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Salesforce.com: Another Valley IPO
prostoalex writes "It's a young company led by charismatic executive, it shows impressive growth, is located in Silicon Valley and recently filed for Initial Public Offering. Nope, it's not another Google story - New York Times profiles Marc Benioff and Salesforce.com, the company that said No to software applications (mostly Siebel and Oracle apps) and said Yes to hosted CRM solutions (which it hosts on its own servers). Benioff's personal philosophy is interesting as well, as he calls himself compassionate capitalist, believing that corporate philantropy and check-writing should end, but instead the company should allow their employees to dedicate 1% of paid time to volunteer projects in the community." I've used SalesForce for a while now - it's pretty slick. The era of the web-based software package has come.
a CEO with a soul? I thought the deal was you sold it to the devil to get that high up. hmmm..
"charismatic executive"
One word. Oxymoron.
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
That's what - two and a half work days a year? I spend more paid time then that reading slashdot - per week! (And that isn't exactly making the world a better place.)
Wow, 1% of your paid time! Assuming a 40 hour work week (yeah I know, but work with me here), that's a whopping 24 minutes to the community, every week! What a citizen!
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
"Compassionate capitolism" sounds like more than just good karma (although that's part of the package), it sounds like a responsible thing for a corporation to encourage.
It seems that capitolism tends to encourage greed and selfishness, perhaps a concerted effort towards community building will help balance things out.
If Gmail has caused so much concern about privacy, I wonder what salesforce.com won't do! Externalising IT services, or even CRM software support is one thing, having all your customers information stored outside and out of your control may be another....
I'm not saying externalising is bad. It's the trend in the industry but still I find customer relations are among the most sensitive information a company handles
It would be nice to see other employers adopt this - especially if the company uses any OSS applications. Trouble is, it looks too much like doing free work for someone else to be widely adopted - and it'd cost in management time to ensure that the 1% isn't exceeded (it's easy to get carried away on a train of thought while coding!)
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
The media retards will champion this shit while ignoring that many of the mentioned corporations layoff thousands of people and then offshore because Americans are "too expensive."
Compassionate capitalism? What a fucking joke.
What is this bitching about the 1%. You have to remember that this is time when employees are paid to do these projects. It isn't much, but show me a company that does better.
. . .will kill these web-based hosted apps eventually. These apps are too important to a business to have them break every time the mobile salesman decides to download Hotbar. . .
RTFA...
It's 1% of the company profit and six days of paid volunteer time.
You're still allowed to do more than that, it's just that the company pays you for some of it. I think this is a great thing to do. My company does something similiar. They pay you for certain charitable and civic activities, and pay your time if you donate blood during the blood drives they have 4 or so times a year. I think it's great when companies try and give back to the communities. Is 1% enough, well people will all say different things, but I say it's a nice start, remember, these companies are in business to produce something, and make a profit, NOT to provide charity for the community, the fact that they do ANYTHING for the community is a big plus, and should be encouraged, not denigrated. Just my $0.02
Liberalism...the next best thing to thinking.
Ummm, actually capitalists are what made this country what it is. Everyone running around with their hand out to the government, or via lawsuits will be the downfall of this country. Just where do you think money comes from??
Liberalism...the next best thing to thinking.
However, business analysts were cautious as it is still likely that the sales people will lie through their teeth to get as many customers as possible to buy this product and that software engineers will still be descending onto each installation in their droves to debug major problems the day after the system goes live.
Move along, nothing to see here apart from "man in smart suit speak with forked tongue".
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Without capitalist companies and businesses, hiring and paying employees, and vendors, and taxes there would be no money. The government does NOT create wealth, private industry does.
Liberalism...the next best thing to thinking.
Cost-wise, if you employ 100 people then that would cost the company the same as having one person working full time on community projects. This is better than nothing, even with the reduced productivity involved in spreading this time over 100 employees.
It would be interesting to work out how much a company would save using free OSS over existing solutions (think OpenOffice vs. MS Office) and how much employee time that would equate to that could then be donated back to the community.
