early in the webcast, Taleo is already the mother lode of employee talent data. "We have 1,400 experts in this area working for us. We service 5,000 customers, and Taleo manages 15% of all U.S. hires. Taleo has one of the world's largest cloud deployments, managing over 16 billion transactions a year."

While there's considerable discussion about businesses looking to Facebook as a trusted provider of identity - of data specifying who someone is - Taleo has been busy building a repository of what people have done. It's being contributed to by a growing number of corporate customers.

The product of these contributions could become for individuals' careers what credit reports have become to their financial status. Oracle and Taleo will not be without competition; SAP made a similar acquisition play with SuccessFactors last December, and analysts are expecting Salesforce's new Successforce - created from its acquisition of Rypple the same month - to produce an equally competitive cloud-based talent management provider.

But the three of these players alone will establish a baseline of expectations from HR departments, for what talent management should be and should become. It's very clear from Thomas Kurian's projection of the near future that this baseline will include the ability for HR managers to scan the planet in real-time, gauging whether each person on the org chart is better suited for that position than anyone outside the org chart.

"To plan, predict, and optimally source your workforce, we want to integrate predictive analytics with recruiting, so you can understand your workforce structure, your recruiting needs, and talent gaps," explained Kurian. "To make sure you're going after the right, the best talent, but integrating recruiting performance management talent reviews, we allow managers to define the critical roles they have and source the top talent they have for positions internally, so you don't even need to go outside the organization to find the best people."

Once employees are firmly involved in the performance management process, Kurian went on, your business will want to use these tools to help retain them. Here is where he introduces us to a wealth of new and curious euphemisms: "You need to have a view of which employees are at a risk, and identifying new opportunities for talent employees who are at risk. Second, you want to empower employees to develop their own careers, so that employees don't feel that the only person responsible for their careers is their manager or the HR professional. Third is to tailor human resources practices and to optimize them based on the population of employees, their skills profiles, and cultural practices."

Given that Oracle is interested in making Taleo's talent profiles available to employees as well as HR managers, we can and probably should expect to see some form of employee-level service for accessing and perhaps maintaining talent profiles. One such a service, or services in that genre, become ubiquitous, then the use of a résumé to represent one's curriculum vitae may become passé.

Stevens is Red Hat's CTO and vice president of worldwide engineering. Right now, he says Red Hat has no "confirmed" product plans for OpenStack but the company is "just finding additive ways where we can get involved in the community and help move OpenStack forward."

Even though Red Hat isn't saying what its intent for OpenStack is, Stevens says that OpenStack is "highly complementary" to other projects and products in Red Hat's portfolio.

With the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0, we provide a community-backed solution (through the oVirt project) for enterprise-scale virtualization, which includes capabilities such as live migration, high availability and dynamic scheduling with support for both virtual servers and virtual desktops (VDI) in a single open platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux with integrated KVM, when combined with OpenStack, forms an interesting foundation for building enterprise or public IaaS clouds.

Our upcoming CloudForms solution will provide IT governance and lifecycle of application management across hybrid clouds including vSphere, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and providers like AWS. Architecturally CloudForms sits above the IaaS layer.

Stevens also says that Red Hat is already seeing "early stage interest" in using OpenStack with RHEV and "in some cases are providing consultative support for our customers."

Joining OpenStack?

RackSpace and the OpenStack community are currently thrashing out a plan to create a foundation around OpenStack. I asked Stevens if the company was involved in those discussions. Stevens says that the company has "publicly expressed some of our thoughts on how the governance for OpenStack could be modified to allow for, in our opinion, a meritocracy-based model that could result in an even more vibrant community."

Stevens says that Red Hat would like to see a "lightweight and open" foundation, of which "there are many successful models in existence that could be emulated." He pointed to the LibreOffice community, Apache/Hadoop, GNOME, and the Linux kernel community as examples of well-run communities.

Since Red Hat is already doing the hard part of actually contributing to OpenStack, why not actually take the step of joining officially? Stevens says that it's more efficient.

"The way OpenStack has set things up, official joining is not a prerequisite to getting involved and helping," says Stevens. "So instead of a press release, we chose to just roll up our sleeves. In some cases we find it more efficient to get involved in the actual technologies than in some of the commercial and marketing elements of open source efforts."

Stevens says that it's "early days" for OpenStack, but says that it's "another example of collaborative open source development driving cloud innovation."

The next OpenStack release is due on April 5th. It will be interesting to see which companies have put in the most to the Essex release, and how it turns out.

So you might expect the predictions of MapR CEO John Schroeder for the year 2012 would not include obscurity for his own company. But Schroeder makes at least an arguable case: The difference, he says, between the database market in 2012 versus the one from 1992 has to do with the customer's preference to refrain from vendor lock-in, and that customer's newfound ability to ensure against it.

The portability play

"Multiple vendors competing in the marketplace brings out the best," Schoeder tells ReadWriteWeb. "If you look at the early '90s, with Oracle, Sybase, and Informix slugging it out for building a world-class relational database engine, it was all based on ANSI-standard SQL. I'd argue that Hadoop interfaces are even more standard and portable than the interfaces were across those relational databases, because those vendors had [their own proprietary] extensions. There's more to the platform than just the programming language of SQL."

By way of a strategic partnership with EMC, MapR has quickly evolved into a first-order player in this new market. This partnership, Schroeder implies, could help serve as MapR's insurance policy against oblivion.

But more importantly, he believes, Hadoop's APIs are strictly standardized, so that more components of the platform are portable than for an RDBMS. "Customers could move between distributions fairly easily with fairly low switching costs," he tells us. And future innovations in the emerging big data market, he believes, can and will only happen so long as the other players in MapR's category - most prominently Cloudera and Hortonworks - work in cooperation with MapR to maintain that platform portability, and ensure their mutual plurality.

"I think having multiple vendors in the space advances the technology," the CEO remarks. This way, if some developers write an application using HBase as the interface, others use Hive, and others use Pig, while still more choose to stick with the basic MapReduce API, the application itself is still portable between the various distributions.

The beta test phase is over

Schroeder perceives Hadoop implementations in enterprises as moving past the experimental, embryonic phase, and finally entering the mission-critical stage. But isn't the fact that mission-critical applications started using data sets that were too huge for SQL relational engines, the trigger that sparked Hadoop in the first place?

"In cases where you've got very large, unstructured data sets that are not feasible for being processed using traditional data warehouses, companies will move forward with these implementations," MapR's Schroeder admits to believing. "They have applications that they wouldn't have been able to implement before, so they could be critical to their business. But the state of the Hadoop distributions a couple of years ago really wasn't a reliable compute and data store. Just eighteen months ago, if you put data in Hadoop, it was subject to data loss; and if you were running production applications, you would encounter cluster crashes. The distributions hadn't matured enough to be reliable compute and data stores. That limited the applications to being more experimental, and less business critical."

That's changing, he continues, as the commercial Hadoop providers implement the same class of features customers expect from their SQL engines, such as business continuity and data protection.

Is SaaS a threat or a blessing?

As cloud service providers find new and more clever ways to provide database services through the cloud (Amazon's Elastic MapReduce and DynamoDB, the latter just announced today, being two examples), some believe that small and medium businesses will sign on to cloud service providers for remote big data storage and management, rather than implement their own deployments on-premise. Could this possibly threaten the status of the new, commercial on-premise brands like MapR?

No, not so long as MapR gets a chance to be the engine inside these brands. One example John Schroeder provided was a defense contractor that resells its own implementation of MapR as a turnkey app for companies doing business with, or at, the Pentagon. Maybe those customers don't recognize Hadoop as the engine, but who cares? Perhaps IDC's Vesset was partly right in that the brands could fade into obscurity, but the companies behind those brands' shared technology at least have one formula for continued survival.

To enhance, not replace

Early on, the future success of the so-called "NoSQL" movement was predicted on the basis of how soon unstructured data models could take over the enterprise. Now MapR CEO John Schroeder believes that success for Hadoop and big data systems depends on how soon software developers like his own take full advantage of the new class of applications beyond the maximum reach of SQL scalability.

"From working in this market for over two-and-a-half years, there isn't much evangelism required. There's a pretty strong market pull right now, and the integrators see that market pull, so they have to integrate that in. That said, I don't see customers initially unplugging their data warehouses and replacing them with Hadoop. They augment."

One example Schroeder provided was a credit card company working to implement fraud detection functionality. A traditional SQL data warehouse is more than likely already in place, and it may work well enough but without enough granularity for an analysis system to accurately capture or isolate the sequence of events that may lead up to a fraud incident. So one smart strategy he suggested was for that same warehouse to begin storing a supplemental stream of raw transactional data, perhaps several years' worth, through Hadoop. That way, when a potential fraud incident is isolated using SQL, rapid analytics over billions of transactions may become available through Hadoop. From those analytics, a model for predicting future fraud events can be constructed that benefits both SQL and Hadoop engines.

"I think [enterprises] are introducing the Hadoop framework as a way to augment their data warehouses; and I think in the future, there'll be much greater growth in the unstructured world than in the structured world. Why would you flatten and summarize data if you could keep the raw, transactional, log data online? You're limiting the types of analytics you can do when you summarize, structure, and flatten the data."

