This may seem counterintuitive, but Salesforce.com, Inc. says it wants to help to create and nurture future competitors.
Yes. To itself.
The company's ability to deliver software as a service (SaaS) for customer relationship management (CRM) and other critical business functions is well proven. It has opened up its SaaS delivery architecture and its development tools, to enable creation of applications custom-tailored for specific businesses, their needs, and their processes. It is now offering a Platform Edition of its architecture, for those who want to deliver on-demand applications other than those which Salesforce.com itself offers. It has created a rapidly growing online AppExchange and supporting business model, to help others market and find such applications. (The folks at Forbes.com called the Salesforce.com AppExchange "the iTunes of business software" and one of the "top 10 disruptors of 2006.")
Now, Salesforce.com has created the AppExchange Incubator. It's (initially) a single physical building. It currently houses 32 ventures – some start-ups, some extensions of already established companies – in various stages of, well, incubation. Salesforce.com business and technical resources and expertise are immediately available to them on demand, as are all the support services you'd expect to find in a modern office/start-up facility.
The upshot of this should be rapid and broad development of applications that focus on specific combinations of specific business types and supporting processes. A broad range of specific combinations. Resulting in an expanding marketplace of pre-built and easily customizable process-aware, process-enabled, and process-enabling applications. Applications that can be deployed as needed, with minimal infrastructure investments, just like Salesforce.com's core, proven applications.
This should also result in a lively online ecosystem of technology- and business-focused folks with growing bases of experience in designing, building, and deploying such applications. An ecosystem that becomes an easily tapped fount of knowledge, skills, and talent for those seeking help with their own applications. And so on. And so on.
But enough of what I think. What does the company itself say about its plans? This – it wants to "[b]ecome the trusted business and technology platform for empowering the next generation of on-demand."
And what do the "incubatees" think? Well, I spoke with several of them during my visit to the Incubator yesterday. They all said a bunch of interesting things, but the most interesting was one they almost all said in almost the same way. A lot of other vendors are saying the right things about SaaS, on-demand applications, and integrating business processes within those applications. But only Salesforce.com has proven the ability and the willingness to "walk the talk," and to bet their entire corporate strategy on enabling and supporting success with on-demand applications.
I think the Salesforce.com strategy could help accelerate progress toward that wonderful day when we can stop worrying about how to manage business processes explicitly. Instead, we can focus on managing people and the IT resources they use to do their jobs, confident that many if not all of those resources are delivering the functionality and information we need to integrate process management with management of those people and resources.
Sigh. We'll see. Meanwhile, dreams are good, right? (And let's not forget, others such as WebEx are contemplating similar strategies.) What's it all mean? Let me know what you think...
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