It's a great idea to donate something back, even if this particular implementation isn't the best way.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
I (obviously, see nick) am pretty convinced that web applications have loads of advantages as deployment, manageability and what not, but for a CRM application I have serious reservations. Applications that users interact with constantly need to be above all, responsive. An accountant wants to play piano on his numpad without waiting for the application. When an administrative employee is holding the phone and looking something up, every delay is very very annoying
Artists against online scams http://www.aa419.org/
Everyone seems to be complaining about 1% being "merely" 30 minutes a week. That's still loads better than... gasp!... NOTHING!
I don't know how things operate there, but I get this feeling that you don't just do 30 minutes a week, but rather do 4 hours every other month, which would be like half a day off. And to be honest, paid or not, people that do community projects do it for free anyhow. It's nice to get a little compensation, but more importantly, it's nice to have someone say "we support the work you didn't have to do."
There's a lot more to community projects than just coding for OSS. I'm actively involved in a community project, and spend a lot of my private time. It's actually voluntary community service, but hey, that counts too doesn't it?
So, 1% or not, that's still 2 free hours of pay every month. Not bad, not bad. It sure as hell beats zilch, and more importantly I get this feeling that the company would say "well, we can't pay you for more than 1%, but you are certainly welcome to work for free for yourself." That's loads better than my employer, who seems to think that I'm slacking if I work any less than 11 hours a day, and is sure to increase my work load which makes my voluntary work very difficult.
salesforce.com integrates with several leading email marketing vendors, allowing you to send tens of thousands of emails at once
-from the salesforce.com flash demo
Words such as "the era of web-based software is here" is mere nonsense. The writer has probably never been in an IS shop that runs one of the major ERP software for its accounting, CRM, sales & distribution etc.
The era of web-based backoffice software is NOWHERE near us. The challenge is not merely converting a traditional client/server app to a web-based architecture. The biggest enemy is INTEGRATION with other apps. Integrating an app like salesforce.com to SAP, Oracle, Siebel, Peoplesoft etc is still the biggest nightmare (and the biggest expense item for any CIO).
I'm glad to see some of the software as an application people have some success. Will be interesting to see if they can adapt to the short term focus that being public brings.
-- $G
In other words, in this policy it appears that charity begins, and ends, at home. Foreigners can get stuffed.
I would be spending those days doing mountain bike patrolling. Getting paid time off to ride a mountain bike = heaven!
(Yes, I am a volunteer docent for several agencies, as well as a member of the National Mountain Bike Patrol.)
Be who you are and say what you feel, because the people who mind don't matter, and the people who matter don't mind.
Actually sales executives love it because it tracks their own sales people: Do they keep busy, are they hustling for new business, do they keep their sales funnel loaded, .. do they have all their information in the system so that we can fire them next week?
Tracking customers is a nice spin-off.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
come on.. can you name another 2,3,4 examples of web-based software so that you can actually say the era of web-based software is upon us?
Umm, actually, Keynsian economics is what made this country what it is (at least after the Great Depression). If it wasn't for government social assistance programs that arose during that period, it would have taken a lot longer to get the economy going again. If there is a downfall, it will be in no small part due to the ignorance and arrogance of the neo-con capitalists.
1% of paid time, eh? Suppose you work 8 hours per day. There are 60 minutes in an hour, correct? So you work, say, 480 minutes per day. If you spend 1% of your time working on volunteer projects in the community, that would be a whole whopping 4.8 minutes per day. People spend more time than that sneaking a smoke or shooting the shit by the coffee machine than that!
Conclusion: Bullshit made to sound good but mean nothing.
I work for a company that uses Slowfor...err, Salesforce.com for sales tracking and technical support ticket tracking. It's awful. There are performance issues about half the time, and our company's data is basically held hostage on machines that we have no control over. I can't see how this could possibly be a good idea. Not to mention that we're at the mercies of our Internet connection. If that goes down, there's obviously no way to get to salesforce.com.
Perhaps other companies' implementation of the salesforce interface is better than ours, but ours stinks. Not only that, I question the wisdom of a software company (like mine) working with an outfit that uses an ad strategy that says "Don't buy software, use us instead."