Most conspiracy theories seem stupid three years or so later, after they've failed to come to fruition. Now that Amazon is the leader (albeit amid good competition) in cloud-based virtual machines, VMware is the leader in virtualization services for the enterprise (with Citrix keeping it on its toes), Salesforce (it's still amazing to say it) has become the leader in cloud-based applications, and Heroku (a Salesforce product) is believed to be within striking distance of leadership in cloud-based apps platforms, it becomes not only feasible but practical to consider Azure in terms of relevance.

The feature that could put Azure back in contention in many customers' minds is persistent images, which Microsoft also refers to as "VM roles." It's the type of service that Amazon EC2, Rackspace, and GoGrid customers typically expect: deploying a server image to the public cloud that can then be used to host an application full-time. It's not rocket science, or at least it shouldn't be. Azure's had it in beta for nearly all of last year.

"A VM role gives you a high degree of control over the virtual machine," reads MSDN's current beta documentation, "while also providing the advantages of running within the Windows Azure environment: immediate scalability, in-place upgrades with no service downtime, integration with other components of your service, and load-balanced traffic. The VM role consists of an operating system that is constructed using a base virtual hard drive (VHD) and optionally one or more differencing VHDs. The use of the VM role also involves a service definition file and a service configuration file."

Rather than develop and run code to be managed by a .NET Framework running in the cloud, as Azure's principal PaaS service works now, users would deploy an operating system image and manage that image directly... the way Amazon users have been doing for years. My friend Mary Jo Foley has kept her unblinking eye (I can't do that myself without it burning) on the fact that MSDN documentation refers to "an operating system image" in a curiously agnostic fashion, as opposed to stating "a Windows Server image" or something else equally specific. This leads Foley to believe that the company is willing to open up Azure to host other types of server images, including Linux.

While such an event would finally bring Microsoft into the same topic of conversation as Amazon among customers, it won't make the company automatically an equal player. Even leveling the playing field may not be enough; Microsoft will need to create a competitive advantage, and do so the old-fashioned way.

Becoming a "full service" provider may not be enough, because as Amazon has demonstrated, different services appeal to different classes of customer. Microsoft maintains some advantages against Google in the SaaS field, where Google Apps remain too underpowered, limited, and unreliable to compete against Office. That said, Office Web Apps must still improve. In the PaaS field, Azure is by no means a weakling, though against competition from out of nowhere like Heroku, it will need several repeat performances like its embrace of Node.js last month, which broke Azure out of its .NET shell.

Among consumers, there needs to be more direct connection between Windows for PCs and Microsoft's cloud services. We've seen a few examples for Windows 8, but not nearly enough. Windows Live is still treated too much as "online" - a connotation that harks back to CompuServe and Prodigy. Consumers need to see the Microsoft cloud as the software, and they will need to perceive Office 15 (hopefully not "Office 2015") as the cloud.

But that won't elevate Azure's position in the enterprise, certainly not by itself. Microsoft will need to become something it historically has never been: cost competitive. Its success in staying relevant against tremendous competition in 2012 will be measured by three factors: 1) How many customers will Microsoft take away from IaaS leaders such as Amazon and Rackspace? 2) How will Microsoft expand its PaaS services beyond just Node.js support? 3) How soon will Microsoft's moves this year be answered by Amazon and others with price cuts?

It's the key lesson being taught by cloud technologies such as OpenStack, and governments are learning it: Because failures happen, systems should expect them and overcome them - in advance, if possible - rather than wait for them and react. This lesson is having an impact on key data center technologies, most notably virtualization. Now, VMware is offering advice to its customers that bears the traditional "disaster recovery" moniker, but which is in the midst of altering its tone.

VMware's revised set of 10 Disaster Recovery Tips, unveiled earlier this month, now have greater emphasis on steps businesses can take to avoid loss and minimize impact when disasters happen. Because disasters will happen.

1. Run a full business impact analysis. As Gaetan Castelein, VMware's senior product marketing manager for infrastructure, tells RWW, businesses only think they're running such an analysis, but they usually stop at the beginning.

"When you're implementing a disaster recovery solution, think of how many people often do it on an application-by-application basis, or for a subset of virtual machines," says Castelein. "Really, few people actually do a full business impact analysis. What you really need to understand from a business standpoint is, what will be your recovery time objective and your recovery point objective for each business service that is running on your IT infrastructure? So if your data center goes down, how much time will you have to recover this application? How much data are you willing to lose? This is a business decision, and those numbers are going to change on an app-to-app basis."

2. Identify your application dependency mapping, which refers to all the software components your application needs to run on client devices. "Once you've figured out that, for example, your HR application can't be down for two hours, because a customer-facing application must be continuously available, then you've got to figure out, what are all the dependencies between those applications? Discuss those facing apps' needs (for example, access to these two databases, LDAP from a security standpoint) if you can identify all the individual components that are necessary for those services. And based on that, you've got to come up with, 'Here's my disaster recovery requirement for each individual application.'"

3. Evaluate your potential recovery site, based on its distance from the possible point of disaster, and how much bandwidth available between those two points.

4. Evaluate the differences between your disaster recovery requirements and your disaster avoidance requirements. There's a chance that the tools you implement to avoid disaster could mitigate the impact of a disaster event, reducing your outlays necessary for recovery.

5. Evaluate the different classes of disaster recovery solutions. Here, VMware is recognizing it doesn't have a player in every camp. "There's many different types of solutions," says Castelein. "There's storage-based solutions with storage-based applications; there's application-level clustering. Obviously, we do a lot in the disaster recovery space with Site Recovery Manager and vSphere. So look at those different solutions that are available out there and see which one is best for your needs."

6. Design your business continuity solution. The broader concept of resilience is incorporated into continuity tools that help a well-distributed network, for example, maintain full database uptime after a disaster event through strategic replication.

7. Create a solid recovery plan. This is the point in the process where you learn how much of the recovery process can be implemented in software, and how much requires manual intervention. (And how much has relied in the past on divine intervention, for that matter.)

8. Test your recovery plan. Do these drills at least twice a year, VMware recommends.

9. Automate your processes as much as possible. As VMware's Castelein advises, "Disaster recovery on the one hand is certainly not inexpensive, but it's a very big investment. And unfortunately without automation, we see all too often that human elements come into play, so the recovery times are much longer than they need to be. If you rely on manual processes, they need to be documented. In many cases, they fall out of sync with what's actually running in your data center. So getting automation and having a lot of recovery processes executed through software, instead of manual processes, is a big plus."

10. Use a checklist. VMware's idea of a "solid" recovery plan is one that can be encapsulated into a NASA-style, well-defined checklist. Conceivably, certain elements on this checklist could be implemented as drills, effectively recovering - and thereby refreshing - some systems which haven't even been impacted by disaster.

The idea is to change the conventional way manufacturers engineer their product lifecycles: first by developing it, then by marketing it upon completion. Those cycles have historically been separate; DemandTec's idea is to merge them, to make businesses make strategic merchandising decisions (e.g., "How about marking that tablet down to a hundred bucks?") rather than marketing corrections (e.g., "What if we changed that tablet's promotional slogan?"). It sounds like an idea IBM could wrap its head around. Today, that's exactly what IBM did.

Through its own blend of organic development with mergers and acquisitions - the most recent being trade investment management software maker M-Factor just last March - DemandTec is said by analysts to be among the biggest brands in its product category. IBM is paying $440 million for DemandTec in an all-cash deal that's typical of IBM's acquisition pattern (back in 1996 it paid $743 million for Tivoli Systems).

Today's deal indicates that IBM's on-again, off-again affair with business analysis services is on again. Back in 1996, the company began testing the waters of Web analytics with a product called SurfAid. Then five years ago, deciding it would cost too much to continue competing directly with bona fide consulting services, IBM sold SurfAid to a company called CoreMetrics. That company took SurfAid like a fumbled football, and scored big. Meanwhile, in 2009 Adobe acquired Omniture, in a $1.8 billion deal that a certain individual thought might be overpaying.

In August 2010, IBM reversed course and acquired Coremetrics, in so doing bringing SurfAid back into what the company calls its Smarter Commerce portfolio. DemandTec will find its new home within that same portfolio, but its purview is not Internet usage behavior. It's purchasing behavior, both online and in traditional retail markets.

"DemandTec's platform for customer-centric decision making, combined with advanced customer analytics and marketing expertise from our partners, enables retailers to gain new insights into customer loyalty," reads a recent DemandTec product brochure. "For example, retailers can analyze market baskets and product affinities to understand the categories, brands, and items that are associated with the purchasing behavior of the most loyal and most profitable customer segments. They can also perform detailed analysis of customer loyalty data to identify behavior that is predictive of customer attrition, and then apply prediction factors to existing customers to identify customers that are at risk of defecting."

The term "market baskets" in this instance is not a euphemism; it means the things that a consumer purchases together in one batch. DemandTec's data doesn't come from extensive polling of customer satisfaction, but rather by a measurement of what products get purchased as a result of certain promotions, which products get purchased along with others, how effective coupons are at driving sales, whether a consumer experiments next time with a different brand in the same product category, and data of that nature. And using consumer loyalty data, DemandTec's SaaS-based software can point the way to the most effective promotion a manufacturer or vendor may make, for a given product line, at a select subset of outlets, in a particular geographic area.

Sounds like IBM territory to me. And in light of the $440 million price tag, I'm wondering whether IBM used DemandTec's own software in projecting the best price.

