2013 Dreamforce: Lots to learn from results

I was unable to attend Dreamforce, which is the major event put on by Salesforce.com, but there were a lot of comments that could boil down some of the lessons for many of us who weren't there.

On this blog, I have spoken much about the Cloud transition and how the datacenter of the future will be in the cloud. Many companies offer real cloud solutions for companies ready to go, the leader in this industry is AWS. But for the mainstream customer with a data center the transition to the cloud is a major disruption and until things break, they are unwilling to move.

The other offering is the traditional SaaS model that companies can transition to, where a major business process transition that involves the use of a new SW package in the cloud can make the same transition. Here, there is often no choice. If the functionality you are searching for is in the cloud, then you will move to the cloud. 

In the case of Salesforce.com, many companies are finding the best of both worlds. Yes, following an improved sales strategy with a CRM model will lead you to their core CRM package and therefore to the cloud, since SFDC (=Salesforce.com) does not offer any other model. But what they have been able to create is a cloud based platform that can take the core of your customer data and expand it to include all other data your company needs or will need from here. SFDC can run your company's cloud transition completely from soup to nuts. Yes, AWS offers the cheapest computing and storage option and many different SW packages are becoming available in a SaaS model. But no where will you find the complete data landscape package that will allow you a transition on your time, piecemeal or complete, as you can with SFDC.

Here are some choice links that I learned a lot from:

Many new ideas
Idea is the customer
Take aways from Marissa Meyers

PaaS the Fastest Growing Cloud Segment

This is something I have written about before, but it seems that the market has finally caught on: PaaS will be the dominant segment throughout 2014. For more information on exactly what the market is and to understand what PaaS means, read this.

Why PaaS? Because the easiest business case for cloud adoption is the area of Software development and operations, called DevOps. The business case is simple and ask anyone who has ever run a data center why. Whenever a new version or release of a piece of code was ready for functional/regression/production test, there needed to be a new environment created for that test. The datacenter guys had to find servers, implement servers, install servers and create a complete environment to complete the test. Once the test was done, the hardware needed to stay untouched, so that a new test (yes, they did find bugs) could be implemented quicker.

The problem here is not only unused hardware and wasted hardware set up skills, but the worst was the time it takes to get a new release out the door.

Cloud and especially PaaS promises to change that forever. Users (SW development guys) can set up an environment on their own as a cloud account, test, and then only use the hardware environment when they need it. As soon as they don't need it, the resources no longer cost money. DevOps is the easiest to understand use of Cloud computing.

Is Risk Really Holding Back Big Data Projects?

In his WSJ article titled "The Risks of Big Data for Companies", Dr. Jordan explains a number of risks that companies should be aware of before jumping into this new and unchartered market.

He outlines that too much data could be dangerous for companies who might invoke inner company politics or make unjustified decisions too early with the results they make. I would imagine there are no risks in ignoring information that the data gives us and just keep moving along as a horse with blinders.

WHAT? If people seriously took the advice of this column in the WSJ, we would never advance in business. More importantly the #1 risk that is keeping up every CEO is not whether a plant in Canada has better output than the same in the US, thusly creating an "inner company rivalry". No, the #1 threat is the competition. The competition can close down your market and make your company's revenue tumble.

Listening to this sort of advice is not only dangerous, but plainly stupid. No company that I have helped with Big Data projects has decided to throw out human intuition and experience for decisions made based on the data alone. Instead all functioning companies want to see whether the data can complement decision making. That is what a pilot will show and the ensuing business case will prove it, or not. Pilot programs should be done with Big Data in small areas to show what we could know, without fear that we will uncover some terrible new insights that could cause inner company conflict.

If you are starting a new Big Data project, please do NOT read this article. Instead follow your own intuition and call me in as an adviser.