Thoughts on Saleforce

Riddle me this: Why does the self-proclaimed "Leader in Software-as-a-Service" require you to fill out a form and fax it in to change the credit card used for billing on your account? This is the email I got from their billing department when I asked where on their website I would go to change my credit card information:

From: Omar Hernandez [mailto:
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 ]
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2007 12:04 PM
To: Mike Schinkel
Subject: RE: Need to change billing info

Mike,

If you would like to change the credit card on file,please fill out and sign the form I have attached and return back to me. Once I get this form, I willupdate your account immediately. You can send it tome either by fax at my number below, or by email asan attachment. Please let me know if you have any questions. 

Regards,
Omar Hernandez
salesforce.com

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415-536-XXXX  Phone
415-901-8494  Fax

I thought the whole idea of "Software-as-a-Service" was that you did things online at their website! Sheesh!

J.Ja comments on "Benioff: Customers want integration, customization" by saying (emphasis mine):

How can any CEO seriously consider adding a single new feature when the core product is a broken pile of junk? Based on Salesforce.com’s track record, I am surprised that anyone would consider them as a choice, without some serious price concessions. Given that they are more focused on adding new gee-gaws like integration (hello? it’s a web-app, what will you integrate it with?) instead of reliability, I’m surprised that anyone would consider signing a contract with them at all.

Although I agree with J.Ja that reliability it essential, he/she absolutely does not get it when he asks "Hello? What will you integrate it with?"  I would instead ask "HELLO?!? What won’t you integrate it with?"  I currently am integrating and/or want to integrate SalesForce.com with Outlook, Word, Excel, my local SQL Server databases, other web apps I use, my website, and more.

As far as I am concerned Integration is the "killer app" for Software as a Service.  That is why is infuriates me so much that Marc Benioff and friends don’t allow Professional (and Team) Edition customers to use the API except in very limited indirect cases.

In commenting on my post entitled "Is Hosted CRM Viable?" Enough BS asks:

"I do not understand how you see local software as the answer to hosted software reliability problems. Could you elaborate?"

Simply put, local software could cache data locally and then replicate back to SalesForce.com when available thereby allowing people to access and update their data when SalesForce.com is offline. Not everyone would take advantage of this, but those who did could get past these downtime issues, and such a solution would scale a heck of a lot better than SalesForce currently does (By analogy, imagine if the all DNS queries had to route through one of the ten (10) root servers?!?)

SalesForce.com does have the Offline Edition, but it is only handles about 25% of what is needed.  For example, synchronization needs to be handled seemlessly and close to real time.  What’s more, there needs to be an option for something like Offline Edition to be the only interface users need, not the interface they use when the regular one is not available.  In other words, the user shouldn’t even need to know when SalesForce is down; everything would just keep working.

And local software can provide a lot of other benefits besides reliability. My opinion in this area is admittedly broader in scope.  If SaleForce continues to shun local software in their positioning, their competitors who do not will eventually bypass them.

For example, assume you want to update the address for ten (10) Contacts at the same company. Currently it is a very labor intensive projects.  It would be a lot easier if you have a grid of data that behaves like Excel than having to edit each individual record in a web form.  Of course, SalesForce.com could add a web feature to make this use-case easier, but they will never be able to add enough features to keep up with the practically infinite data entry and data manipulation needs their users will have, and that local software can make easier.

Marc Songini of ComputerWorld emailed me to ask:

From a technology/market point of view–given the SaleForce.com crashes (and now that SAP is launching Hosted CRM) is Hosted CRM a viable source? Can we rely on it?

And I replied to him with this answer:

I think hosted crm will eventually get past these problems, but we’ve got a long way to go in terms of best practices for hosted alternatives.  SalesForce.com has just been too arrogant to acknowledge they are no where close to perfect yet.

Best practices may require maintaining all prior rollouts (except bug fixes) so that users can stay on the prior versions at least for a year or more, and upgrade (or downgrade) only when they are ready and the new release bugs have been shaken out.

The problem with what they do now is they rollout new versions and tell the users it affects "Sorry, too bad if you don’t like it. We like it and that’s what mattters." BaseCamp at www.BaseCampHq.com is especially bad at this, much worse than SalesForce.com even.

As for reliability which was the core of your question, I’m not sure the answer but they need to get to a lot more redundancy then they have now.  Ironically, a significant part of the answer might be to add software locally. But that would violate their "No Software" ideology which, IMO, is eventually going to back them into a corner from which they cannot extract themselves.