The preponderance of anti-capitalist, anti-USA fucktards posting today is amazing. Is that dirty hippy Richard Stallman orchestrating this?
the company should allow their employees to dedicate 1% of paid time
What a load of shiieeete. Charities need money. Volunteers are easy.
My company purchased their services and we had to cancel the contract because they have several serious flaws in their design. It turns out (by their own admission) they are really only set up for one-on-one type high touch selling. It would have been nice if they had disclosed that in the meetings where we detailed our entire workflow.
As an example of a design flaw, they have hobbled email so that you can only send 100 per send, and 1,000 in a day for your company. Imagine the process trying to send an email declaring a sales special to 1600 of your customers... you have to makeup some filter scheme so that you have groups of less than 100 but cover all of your 1600 customers. They recommend selecting names beginning with the letter A, and then B, etc., until you are close to 100 and send the email. You go through the alphabet and do this no less than 16 times until they have all been selected, but of course when you hit 1000 you stop and come back the next day to finish the last 600. If you make a human error then oops, a double send or no send at all. How do you like that workflow?
The reason for this is apparently for them to be avoided being listed as spammers. My response -- then schedule the email send automatically. Don't give me a horrid workflow. Unfortunately, we found that there was so much overhead and wasteful mouseclicks through all of their processes it was a drag on efficiency and slower than our previous system.
"Every year, corporate philanthropic foundations pour $30 billion into their endeavors in the U.S. alone," said Benioff. "Many of these efforts occur in isolation with little or no relationship to the communities in which they operate, the people they employ, or their corporate missions. Compassionate Capitalism calls for a new model - one that closely aligns business and community goals and focuses on serving the communities in which a business operates."
That's probably the strongest paragraph in the press release that makes me doubt just how compassionate this whole idea is. So instead of doing things "the old way" - spending money on unrelated good causes - companies should concentrate on donating time and money locally... but why in particular? Not because local needs are higher, but because in the end this helps the company. It's really more "profitable philanthropy" than "compassionate capitalism".
Now I'm not saying that this isn't preferrable to giving nothing back and putting excess profits entirely towards ivory back-scratchers, but at its core this is a philosophy of self-interest, not good will. And it's not exactly a new idea, either... plenty of organizations from well-meaning companies to corrupt political machines have known that helping out your community in the right way can be very profitable in the long run. In a broader sense, the fact that helping the people close to you is in your best interest is just one of the basic features of living in a society.
So while I'm glad that communities are benefitting from this strategy - and they are, I think, as I do have a few local examples I've witnessed of this sort of behavior - it isn't compassion that's motivating people here. It's concern with the bottom line, just like everywhere else in business. And call my cynical, but a business being concerned with the bottom line just doesn't inspire very much admiration in me.
Actually it's 2.6 days per year.
5 working days per week.
52 weeks per year.
Do the math.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Never mind... I actually RTFA :) Sorry about that.
That'll teach me to post before I wake up.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Moron. Keynsian-type economics in 1930 is what turned what would have been a year-long recession into a decade-long disaster.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The era of the web-based software package has come.
And what do I do when I have no internet connection for hours on end? This happened recently with SBC in CT. What am I supposed to do, go home? That is not an option, and we are too small a company to have a secondary connection for back-up purposes (don't ask - I wasn't allowed any input in that decision).
WTF? Is this an article or an advertisement?
It would be interesting to work out how much a company would save using free OSS over existing solutions (think OpenOffice vs. MS Office) and how much employee time that would equate to that could then be donated back to the community.
If you want to use OSS successfully, you must give back to the community. If you keep your local tweaks and patches to yourself, you'll have to reapply them after every upgrade. I've done that, and even with version control, it becomes quite painful after some time and involves just too much job security for the local patch master.
We had problems and our admin got in touch with our SFDC account rep. They can worked with us to make sure we were getting the most out of SFDC.
We learned that the SFDC Account and Support Reps use SFDC off the same servers you do, and experience the same level of performance you do... and they can still do their job well... What do you think explains the discrepancy between your experience and theirs.
