Salesforce-native vendor speaks out on cloud integration
- Summary:
- Uncontrolled SaaS adoption has left enterprises with a cloud integration headache - says one SaaS vendor. Did someone mention stones and glass houses?
It's fair game for a fresh, new cloud vendor to characterize the ageing products of incumbents in this way. Workday has since used the image in keynote presentations as a proxy for the likes of Oracle and SAP.
But today a cloud vendor is applying the Frankenstein label to rival cloud solutions. This could be a high-risk gambit — those who live in glass houses, as the saying goes, shouldn't throw stones. In fact it's a logical position for this particular vendor. But will the average punter care enough about the granular detail of the cloud landscape to get that logic?
In a further twist, the projectiles are being cast from this very site. FinancialForce.com, one of diginomica's vendor partners, has chosen to launch the theme of a multi-month marketing and advertising campaign with this dignomica post by its CEO Jeremy Roche: How businesses have created a FrankenCloud monster.
(For those unfamiliar with our business model, I should quickly explain that partners pay us an annual subscription to post content on the site that is clearly branded as their own and is vetted by us for suitability before going live. That business model funds our ability to create our own independent, organic content, including this article, which the vendor has had no part in).
SaaS industry's dirty secret
What FinancialForce.com is saying is that most organizations acquire their cloud applications in a haphazard fashion, mostly led by line-of-business buying decisions, without much thought being given to the headaches that will ensue once people start trying to join them all up later on.
It's a sensible point that gets surprisingly little airtime — the SaaS industry's skeleton in the cupboard. Most people have focused on the greater ease of connecting up cloud applications when compared to the complexity of traditional on-premise integration middleware. It's almost heresy to suggest that this less onerous infrastructure of APIs, single sign-on and emailed workflow might still be more trouble than people really want.
So why has FinancialForce.com stuck its head above the parapet to hoist the cloud industry's dirty laundry high overhead?
Here's where the vendor is perhaps being a little too clever for its own good. Its argument depends on the punters recognizing not only that pureplay cloud vendors have a different architecture from client-server vendors who migrate products to the cloud, but that there are also significant differences among the pureplay cloud vendors.
Inner circle of Salesforce partners
FinancialForce.com is one of a particular group of vendors that have chosen to build their software natively on the Salesforce platform. While many people have heard of the wider AppExchange ecosystem, which embraces any vendor that integrates to the Salesforce platform, few realize that there is an inner circle of vendors that are native on the platform.
Even though this makes them entirely dependent on Salesforce, these vendors have been able to build substantial businesses. One of them, life sciences CRM specialist Veeva, has even had an IPO. Quote-to-cash specialist Apttus is expecting to sign its first $10 million-a-year enterprise contracts this year. FinancialForce.com last month topped up its already substantial funding with a whopping $110 million round. Another is service management vendor ServiceMax, which raised $71 million in its most recent round a year ago, or fast-growing UK-based global HR vendor Fairsail.
The new FinancialForce.com campaign is designed to highlight the differentiation that all these vendors share from running directly on the Salesforce1 platform: a single, shared data model, login process and user experience, business logic and reporting framework. This is why it's logical for FinancialForce.com to expose the integration woes of rival, best-of-breed cloud application solutions that lack that shared underlying platform — the risk is that punters will simply note the headline assertion that cloud apps cause integration headaches and steer clear.
My take
One thing I find odd when it comes to the Salesforce native ecosystem is that Salesforce itself has not made more of a song and dance about the attributes that FinancialForce.com is seeking to publicize in its campaign. Why is it up to the partners to push this message rather than the platform owner?
Probably Salesforce is weighing the adverse impact on its non-native AppExchange partners, who are a larger partner ecosystem than the inner circle of Salesforce-native app developers. And of course Salesforce may not want to invite scrutiny of the more limited integration within its own platform of acquired components such as the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, Heroku or the small business Desk.com service management offering.
On the whole though, it's probably a good juncture for the cloud marketplace to start talking about the various approaches to integration (or connection as I prefer to call it) across different applications and services. Now that every software vendor is aggressively pursuing a cloud strategy, buyers need to wise up to the pros and cons of differing approaches to cross-application integration.
Disclosure: FinancialForce.com, Salesforce, Oracle and SAP are diginomica premier partners.
Image credits: Plug and cloud on sky © faithie - Fotolia.com.