In recent months, Salesforce has been making inroads in building a business software ecosystem around its Chatter system of communication, developing and enabling the development of tools that could potentially wedge Outlook and SharePoint out of the enterprise. Expect a stronger message on the subject of reducing and/or eliminating middleware and message queues, a topic that Salesforce marketing has been chattering about in recent days. ReadWriteWeb is delivering a running summary of Benioff's speech as it happens.

10:18 am ET: Marc Benioff takes the stage. "We've been born cloud at Salesforce.com, but we've been reborn social."

Plans to exceed $3 B in revenue this year, Forbes ranking Salesforce as #1 Most Innovative Company.

Starting by recognizing the contributions of non-profit organizations. Not always as blessed with the technical resources that commercial customers have.

"I want to tell you what it is about my job that I love so much," he goes on, stepping outside of the spotlight and into the aisle as he's been known to do. Listing all the great technological leaps forward, as he's done before, paying tribute to Steve Jobs for bringing forth the mobile revolution. "But the new era that we're in is the social revolution. And just like every other cycle before it, it's bigger and more exciting than ever before."

Repeating the message of the political revolutions in the Middle East, which once again Benioff credits to Facebook. Credits the Occupy movement to the proliferation of an online display ad:

"A 22-year-old nanny brought down the Bank of America! Isn't that amazing?"

10:29 am ET: The Arab Spring, he says, will lead to the Social Spring, the CEO Spring, the Corporate Spring. "Great success, but how do we do it? What do we do? What is causing this? What is causing this? What is causing this?"

Facebook is eating the Web, he says. He cites this graph:

If individuals coordinating the placement of tents in the park in Oakland can use social tools to decide where to go, then business can and should use the same tools. It's also "leaderless" - there's not necessarily someone in charge, and the CEO suggests that's a good thing.

"Not everybody is on the social revolution. Not everyone is on board. But our employees are in it, our customers are in it. They're accelerating what products are successful. But it's a social divide! It's a social divide! What about our products? How do we cross the gap of business performance? How do our enterprises bridge this social divide?"

Introducing a three-step process. Business social networks, then customer social networks, then product social networks. "The core of the social enterprise is the cloud. It's fast, it's easy, it's open." Lowest cost of the transaction per carbon in the world.

"But beware of the false cloud," Benioff adds. New, proprietary mainframes are the false cloud. "We've got the cloud! And we can install it in your data center tomorrow," he says mockingly. "If it's about more hardware, it's not about the cloud! If it's about another software update, it's not about the cloud!"

10:40 am ET: Plays the Burberry video seen at Dreamforce a few months back. Introduces Angela Ahrendts, Burberry CEO.

Multiple constituencies come into Burberry every day through the front door, but back end infrastructure needs to be able to connect those constituencies with the people they need to speak with. "Our vision was Facebook for Burberry... We have to change our language to communicate the way they're used to."

Benioff mentions that SAP provides the back office infrastructure for Burberry.

"For a retail company, usually it's about the store. But that's the store," says Ahrendts, indicating the projection of the Burberry front page. She explains why the online store must represent the full retail store, giving the customer the feeling of "walking in." "Every screen has the ability to move and interact in the way you'd have human interaction in a store." Can customize that response via country. But previously, was not able to deal directly with suppliers with the same ease that it deals with customers. Done through the integration of Salesforce Chatter with Burberry World, which links back with the SAP infrastructure. "So this is the front door now."

[Interesting how this front door takes place on the Web, which is the same technology Benioff said 15 minutes earlier was being eaten by Facebook. How would a customer feel like she's in Burberry World, if that front end were being supplied by Facebook?]

10:49 am ET: So what is the first step? "Create that customer social profile." Then create the employee social profile, and then the product social profile. [A three-step first step.]

Benioff tells the story of visiting customers in Detroit [same story told during Dreamforce]. Going to a hotel that gets great Yelp ratings. "This amazing thing happens. We got to the hotel, and the guy at the front desk says, 'Mr. Benioff, we're so happy that you're here! Our CEO FedExed a note to you overnight saying, thank you for coming. And that restaurant you talked about on Twitter? We got you reservations, you're all set!'" Uh-huh. "That's not what happened."

What really happened, of course, is that he was handed the key, he grabbed his bags, he went upstairs, and he went into an empty room with the lights off. "How can this be?? Is this company not even aware of the technology available to them to create a great customer experience? A customer social profile is so good for business. Delighting customers is knowing who they are and what they like."

10:54 am ET: Noting changes to customer contacts screen in Salesforce. Dan Darcy, VP product marketing, showing how new contacts screen shows what the customer has been saying on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Benioff mentions Data Residency option, so that some business data does not have to be shared with Salesforce data center or with Database.com.

Databases have been too proprietary, too expensive, too difficult to use. Tells the story of being at the GE Management Center, where Salesforce gives a special demo for Jeffrey Immelt (GE CEO). Showed integration of existing GE database with Database.com. "Would you stay this is step one, get your data model together?" asks the CEO. [The fourth "step one" of the day.]

Salesforce can build a custom version of the presentation for specific corporate customers.

"So if that's step one, what's step two?" Employee social network. "Why do I know more about my employees and my customers on Facebook, than I do my own family? How can we take that power, and turn it back on the company?" [This keynote fits the Dreamforce template so perfectly that any moment now, I expect Benioff to find a Coke machine.]

NBC Universal story, also a video shown last time. Story of implementing collaboration backbone, 300% ROI in the first week.

11:02 am ET: Chatter only released in 2010, so much has happened in only three conferences. Introducing PayPal founder Max Levchin.

Believe it or not, Levchin critiques Benioff for having asked a complex and long question. "I had 15 seconds of prep time right there to come up with an answer." [Just who is the guest of whom here?]

Levchin says that companies are failing to mine the tremendous amount of data they're generating. He criticizes businesses for not realizing that cloud isn't just about not having to upgrade their servers any more. [Something tells me Levchin won't be back in six months, but Ahrends will.]

11:09 am ET: With NBC Universal, Benioff says, he gets the picture in his mind of Customer 360.

"But we can go farther. We can go So. Much. Farther." Tells story of an investment banker who tells him about all these companies he wants the CEO to look at. "Have you had an e-mail of four or five or ten PDFs of analysts' reports? That's not how I want to communicate. I certainly don't want to manage those files, and I don't want to download them. I want to keep them all in the cloud." Moving beyond to customer and supplier social networks.

11:12 am ET: Chief Marketing Officer Kraig Swensrud takes the stage. "Chatter looks and feels like Facebook, but it's private and secure for your company." Teams working together to service a customer better. "The flattening of an organization." Executives asking questions and getting responses and ideas back in real-time. "This is becoming the new UI of the entire Salesforce application." Can drill down into any object in the system. Can see which apps a customer has installed from the Facebook and iTunes app stores.

"Social networking is different. The answers actually find you." Chatter Now allows real-time presence and IM inside the company, for live chat. File-sharing with hyperlinks to the underlying file system, no downloads necessary. Chatter Customer Groups for real-time customer intelligence. Customers do not have access to private information, but instead only the information you delegate to a group. Bringing a customer into a group is as simple as sending an invitation, customer gets direct access to documents. One-click log-in from e-mail to Salesforce customer screen.

Chatter Mobile already in use for providing such screens on mobile devices in app style - first demoed with iPad, then with Android Honeycomb-based tablet.

11:21 am ET: "But what's the second thing that's important?" asks Benioff. [The second #2 of the day.] "It's about selling." How do we bring the sales cloud in with data. Customers say they want to "clean" these fields or fill these fields in? Data.com takes contacts page, adds a Data button, gives employees access to "the best data possible."

Video of Napa Valley winery Bespoke using Data.com.

11:27 am ET: The rebuilding of software for the tablet platform. Next generation of software is emerging around HTML5. "You have all the power of the cloud services, and the security and integrity of the cloud services, but you continue to have the fundamental persistence of cloud computing." Touch.salesforce.com Salesforce UI around Salesforce.com.

First peek of pictures of Salesforce.com on tablets, HTML5. Brings Kraig back out. Throws in the fact that analytics are now part of Chatter stream (actually completing the part of his Chatter demo that got cut off in the previous half-hour, not actually premiering Touch quite yet.) Private and secure social collaboration space inside of the sales app. Can get pricing and discounting approved by sales manager, inside the Chatter stream.

Now moving to the Touch part of the demo. On the iPad, Chatter page (which users already know) is accented with a functions bar along the top.

Customization screens built into existing Salesforce will be automatically rendered on Touch screen.

Demonstrates how Data button may be used to fill in existing information from the cloud, into areas and fields that need to be filled.

11:38 am ET: Benioff: "For me, it's about the customers." Introduces Sigal Zarmi, CIO of GE Capital. "We're not just bankers, we're builders," she says. Started a social footprint project called GE Edge, to bring CFOs and CEOs of big companies together to exchange information, share knowledge, "and also tap into GE expertise." GE brought the idea to Salesforce, which built it on its own platform. Also enables customer collaboration channel.

Built in 5 weeks in collaboration with Salesforce.com, hosted by Ohio State University.

11:42 am ET: Benioff: "Service and engagement is something that has dramatically shifted over the last 12 months." If you go to Bank of America help, you'll find its call centers can respond via Twitter. KLM Airlines has similar customer service capability tied in with Twitter. KLM video. Reminder that private data always remains protected.

"The entire enterprise is being transformed. It's reaching through every application, every way we touch the customer," says Benioff. Brings Kraig back on stage.

