Peter Coffee, VP and Head, Platform Research, Salesforce.com

How has the perception of cloud changed in the past few years? What are your thoughts with respect to the applications that are coming?

You are right-the conversations around the cloud have changed. Three to four years back, I would not encounter a CIO who would not have any apprehension about the cloud and be certain about its function. Today, they say they understand the new capabilities in the cloud.

A lot of organizations understand and want the cloud because it's cheap. But this is a small piece. Talking about the cloud strategy is like talking about an electricity strategy. Having your own data center today is like having your own water tank or generator in the basement. The cloud is a utility and that should be used correctly in business and thinking of new business opportunities that you could not do before. Using the similar example of electricity, having the cloud and using it to do what you have always done in IT is like using electricity to just light the office.

The internal applications are matured and staying in an old IT architecture rather than cloud. The key word is not migrate but innovate and integrate. There is no business value in migrating one application that is working fine from one place to another. For enterprises, applications that are already functioning are not a problem, but missing the opportunity because they do not have specific applications and services that could be easily built using a cloud platform is one. The question they need to ask themselves is, 'What are the things that we do in spreadsheets and emails because we could not get an application to do these things'?

This is a scenario where a bunch of university students talking about business that they will create in 3 years from today. They will not buy a server or waste time in buying licenses. Many present organizations of today will be competing with companies that do not have the overhead and inertia of IT investments. The organizations should start that process today and not 3 years later to respond to the new competition.

 

Enterprises are looking at 2 functions-handling data and managing the sources of data. Are both of the above being offered together?

One the most important developments that have happened is firstly that all organizations realized the significance of external data. Formerly, they only looked at the internal data which was collected by IT from the business and accounts. Now the data that greatly matters originates from the social network, partner ecosystem, and supply chain.

Social media is an interesting space. People find value in being known to the people they want to build relationship with. They will invest in telling you things about themselves and are pleased with the idea that they get to tell their own story instead of wondering what inaccurate information is floating around. People know what an individual has chosen to tell them.

Secondly, the speed of improvement of the devices has gone up. Earlier, writing an application would take years. But mobile devices have changed things, environments like facebook, LinkedIn, etc, have helped the developers. Two important things here are-first, the data originates from the cloud and two, how people interact today with data using mobile and social networks. And the platforms today allow developers of every organization to leverage cloud. The CIOs are more responsive to understanding the need of the data and analyzing this big data. They realized that trying to make the data better is an enormous business that most people struggle with.

Can you share a little about the idea behind Data.com. How does it fit in with the entire portfolio of Salesforce.com?

 

Around couple of years back, we bought this company called Jigsaw, which was a leader in crowd-sourced data services. It is a layer that brings in the data, our next product. Database.com gives structure to the way of handling data. Force.com platform, as you would know, helps build custom business function around that and Visualforce layer allows you to deliver it on mobile devices. So as you see, none of these work in silos, all these are layered to offer an integrated solution.

If you look at the government and public sector, keeping the factors of developed and developing markets in mind, what is the story that they should be told?

Federal government said very early on that all of the organizations use public money and public resources to produce an enormous data set. This data could deliver enormous value to third parties and hence it made a requirement very early on that every federal agency should add a few slices of web presence to make their data available to the third-party app developers to make data useful. In one of the universities that I recently visited, the students were using GPS of mobile and Google API to locate the public buses and frequency of the next shuttle from the university. This is an example of how public will get their data and use that data for many purposes.

The government should not think of everything, but do what they can do. Cloud is about making opportunity available for everyone. And this is happening in the US and many forward-looking countries.