FYI: the Offline option gives you access to your accounts, contacts, and opps when you are completely disconnected. I can then synch it back with salesforce when my connectivity comes back.
There are also wireless access options (Blackberry, PalmOS, etc.)
"Other slashdot readers: now you see why mono project is so important?"
No. I see why Miguel thinks it's important, but I've been researching this very issue for a couple weeks, and I've concluded last night that MONO isn't needed to get what we need. What we do need is to stop with the "grass is always greener" gazing, and look in our own backyard. We can not only solve the general[1] issues that XAML,AVALON,.NET is suppose to. We can avoid the inevitable lock-in that you just know that MS will try (wanna put money on it?). It is possible, but we need to put ALL the pieces together, to give Windows, AND Linux users (amoungst many) what's needed.
[1] I say "general" because all those MS technologies were meant to solve MS issues, and it solving the public at large's issues is just a side effect.
"Ummm, actually capitalists are what made this country what it is[1]. Everyone running around with their hand out to the government, or via lawsuits will be the downfall of this country. Just where do you think money comes from??"
You want an honest answer, or are you just pushing an agenda? What makes any society succeed, be it capitalist, or socialist, or any variation, is the efforts of the individual. Have you ever seen the Amish put up a building? No "capitalist" involved, just simple honest, hard work done with a "scratch my back" basis. Capital-ist come into a picture when people decide to go beyound their capabilities, and barter isn't involved i.e. I trade my dentist skills, for your carpentry skills. So we get into an exchange relashionship i.e. I give you some of my time, and you give me money. Combine this with the effects of aggregation (like the Amish) and you have something greater than the whole. So while capitalist have helped by being a form of catalyst (chemical sense). The individual is still the pillar upon which "capital" works. No individuals? No "works" to admire, and "capital" is just a bunch of paper in a vault somewere. With it's only value bestowed upon it by the "individual".
[1] I stuck this down here because it is not just capital that made the US what it is. Money may make the world go round, but it's other things that built the wheel in the first place. Let's never forget that.
I use sales force to get organized. It is primitive but good. I store my important contacts, information about my car, my insurance, bits of financial information, storing links if I am browsing out of my home and a few documents.
I work in the auto industry and have seen MANY CRM products come and go. I've looked at SalesForce as well as many others. SO many of them appear to be lacking.
:-)
The software our dealership is currently using is called OCM (Online Customer Management) http://www.ocmusa.com
Not bad, but like anything else can always use some improvement. What I like about it the most is the suite of products they offer. Almost like a customizable package... you purchase only what you want. I myself think that THIS is the future of web based software providers.
What CRM software does everyone else use? Micro$oft's 800lbs gorilla didn't seem to do too much... I suspect they'll eventually just find and buy a successful company like they always do... then mess it up.
Yes, it's more than nothing, but is it worth the cessation of corporate philanthropy? Probably not. To me, it sounds like a weak excuse.
I think that the finely engineered elegance that was the Yahoo! Stores application (still is, but I'd remove the "finely" qualifier, out of lisp snobbery) would have something to say about your "1 example" statement.
On the other hand, I think that it would also have something to say about the trumpeting of SalesForce.com. Sure, it's a great web app. It's not the first one, and it won't be the last.
Well, I use www.darkhorsecrm.com for free, and I host it on my own machine.
Yes, actually I do believe we have the technologies to pull it all off. All of it either open source, or open standards (or both). As far as Java. I'm a bit ambivolent about making Java a core technology. Yes we can use it in a support role, but let's be careful about making it a core technology (remember what happened with the Blackdown guys?). Can Windows users benefit from our technology? Yeah! As long as Microsoft doesn't use DRM to keep us out. Patents I'm not so worried about AS LONG AS WE STAY AWAY FROM MS TECNOLOGIES (yes I shouted, but some people just never learn).
:)
I think that we can not only have a desktop like Gnome or KDE with good remoting capabilities (among other things), but also reduce some of the complaints (UI sucks, etc) and make the whole thing lighter. And it should all be easy to port to the MS platform once it's done. Now to get the juices flowing. What open-source technologies (plus Java if you want) that'll pull all this off?