Demonstrates service cloud app. Importance of social media started on Twitter. Everything Twitter users posted, including gripes, was public. Customers tend to share their gripes on Twitter, and then YouTube.

Questions may be routed within a company specifically to the folks with expertise. Cases may be escalated, service agent may bring five or more people into the conversation, perhaps including engineer, sales rep. Chatter Answers are now part of the service cloud. Customers can type questions into a box, system can recommend other customers with similar problems, bringing together customers to help one another.

On the agent's side, shows the customer, history of customer, previous cases. Call center agent typically asks drill-down questions. Those questions can be supplied via scripting that reads the nature of the customer's questions. Can connect directly with Facetime on iPhone.

11:55 am ET: Back to Benioff: Deep inside the social enterprise, how do we build custom apps to run the business? "How do we automate-extend our enterprise?" 4GLs are broken. Introduces Rich Lu of Facebook for automating the back office, talking about how Force.com can be customized for filling gaps in the system, adapting existing apps, "using Salesforce as the glue."

Next introduces Chuck Phillips, CEO of Infor, former president of Oracle. Calls Infor "the third largest applications company in the world." Creating software for hospitality providers that enables a hotel chain to build social profiles around its customers, knowing their likes, dislikes, and preferences from visit to visit.

Infor had the advantage, he says, of a hybrid business model which enabled it to be in the cloud from the beginning. But has learned from its own transitions how to lead customers into the cloud.

12:01 pm ET: Benioff introduces Siteforce, ability to drag-and-drop components of social features into a custom app. (Doesn't use the term "mashup," thankfully.)

Millions of apps already on Salesforce AppExchange. Announcing AppExchange mobile.

First mention of Heroku, where customers can build complete applications. Quick mention of Disney.

Video from ASICS, which built "Support Your Marathoner" - a way for families to send words of encouragement to their favorite runners.

Keynote has definitely gone into fast-forward mode to get subject points finished. "We see marketing itself transforming. Marketing is the ability to really listen to customers." Social marketing technology around Radian6, with social engagements and social hubs. Mention of Gatorade social media command center, which was the subject of a video at Dreamforce. Reintroduces Kraig.

Radian6 can pull back every conversation that's had on social media about a subject, including about TD Ameritrade.

Can drill down into the classes of customers who are talking right now about a product. So much for needing to convene focus groups. "Social hub" technology can define automated rules for how cases are handled within an organization. So all the conversations about a product that meet specific criteria, such as needing a response, can be routed to campaign managers within an organization who can provide offers. Drill-down into customer social profile can show where she is and what she's doing (she's at the bank, she's applying for a mortgage right now, can communicate offers right now). Can present offers back to the customer through iPhone or other mobile device.

12:13 pm ET Benioff now walking around the Toyota. Bracelet he's wearing is recording his every activity. "It's a product social network. Products need to become much more social."

"I want my car to be my friend... I want a Toyota friend," he says. You need to know if the car's charged, if it's ready to go, if the tire is low. "It's a community, it's not just a car. It's a community of dealers, the factory, the cars." Video from CEO of Toyota, who thanks Benioff personally for changing his life with the idea of the Toyota Friend service.

12:19 pm ET: "There is a new world and a new opportunity that is unfolding for all of us," says Benioff. Rebuilt everything around the vision of going to a higher place. Moved away from per-user pricing, now every product for every employee at one price.

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It isn't exactly a cloud if it comes with partitions. Realizing that, a startup from June 2010 called Joukuu has been building a compelling solution: an all-inclusive desktop for users of multiple cloud-based storage platforms, including Box.net and Dropbox. The result is a kind of all-in-one Finder window for all files and documents, including Google Docs documents that you can edit inline.

This week, Joukuu is adding to its service with a Web app that requires no client-side installation, and runs from any browser. With Joukuu Web, you manage your Dropbox and Box.net documents from a central location. You can then edit Google Docs elements by linking to them directly (it's not inline like with the Joukuu native app, but since you're using the browser anyway, there's no reason not to link directly to Google).

Our initial tests showed Joukuu Web working adequately with an up-to-date version of Firefox. However, in linking up with Google Docs, you need to be careful about whether you're already signed in with Google while you're activating Joukuu. The Google account you're signed in under at that time needs to be the one you intend to use for Google Apps. Otherwise, Joukuu may attempt to link one user's Google Docs with another user's Box.net and Dropbox, and editing existing settings in Joukuu is a matter of revoking access and re-establishing it all over again.

The new Web app may not only be the missing link in Joukuu's puzzle. For many users, it may substitute for the stand-alone Joukuu app altogether. Up to now, the firm's free, entry-level service, Joukuu Lite, gave users a simple access point for seeing and opening files on Box.net and Dropbox (support for Microsoft SkyDrive is forthcoming, the company says), but not completely managing them. Joukuu Web is free as well, but adds functions to create, rename, and delete folders, and to search within folders.

By contrast, the Joukuu Plus app, which sells for $59.99, is for Windows users only and adds the drag-and-drop capability that Windows users expect. One can drag files between the System Desktop and the app, and integration with Explorer also means right-clicking a file or document brings up an option for backing up files through Joukuu. The Plus app also serves as a document sync service as well, including the option to synchronize files based on how frequently you use them, thus optimizing your bandwidth consumption.

These are nice plusses, but with so much of the service being offered for free, it may soon become time for the company to reconsider its price.

For comparison, here's a video demonstrating the stand-alone Joukuu Plus app.

Joukuu's main business model comes from file sharing and collaboration. For an annual fee starting at $40 per user, up to 9 people may share files (including Google Docs) through Joukuu's servers in what the firm claims to be a secure environment. For groups up to 99, the per-user fee drops to $35 and Joukuu throws in free Plus apps.

So it may seem odd to some that ADP finds itself today launching a cloud-based software platform for its enterprise clients. Called Vantage HCM (human capital management), its gamble is that big businesses are so mired with ineffective human resources software today that they're ready and willing to go all-in with something completely different.

"Vantage is positioned squarely at our largest and most sophisticated clients who are looking for best-of-breed-type functionality," says Don Weinstein, ADP's senior vice president for product management, in an interview with RWW, "but up to this point, in order to get that, they've had to cobble together a hodgepodge of different systems. What Vantage does is bring together that best-of-breed functionality together in an integrated solution."

This is terminology we've heard before from other vendors, but in the context of ADP, there's special meaning here that long-term clients may appreciate. Throughout the 1990s, the company supplied its enterprise clients with specifications (not really APIs as much as printed instructions) for their own payroll databases. It was up to the clients to craft the software - much of it in-house - that converted their payroll data into ADP's format. The company then supplied them with the software to upload that data on a (hopefully) regular basis, sometimes literally through an acoustic coupler.

Thus began a trend which, for some clients, continues to this very day: As payroll moves to the HR department, and ADP's services transition from just payroll to the broader scope of HR (or as the company calls it, HCM), clients' HR software has failed to integrate with itself. It becomes a mashup of several semi-compatible packages, some of it ADP's, some from elsewhere. The existence of the mashup itself incurs costs, which ADP recently hired PriceWaterhouseCoopers to estimate. Weinstein tells RWW that enterprises with 1,000 or more employees could spend up to $1,400 per customer per year in managing mashed-up, cobbled together processes. "That includes not just the cost of the HR department, but also the systems and the hidden costs of keeping them all integrated," he tells us. Medium-sized businesses from 50 to 1,000 employees could spend $2,000 per employee per year.

Up until now, ADP had been working toward a kind of single-sign-on service for multiple software components, which ADP would provide a la carte. At least the employee or the HR manager would have one place to access these applications. Then the syncing of data between the local client and the remote host could take place in the background. "From a user experience perspective, that's all good... but it wasn't a truly seamless workflow," says Weinstein. "It was better than buying them from multiple providers."

But the company's research revealed that what their clients' employees regarded as the "user experience perspective" was best described in terms of how their HR managers treated them, not how the software treated them. If the software was less than seamless, and the workflow less than optimal, the employee perceived the HR manager - and thus the employer at large - as unsatisfactory.

Weinstein offers us this example: Suppose a client hires a new employee. The workflow for that person's first day is called "on-boarding" (by folks who don't think we're tired enough of airport metaphors). The employee needs, first thing, to be able to enter the building. So she needs security credentials and an ID badge. Facilities management will need to have provisioned her office. She'll need a PC, maybe a landline phone, certainly a mobile phone. She'll want her talent profile to be enrolled with the HR system-of-record. She'll want to enter her financial information for direct deposit, W-4, benefits.

This is a very common workflow. Rather than a 1990s software model where each component is managed separately, one system could manage the entire workflow.

"What's unique about the way Vantage is designed is, now that it's a single integrated application, it's a nice workflow and it's very configurable. You come in, and it'll step you through it step by step," says the ADP VP. And it will make the appropriate notifications to the other staffers involved in the process (facilities, IT, telecom, finance).

Though there are some cloud-based platforms that have seen tremendous growth in just the last year, Salesforce.com being the most prominent example, Weinstein says ADP's inspirations for Vantage HCM come more from the consumer sector. Amazon.com's ability, for instance, to make recommendations for things the customer may want to purchase next, led to Vantage's recommendation feature, advising what the user should do next based on the task he's just performed. There will be a data mining engine in the background that records the pathways users tend to take through the application, in order in the future to make recommendations for future actions based on common, past actions.

Also, Facebook has raised the bar, says Weinstein, for users' expectations of service reliability and richness.

"One of the designs we use over and over again is 'happy.' I want the application to be happy," remarks Don Weinstein. "I want someone who comes in and uses it to be happy. I tell my demo folks all the time... that I want someone to come in and look at our demo company and say, 'Wow, I would like to work there!'"

With this round of HR applications, ADP may find itself once again helping clients make the long migration, either from the company's existing Enterprise HR platform or anyone else's. Says Weinstein, "Our plan for Vantage right now is to focus on new clients, and also on those current clients who are ready and willing to migrate. We're not going to entertain any forced migrations at the moment. One of the advantages of the cloud, of course, is that it makes the migration process a little bit easier. I'm not going to say it'll be simple, but it'll be easier to move somebody from a hosted application to another hosted application than it is to move them from a desktop application to a hosted application.

"The other part of the strategy," he continues, "is to make the new application so appealing to the client that they're going to want to engage with us, and do the hard work necessary."

The next generation of cloud computing resources can be traced back to NASA, and not very long ago. Faced with the onus of either evolving for much greater cost efficiency or shutting down, NASA's Ames Research Center came up with a way to fit a cloud computing nucleus full of fairly ordinary blade servers into a simple shipping container. From Project Nebula, created with considerable help from RackSpace, came the concept of a radically scalable cloud infrastructure, which we now know as OpenStack.

Free software, as anyone in open source project management will tell you, does not sell itself. Today, some of the key architects of Nebula, with the blessings of their former NASA colleagues, are launching the first commercial venture around a complete cloud-oriented operating system based on OpenStack. The new venture is called Piston Cloud, and as with Nebula, its architects intend to change people's perspectives about what cloud infrastructure can be, in order to solve once unsolvable dilemmas from a new vantage point.

"When we launched OpenStack, it was really exciting to be pushing forward a technology that was built to address both public and private cloud environments," Piston Cloud CEO Joshua McKenty tells RWW. "If you look at the parallel in networking with having both local area networks, private networks, and the broader Internet, all of which are connected on the same TCP/IP and Ethernet stack, that's what we're driving for with the cloud environment: to have sets of private clouds and sets of public clouds that can be interconnected and interoperate."

Reducing setup to near-zero

McKenty was one of Nebula's technical architects, working in concert with RackSpace. His experience with open source projects dates back to his time as a lead developer to Netscape version 8. He's now a member of OpenStack's governance body, where he found himself astounded by the unanticipated growth of the contributor community. "[It] ended up two orders of magnitude larger than any of us had expected," he says.

But that interest was lopsided, he explains, biased somewhat toward the public side, where the prospects for concentrating on issues like scale and multi-tenancy seemed greater. Enterprise stuff - security, regulatory compliance, integration with existing infrastructure - aren't the types of topics you throw parties around.

That led McKenty to think this way: The topics that generate contributor interest are the things that make a great open source community. But the topics that generate apathy the stuff folks would prefer to shift to other groups' shoulders - might make a great commercial opportunity. You can make money from doing stuff on other folks' behalf - stuff they don't want to do.

From this inspiration came the underlying design philosophy for the Piston Cloud Enterprise OS (PentOS). Using lessons learned from NASA Nebula, including, "Folks don't care about what they don't care about," McKenty's team decided that instead of minimalistic setup, PentOS should aim for near-zero setup. And instead of a lightweight management interface, PentOS should try a radical new concept: no new interface whatsoever. Piston Cloud calls this null-tier architecture.

"Here's the thesis: Let's take the complexity away from the hardware and automate that complexity inside the software," says McKenty. "We don't even want administrators configuring that hardware at all. We don't want them logging into it, we don't want them installing operating systems, nothing.

Nothing new, literally

"What we did is package PentOS into something we call the CloudKey. It's a USB stick," he continues. "Take the USB stick, plug it into the laptop, edit a single configuration file (PENTOS.COM), and then unplug it, plug it into your top-of-rack switch, turn the switch on, and walk away. What happens is, the PentOS software in the switch detects all the hardware that's plugged into it using IPMI interfaces. It provisions operating systems onto those servers, installs OpenStack, configures all of the required services, and then it performs master election to make sure that every required service is running somewhere, but that it can dynamically be moved to any other physical node."

Enterprises already have centralized, LDAP-based authentication and role-based access control, usually by way of either Microsoft Active Directory or Sun Identity Management. So why, McKenty asks, should there be a new dashboard from yet another OS to handle these same tasks? With AD, it should simply be a matter of ensuring the organizational unit (OU) of the AD server is specified in that CloudKey config file. Logging, monitoring, intrusion detection - all of these tasks can and should also be handled, Piston Cloud believes, without the introduction of even more management tools.

"We don't want to build new dashboards, because nobody in enterprise IT has time to learn how to use them," says the CEO. "They have full-time jobs, and now you're adding new capabilities, new software, new hardware to their data center. Don't add new interfaces. People just don't have time to be retrained. Life is too short."

Scalability that's scalable

Rather than having to scale clouds larger by the rack, PentOS accepts cloud deployments that scale up (or down) by the server. "Your capacity planning and management is now a much tighter curve to your actual usage, which saves you a ton of money," says Piston Cloud's Joshua McKenty.

Oftentimes scaling servers up requires scaling software up as well. The reason for this is usually less architectural than commercial: Software companies need to sell licenses. But in a cloud deployment, the conventional platform leverage, where you have to license one tool to enable another tool to manage an existing platform or enable a necessary service, quickly becomes unsustainable.

"You want to have as little as possible in your base operating system. Every time you add a new package, you've added a new potential security vulnerability," he remarks. "You've got another port open somewhere in there, several hundred thousand lines of code that are vulnerable to shell exploits. So we strip that operating system down, and we built one from the bottom up containing only the pieces required to run OpenStack, and that's it. That operating system is also as locked down and as patched as possible, because it doesn't really need to support an administrator doing anything on that physical hardware. The administration is done elsewhere through integration with [existing] tools."

One of the benefits of working with government projects for any period of time is that you learn how to cope with auditing, reporting, and compliance. McKenty realized that the same auditing and inventory processes being used by servers for compliance with federal standards like NIST 800-53, could be used in commercial scenarios for improving security.

Thus PentOS becomes the first commercial implementation of the Cloud Security Alliance's CloudAudit specification. "It's been complicated to perform such an audit on top of a cloud environment," explains McKenty, "because, as soon as you virtualize your workloads and your resources, you have this extra level of abstraction. 'Where is that server, anyway? Where is it right now, and where was it on Tuesday?' CloudAudit addresses a lot of that.

"You shouldn't ever have to understand what's going on inside the architecture," declares McKenty, encapsulating his new company's basic philosophy. "You shouldn't even have to know what host a virtual machine is running on top of in order to migrate it."

If the space program gives us one great new universe to explore in 2012, it may ironically be the open cloud.

In a way, Azure was the star of Build 2011 and folks here in Anaheim didn't even really know it. Whatever form the Metro apps delivery system takes in the final shipping version of Windows 8 (with a likely timeframe now of Q1 2013), its most impressive and maybe the most important aspect is the inclusion of apps that learn what functions they can provide to the user from the cloud in real-time, and then manage those functions locally on the user's behalf. Put more simply: adaptive apps.

Chris Jones, Microsoft's Senior Vice President for Windows Live, may become the company's newest star if he can pull this off. Windows Live has had trouble scratching out an identity for itself; but as Jones perceives it, Windows 8 could give Live new life, as a kind of cloud-based servant for the operating system. Jones began his Day 1 keynote demo on Tuesday by showing off services such as mail and scheduling.

If you weren't paying much attention to that point, you might have thought how ordinary it seems to have a mobile platform run mail and scheduling. If so, you would miss the underlying meanings here:

1. Microsoft is at least experimenting with the idea of folding Outlook from Office into Windows. As Jones said repeatedly, and showed directly, this mail app has Exchange ActiveSync built in. So do Windows Phones, of course, but making that feature meaningful only to folks who use Outlook and Exchange, as opposed to folks who use Windows, is thinking too narrowly.

2. Windows Live is experimenting with the notion of providing services directly to Windows without thinking it has to shove its brand into everyone's face. The brand distinctions (Windows 7, Windows Phone, Windows Live) aren't working for Microsoft as well as its services. Perhaps the way to get people to use Windows Live is to fold it into Windows 8 along with Outlook.

Metro-style mail, Jones told attendees, is entirely HTML and JavaScript-based. What he could have said is, the same expertise used to make Windows Live Mail into a Web page has been put to better use making an app.

Here's one of those revelations from Chris Jones that folks may have missed: "All my mail accounts [are] in one place, and because they're all stored in the cloud, I just type my Live ID into this PC and they all just come down into the system. I don't have to worry about setting things up any more, because all of the settings are done through Live."

That's an allusion to Microsoft's innovative Access Control System for Windows 8, which is facilitated through a connection to the Azure Portal where ACS runs.

Jones took this connection one big step further with his demo of the Photos app. Again, there's no "Windows Live" branding here; the brand is you. As the photo at the top of this article shows, the services with which a Windows 8 user shares photos are branded with one of those photos - Jones uses his own family (lovely, by the way) as an example. Those connections with Facebook, Flickr and whatever else are all done in the background because the user logged in with the Live ID first, and because ACS handles all the rest of the authentication process in the background. It's single sign-on, but this time only once.

So when Jones happens to share photos from his phone with Facebook, those photos appear on the Windows 8 PC - even as the "Facebook" category itself. No manual syncing; a zero-click process. You've shared your photos once, and there they are.

Then Jones extended the notion of sharing photos to sharing entire folders - access to remote PCs via SkyDrive without having to go through SkyDrive.

"Every Windows 8 user's got a SkyDrive," said Jones. "Every Windows Phone user's got a SkyDrive. In fact, if you've got a Live ID, you've got a SkyDrive and it's there for you to put your personal files and the things you want to share. It's also accessible to developers, and that's an important thing because it lets you as a developer access SkyDrive the way you might have accessed the local file system." Photos that happen to be on a user's SkyDrive simply appear in the Photos app, again without manually syncing.

After years of wondering what Windows Live services should eventually become, this may finally be it: the background service that rises to the foreground.

The real problem is not that there are too many claims-based identity token formats for developers to keep track of. The problem is that there are more than 20 identity federation protocols, each of whose intention is to serve as the mediator between all the formats. This week at Build 2011 in Anaheim, Microsoft threw in a curious little demonstration in the midst of its Windows 8 "Metro-style apps" news: It showed the simple act of logging onto a remote app. It showed it once.

It was a key moment linking both ends of the Windows scale, small apps with big iron: A feature called the Access Control Service, running on Windows Azure, was enabling a Web app to authenticate a Windows 8 tablet user once, and then retain that authentication for other apps, some of which use different identity services.

"When I log in here, one of the things that I see is a list of identity providers that this app will accept," said Microsoft identity engineer John Shewchuk, holding one of the developers' preview tablets during the Day 2 keynote at Build 2011 on Wednesday. The demo was for a fictitious travel agency looking up flight deals for the user. "That list actually came down from the cloud where the Windows Azure Access Control Service had been configured to support these identity providers. This represents a great opportunity for 'Marquis Travel.' They can dynamically adjust a collection of identity providers that they want to use, by just going up to Azure and configuring the project without all of those Web sites and those different applications."

Shewchuk showed off the Password Broker in Windows 8 to log into an app requiring OAuth identity to let him log on using Facebook. It actually didn't look like anything at all... which was exactly the point. Once the user logs on once, it's not supposed to look like anything.

The basic principle is like this: On the Azure side of the equation is the Access Control Service (ACS), which the Web app contacts to authenticate the user. On the Windows 8 tablet side is the Password Broker. As we learned from a technical session on the subject this week, the Password Broker's login screen obtains a token that can be used to authenticate the same user on multiple other services, by handling the logon process for those other services in the background when necessary.

Microsoft identity engineer Vittorio Bertocci - another favorite of these conferences - explained the process of authenticating the user for rich client applications - the new class of apps that include Metro apps in Windows 8. Such an app does not have the luxury of relying on the browser to manage the session and handle cookies, because there is no browser here.

When a Web app places a call to a Web service, Bertocci explained to an audience of enterprise developers on Thursday (with his characteristic flare for gesticulations and even live doodle-drawing on PowerPoint), whether that service is SOAP or REST, that service expects the correct credentials. It's not going to give any help if it doesn't; it'll simply respond with a 404, and that's the end. The problem there is, authentication services expect the requester to be a browser with a full array of resources, not a Web app that may be managing the session on its own.

"Most of those identity providers will allow users to authenticate exclusively through the use of the browser," said Bertocci. As a result, Web apps end up launching the Web browser anyway just to lead the user through the logon process. The result is a disconnect, he says, between the way you expect to write a rich Web application and the way authentication services expect them to ask for identity tokens.

"Once you get that token, you had better hold it dearly so that you ask the user as little as possible (but not less) to authenticate." Cookies that retain identity tokens are usually managed by the operating system and/or the browser. But all the token formats are different from one another. The danger is the proliferation of more active tokens than there are active users.

Here's where Bertocci introduces the Password Vault. When you sign onto Windows 8 using a Windows Live ID account (some Windows 7 users can do this too), the operating system can authenticate the user through the Live ID service. The service returns an identity token that's placed in the Password Vault. The Vault utilizes a database of authentication URLs that may be used for the same user, with a handful of other services including Facebook, Yahoo, and Google. Now when a Web app needs to authenticate the same user in a different way, it can look to the Vault first to see if an authentication URL request may be placed in the background.

Some authentication services in particular, the Microsoft engineer went on, actually have to be led to believe the user is authenticating by way of a browser. So Windows 8 kind of, well, forges one, in a nice way.

"Facebook wants users to authenticate using a browser. But I'm not using a browser. Well, in Windows 8, since we're aware of the problem, we created one specific tool that you can use for showing the browser a Web surface when you need it."

In other words, the Web Authentication Broker - a new component of WinRT - actually pulls up Facebook's authentication layout as though it were in a browser. That code had to be scaled down, Bertocci said, so the logon process didn't trigger the user's Facebook wall to be displayed.

The ACS will get a big scaling up this week with the release of Version 2 of the Windows Azure Service Bus. Microsoft Senior Vice President for Windows Azure Scott Guthrie explained to RWW the significance of this announcement in an interview on Wednesday: "If you want to build a simple app, or you have a Web role or a back-end worker role processing data - say, an e-commerce site - every time someone places an order, they send a message to the service bus, do an orders queue, and a back-end processor processes it. It's a very simple messaging scenario. You can do that with a whole bunch of different messaging stacks. One of the things that interesting with the Service Bus is, it's fully managed in Azure, so the TCO is really, really low. But also, the way we do authentication... is through a federated identity system."

With such a system, Guthrie explained, a token that authenticates one app may create a chain of trust that's utilized by other providers that attach services to that app. This way, partners can handle part of the order processing, for instance, without the user having to log on yet again.

"The beauty is, I didn't need to redesign my app," remarked Guthrie. "I started with something small and simple, and it could steadily get richer and more involved. I like to say, can we lead people into the pit of success, as opposed to the pit of failure? By baking in federated identity at the base, it's not a [case of], 'Oh, my gosh, we just spent a year rewriting our app.' It's, 'Oh wow, we could actually spend a few hours and bring online this new scenario in a really easy way.' We've gently guided people to build their apps in such a way that they're elastic by default."

Which makes it all the more difficult for the leader of the big side of the scale to garner attention at a show devoted to all the transformation happening on the small side of the scale. Microsoft did not give away coupons for compute instances or VMs on Windows Azure this week at Build 2011. Which is sad, because in a way the more important stuff - the developments that will have a much greater impact on your life than a slick, sliding Start Screen - are taking place on the big end of the scale.

Scott Guthrie is one of the heroes of every Microsoft conference. Now the Senior VP in charge of Windows Azure, he became well-known and also very well-liked for being the tall, slim, soft-spoken champion of Silverlight, the lightweight app development platform that started Microsoft on the course of mobile apps. He's a believer in the power of the small scale. And yet here he is leading the big scale, letting Silverlight move on to its eventual destination, whatever that may be.

Guthrie spoke with me at length at Build 2011 on Wednesday afternoon.

RWW: When Windows Azure started, it was the .NET programming platform. What it seems to be now is the all-purpose repository for server functionality - the data store, identity management, connectivity. This seems to be as much the back end of Windows, in the modern age, as any other component of Windows.

Scott Guthrie: I'm not sure I'd go quite that far.

RWW: Well, we've seen demonstrations here of porting SQL Server databases whole into the cloud. But we're also seeing utilization of that by Metro apps on tablets. So it's the type of service that 10, 15 years ago, at that scale, would have been provided by a [Windows Server] library. Well, here it is provided through connectivity in the cloud. It gives me a sense of a global diagram of Windows where Azure's at the base.

SG: I think one interesting this is, seeing us take Azure a couple of different directions. One is, there's a huge TCO cost savings. [We're thinking], "How do you enable companies to run their infrastructure cheaper, their applications cheaper, and just make developers' lives better?" There's a whole element of what we do in the cloud that's around that; there's immediate cost savings and benefits provided by that.

I think the more interesting part about the cloud in the next couple of years is not how we make existing scenarios better. It's going to be about opening up new scenarios that, frankly, all of us struggle to conceptualize even today, because they feel like science fiction. We showed a few of those off today in the keynotes, showing identity, integration, and single sign-on with notification services integrating with Windows 8 devices, and we showed off games using Windows Azure as a back end for storage. I think over the next couple of years, there's going to be this steady number of scenarios that are going to be enabled by cloud-based computing, that are going to be really exciting.

Not just cloud apps, cloud data

SG: One of the things we talked about today, and I think you'll see us talking more about over the next couple of years, is the move from structured to unstructured data. The cost of data storage has plummeted to a point where it's almost cost-effective to store anything now because you can get economic value out of that gigabyte of storage, that easily pays for the actual cost of storing it.

RWW: In the development toolkits for Azure being distributed this week, will there be ways for new developers and small application developers in small businesses to take advantage of a contracts-like system, if you will, so that they can get a leg up into utilizing these new data schemas and platforms, as we saw in the Day 2 keynote?

SG: A couple of things we're going to see with Azure going forward: One is the getting-started experience. I come from a developer framework, tooling background. But one of the things I've always strived for in terms of things that might be built is, how do you have that initial concept count be really easy, and how do you pay-as-you-go in terms of concept counts on top of that? To your point of, how does a small business or new developer get started? How do we make it so that you can say, "Hey, go to our Web site, and in five minutes you can build and deploy an app, and then in a few more minutes you can take advantage of a new feature, and in a few more minutes another new feature?"

Is Azure moving to infrastructure-as-a-service?

RWW: A few years ago when Azure premiered, and I asked what service class it belonged to - application as a service, platform as a service - it was described to me as a PaaS, at that time. Do you see, in the evolution of Azure, this becoming a lot more of Infrastructure-as-a-service?

SG: I think you'll see us support more infrastructure scenarios. We have a VM role today that we're in the process of bringing out, there's a public beta. I think we've certainly heard from customers who've said, "I've got code that I want to port easily into the cloud without having to do much work." So there's a benefit of having VM roles. Certainly, look at what Amazon's achieved. "Take this OS image and run it!" There's benefits to that, and we want to make sure customers can do that with Windows Azure easily in the future.

At the same time, I think we often think of IaaS as a kind of important step along the way, but it's not the destination. That's why we've always been focused on Platform-as-a-service, as the end state that we think people want to get to. It can either be PaaS or SaaS. Those types of solutions tend to lend themselves much better from a cost savings perspective, and you can really take advantage of that elastic capability.

I don't think of IaaS as replacing PaaS. I think of it as complementary. If I was talking to an enterprise that was rebuilding a system today, an ISV or a startup that wanted to basically go big in a big way, the thing I would encourage them to do is think about, how can you have stateless roles, how can you elastically scale out and build on an architecture that you know isn't going to come back to haunt you when you go big? That's one of the things we've done with Windows Azure, and I think we've done a good job [of addressing the question,] "How do we guide you toward the pit of success?" There's a set of design patterns that we push pretty hard in Azure that really do give you that flexibility to scale out, that really does give you 99.95% SLAs, and makes it difficult, in some cases, to inadvertently shoot yourself in the foot. That's why we're still big believers in PaaS.

Democratizing Azure

Scott Guthrie, Senior VP for Windows Azure, Microsoft: The place that I want to get to, and you'll see us move towards over the next 12 months, is how do we take some of these concepts that are hard to learn today - and not just in the Azure space, but distributed computing concepts - and democratize them for developers so that they can a) learn them, but b) start using them and get immediate return on value? Because that is always the thing that encourages you to go even further in your apps. It's both a concept count perspective and an approachability perspective for the platform, and that's something we've historically done pretty well with our developer tools, and our developer conferences like this.

I think also from an ecosystem perspective, things like the Marketplace in Windows Azure, like the Store in Windows 8, we're also creating that economic incentive where if you build something great, you can actually sell it to others and you can make money from it. I think getting that feedback loop... encourages developers to write a lot more code.

RWW: What I've seen institutions in academia do is develop some maybe frivolous, maybe scientific, application that everybody can participate in, and make that a distributed computing app. "Let's build this as a project, and along the way, we'll solve the problems of how to distribute distributed computing to the masses." The .NET Framework is wonderful for giving people access to ridiculously interesting languages, not just the straight-laced C#, but beautiful things like D and dynamic languages that move people in new directions, IronPython, IronRuby. Isn't there a way to create a staging environment for individuals, people who want to get a leg up, learn a new skill, to take part in a social, distributed computing environment that looks, on the surface, a lot like a sliding thing with tiles on it, maybe, and you select one of these tiles and it's a project. And maybe you might have time to contribute to it, so you sign up. What about Microsoft participating in something like that?

SG: I think certainly you're seeing the beginnings of that on Azure with the Marketplace. We are trying to create (our UI doesn't use tiles yet, but it might in the future) [something] where I could say, "I want to explore what data feeds are available." Take the Census data. We have Census data for free in our Marketplace, so, "Hey, I want to build a simple app, and I want to know how many couples have kids in this particular region of the country." The Census data you can get from the U.S., but if you could go into the Azure Portal and say, "Oh, I'd like to subscribe to this data feed, it's free." I could run a job against it and do data mining on it. That's the type of problem that you're going to be able to do in a couple of minutes, and then you can say, "I wonder if it has anything to do with the weather?" Let's go subscribe to the Weather data source, pull that data, and pull the Census data and correlate it, do something interesting with it. That's a fascinating way to think about how you can take different pieces of data, put them together, and you - whether you're a student, an academic, a startup, or an enterprise - can start to derive unique data, unique value that only you have, only you put together by basically peeling those pieces apart. Once you can make that so easy to do, you can in turn resell that data if you wanted to, and the rights are allowed with it, but you can build interesting apps and do interesting things with it.

In a world where we do have a marketplace full of services and full of data, and in the same way you can drag-and-drop controls from a UI perspective, today you can drop data sources and piece them together. That's a world that's going to be upon us very, very quickly.

[A fellow I know] was trying to correlate deaths from smoking, or how many people smoke in certain parts of a state, and he was talking to the State itself, and they said, "We don't have the money to do a survey. We'd love to do a census, but it would cost millions of dollars." And he said, "But you have all the tax revenue for cigarettes! It's in your database! Why don't you just run a job and basically compute from the tax how many cigarettes were sold at every county in the state?" "My gosh, you're right!" That's a simple example where the data was available - really interesting stuff that you can do that doesn't even require writing code. How do you take Excel and point them at those data sources?

Talk about democratizing: How do you enable anyone who can do a PivotTable today on a large spreadsheet, to do that type of data analysis and pull in those multiple, independent feeds? For an enterprise or a startup, it's not just about census data. It's about looking at your sales order history and your salespeople, where they're located, what times they work. There's a whole bunch of interesting insights that you can get around your organization, that you can really optimize around. Those are the types of scenarios we just don't think about today, or only a very few people think about. I think we're going to go way beyond that over the next couple of years, and that future's not far away. That's two or three years out; that's not science fiction now. When you can have your phone or take your tablet, and anywhere you can quickly connect over 3G or 4G and look up that information, that really is going to change the way we interact with life, the environment, and everything.

In Part 2 tomorrow: Scott Guthrie was Silverlight's champion as recently as last April. How does he feel about seeing his company move on to a bold new lightweight app model that leaves Silverlight behind?

White's explanation comes in response to a question from RWW about how best to approach the cross-platform question, especially as Syncplicity adds support for more platforms that aren't really devices. Case in point: Salesforce.com, which was added last week to the list of platforms that Syncplicity supports. White and her business partner, co-founder Leonard Chung, tells RWW their development philosophy for now is to create separate versions of their applications, each of which is tailored to the expectations of its platforms' users.

Chung tells RWW his company made the decision to go with native apps for the following reasons: First, HTML5 is still evolving, and may continue to do so for some time. Second, users want an experience that melds seamlessly with the platform they're using at the time. They don't want PC apps on their iPad. Third, they want high performance, which is usually only attainable by addressing the device's or the operating system's native libraries. Customers don't want to wait an eternity while they're uploading files to the cloud.

Fourth, though, is the obvious one: Syncplicity is one of those apps that needs direct access to the entire file system, not just the portion of the file system set aside for an HTML5 Web app to use.

Now, this decision might mean Syncplicity goes missing on what Chung calls "second-class devices." When pressed, he defines by process of deduction: anything that's not iOS or Android, whatever remains when you extract that 80% of the device market.

By making this choice - offering the Syncplicity app in platform-specific versions the way software firms have always done - does Syncplicity feel it's going against the rules or protocols of the companies that manage these platforms?

"We don't feel constrained, but we do feel those differences," CEO White responds. How you would go about accessing the functionality - especially the file system - on an Android system is fundamentally different than how one would do this for iOS. "I wouldn't call them constraints in terms of rules and regulations," she adds, "to say that each device has its own exclusive attributes, and in some cases, constraints that you have to work around. But what we're finding in mobile is that users want a robust experience, and they want to interact richly with their data from mobile devices - even more so than with the devices themselves. So our strategy with mobile is to use whatever attributes that device has, and to optimize the richest user experience that we can provide based on what resources are available."

It's the act of synchronization that throws users off. There are a number of cloud-based services (Windows Live SkyDrive comes to mind) whose usage model presents "the cloud" as a separate partition. You copy and paste files into that partition when you want to make them visible, then copy and paste them down into whatever other device you want to share them with. As the advertisements say, "It's that simple," but simplicity of concept does not always equate with ease of use.

The Syncplicity model (at least at its core) is more around pre-assigned replication. (Yes, for the archaeologists among us who are squinting at the above figure for clues, that's Windows XP.) You select policies for the folders that contain files, and the services that produce files, that you intend to be shared with other devices in your "virtual private cloud," as White calls it. Those policies are entered through a front-end console that is a Web app, and does use a browser.

But this isn't the environment you'll be using every day, all day long. What Syncplicity has historically relied upon is operating systems' willingness to allow integration. In that XP figure, you'll see green checkmarks have been added to the usual array of file icons. Those checkmarks indicate these files are being shared, and all devices with which they're being shared will see the most recent version. So you're storing them both locally and remotely.

This way, you're not actually changing the way you work just to stay in sync. The simple, one-click process becomes a simpler no-click process, something only an operating system can enable.

"We think that if you've set up a file hierarchy or structure on your Mac, you must like it. And if you set up another structure on your SharePoint server, well then, you must like that," explains CEO White. "We don't require that you reorganize all your files and folders into a new SaaS application that you then can leverage into a mobile device. We just think you should be able to say, 'Hey, this is all the stuff I care about...' This SharePoint server, this PC, this Mac, this Android device, these cloud apps - Google and Salesforce. We say, 'Tell us about them,' and now, voilà, they're in your virtual private cloud. Once we know about them, you don't have to upload your files to us manually, you don't have to reorganize your data structure."

But that's not exactly the case with tablets such as the iPad. It's not organized like a Mac, with a universally accessible file system. It has certain classes of files that it uses natively. So an app that synchronizes file system access with a tablet that doesn't use a regular file system, needs to not feel like a foreign country. It must present the appearance of nativity, as though these Microsoft Word documents (as shown in the figure) belonged here to begin with.

For Web apps such as Salesforce, Syncplicity must provide something in-between. This unique, but still intuitive, file management screen appears inside a Syncplicity department header inside Salesforce, for customers of Syncplicity's new Salesforce embedded app.

"All companies have some form of cloud management, and all companies are dissatisfied with it," proclaims White, "whether I'm mildly annoyed because of VPN restrictions and [policies], or because I'm not backed up when I'm off a public network. Those are old complaints; there are also new complaints coming about because people are working in the cloud every day - with Salesforce, Google, and others - and people are using these mobile devices every day and have greater expectations of synchronization and offline backup. So in addition to solving the old problems of on-premise file system servers that nobody has loved, file management systems that have worked the same way for years, we're adding a parallel set of nuisances because users are keeping their information on these file servers and also in the cloud.

"We don't think the convergence is going to be that everybody is going to move their data to one new place in the cloud," the CEO continues. "The convergence has to be around the data itself, and providing the user a rich experience, allowing them to do whatever they need to do with their files and folders, whatever device, cloud app, or file server they happen to be operating on at that moment in time. The smartphone can be the fourth or fifth device that person uses."

They came up with five conclusions from their survey:

1. Mobiles will have dual personalities by next year. While the majority of business users have single mobile phones, the majority of respondents will be using them for both business and personal applications by next year. What surprises me here is that most people aren't doing this already. Given that very few of us carry multiple cell phones, we are mixing business and personal use already, if not just for the voice calls alone. Interestingly, less than half of the respondents currently carry smartphones, and almost 20 percent of respondents were unaware of their smartphone operating system. The top ranked activity on their phones was texting - voice was fifth, behind email and Web browsing and taking photos.
   
2. Business users will demand a unified cloud experience to access both kinds of content from their devices. This makes sense. Cisco predicts that business smartphone growth will drive more mobile cloud app adoption.
   
3. Cloud access is shifting from smartphone browsers and apps more towards thin clients and VDI solutions. This is a big shocker. While the answers on the appeal of thin clients are predictable - better security, no need to update those annoying apps, and less planned obsolescence - still the appeal of a thin client seems to be so retro, so back to the mainframe days of the 1980s. And yes, phones are less secure but a combination of MDM and stronger security policies can help. Perhaps everyone is lusting after the Cius, Cisco's thin client tablet. Or imaging a world when the iPad will be truly an enterprise device. Neither seems a likely scenario from where I sit, and type on a full-fledged laptop.

   
   

4. Mobile will finally become a true desktop extension. Certainly, having a better mobile browsing experience can help, and it seems that HTML5 can be a big factor here. "HTML5 appears to be how most enterprises will address the diversity of mobile devices that might be coming into the enterprise," says Al Hilwa, a program director with IDC, after seeing the spate of announcements from VMworld and Dreamforce last week. "On average, all smartphone users reported spending a stunning 35 percent of their time browsing the web on their devices through a Wi-Fi connection rather than a cellular network," according to the survey results. I find this surprising: I almost never turn on my Wifi radio on my phone, but then again, that could just be me.
   
5. Business video conference calls on their mobiles will finally happen at the end of 2012. According to the survey, 70% of the respondents expect to be doing this then, up from 10% who are doing it today.
   
   
   ]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/09/06/the-state-of-the-mobile-cloud http://readwrite.com/2011/09/06/the-state-of-the-mobile-cloud Case Studies Tue, 06 Sep 2011 04:00:00 -0700 David Strom There are four major players in the customer relationship management market: SAP, Siebel, Microsoft, and Salesforce.com. Their market share differences are negligible. (This article is the counterpoint to an analysis by David Strom here.)

   But this week, only one was behaving like it has the formula to dominate the market. Salesforce has the ingredients. It lacks the recipe.
   

   1. The best clouds have the hardest cores. Salesforce is now officially an apps platform. At its core is Jigsaw, a rich database filled with exactly what its customers need. Jigsaw is the candy store. The Web doesn't need a second Wikipedia, and CRM doesn't need another Jigsaw. Control of Jigsaw gives Salesforce a command and control position that makes up for any market share it lacks.

   2. Ecosystems are made of developers, not customers. This is where Salesforce demonstrated a chink in its armor. Simply adopting pre-existing open standards (HTML5) and systems (Java) does not relieve a market leader from the responsibility of growing its developer base. If Salesforce doesn't start educating and nurturing its developers as well as it appeals to its customers, developers will build HTML5 apps on their own, leaving Salesforce little more than a glorified browser.

   3. The era of platform leveraging is over. Microsoft's success over the past quarter-century stems from its ability to leverage the strength of one plank to support another. To reap the full benefits of SharePoint, you need Office; to appreciate Dynamics, you need SharePoint, etc. The danger is that Microsoft becomes built like a Rubik's Cube. It can get one side all one color at any one time, but only after neglecting all the other sides. Microsoft absolutely can conquer Salesforce in the CRM space. But that requires bold steps to differentiate Dynamics from Windows, and Salesforce knows Microsoft won't take those steps.
   

   ]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/09/03/counterpoint-what-salesforce-t http://readwrite.com/2011/09/03/counterpoint-what-salesforce-t Vendors Sat, 03 Sep 2011 18:10:00 -0700 Scott M. Fulton If you've seen the ReadyTalk conferencing platform at work, you know it has one key feature that distinguishes it quite well over certain conferencing competitors: It can run entirely in Flash. That means it's not bound to Java, and up to now, it's meant that ReadyTalk runs well with minority browsers such as Apple Safari for Windows, and Opera.

   What it means today, though, is something quite different and a sign of the new times we live in: A new version of ReadyTalk for Salesforce, released this morning at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, embeds both conference ability and meeting coordination not into a Web browser, but instead into the fast-growing, cloud-based CRM platform.

   The Salesforce app is the first to use the ReadyTalk API, released last month, to come directly from ReadyTalk itself. The platform was designed to give developers direct access to the stages and steps involved in crafting a conferencing workflow, including generating the invitations, accepting registrations, automating reminders to participants, and distributing post-event surveys. All of these stages have been implemented in the Salesforce rendition, so that users can conduct conferencing workflows with Salesforce contacts.

   

   Anita Wehnert, who directs product marketing for ReadyTalk, gave RWW a complete demonstration. "The whole goal with this application," she tells us, "is to make things easier for people doing scheduling of meetings or webinars or online training sessions or sales demos. We automate getting that data into Salesforce versus having it locked into a conferencing system."

   The initial screen, shown here, reveals a very Salesforce-friendly environment with a ReadyTalk tab added to the usual mix of Chatter, Leads, Contacts, and Campaigns. Here, a user can see the ongoing status of meetings already scheduled, by both the user and others throughout the organization.

   

   The Conference Center screen (familiar to anyone who's used the standard ReadyTalk UI) is where a new meeting is scheduled. It's actually a view of the continually updated Conference Center Web app, within what Web app developers call an IFRAME element. All the other elements of this app, Wehnert tells us, were implemented in Force.com. You may add any number or sequence of fields to the registration form. After that's set up, you then import the meeting into Salesforce using the controls in the Meetings tab.

   Once imported, all the information may be shared explicitly with others within the organization - for instance, they may see whom you've invited and whether they've responded, if you so desire. It's important to note here that the meeting creation data is registered and entered into ReadyTalk's database first, and then the Salesforce app uses the ReadyTalk API to import the data and populate the Salesforce database.
   "The Salesforce application is going to sync with our database once per hour," notes Wehnert, "or every time I click on that Sync with ReadyTalk button." Individuals are invited to a meeting from within ReadyTalk, and they can be sourced from the Salesforce database. When that happens, those invitees are then synced with ReadyTalk, again by way of the API. Invitees who happen to be using Salesforce will see a form like the figure below.

   

   The various activities triggered by the application are tracked through Salesforce Chatter, its built-in messaging service. Any Salesforce user will be familiar with the output, which looks a bit like one's Twitter page:

   

   Licensing this software will be a fully automatic deal. "We offer the ReadyTalk for Salesforce AppExchange application as a value-add to our customers," remarks Wehnert, "so any of our customers are free to use it. There's no charge for downloading the application and installing it from AppExchange, and there's no additional fee for the software. ReadyTalk offers its conferencing service in tiers, with the fee per minute starting at 20¢, and an option to pay a flat fee of $49 per month for up to 25 participants, or $99 per month for up to 3,000.

   "Salesforce has a well-documented API; we worked with a third party to develop the integration," Wehnert tells RWW. "We've been working over the last two years to make sure we got it right, but we think it's great that Salesforce can help companies like ReadyTalk to build AppExchange applications."

   ]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/08/30/readytalk-adds-conference-plan http://readwrite.com/2011/08/30/readytalk-adds-conference-plan SaaS Tue, 30 Aug 2011 08:00:00 -0700 Scott M. Fulton