Peter Christy

Service in the Cloud

On the heels of VMworld, SalesForce held a delightfully upscale introduction luncheon to announce the Service Cloud 2. Sales force automation — SalesForce's primary offering — is a key pillar of CRM, but CRM is a much broader topic and customer service is another important pillar. To date, the customer service part has been typically done with in-house systems that organize problem/solution knowledge bases that are then used by call center agents. Enabling customer self-service is a less-expensive solution, and done well a fundamentally better solution, especially when augmented by community support where users help each other. But of course customer self service and community support are outward facing applications with scaling and distribution aspects that make them perfect Cloud candidates. About a year ago, SF acquired InStranet, a knowledgebase technology company (a key underpinning of all forms of customer service) and they have been integrating and extending that capability since. The SF Service offering is still only a small part of SF revenues but is growing much more rapidly that the core SFA business. This most recent announcement incorporated innovative Facebook and Twitter integration. For example, a vendor can set up a Facebook page and using the SF system, service questions can be posted entirely within Facebook, but fully integrated with the other service delivery channels. It's going to be interesting to watch how this catches on. It's fair to say that SF is way ahead of the traditional application vendors in offering a SaaS/Cloud service. For companies wanting to be on the innovative side of support (self-service and community-service early adopters) but not wanting to operate it themselves, the SF solution is pretty compelling.

VMworld 2009

 As always, this is one of the high energy user group meetings, with 12,000 attendees this year, not quite matching last year's attendance, but not showing the drops of other big shows. There were lots of free goodies from the exhibitors and even some scantily dressed show babes. The underlying business proposition was less clear: a lot of the vendors seemed to be selling features that VMware was strongly hinting were coming in future releases (hope springs eternal). The non-aligned parties were a visible part of the event, not quite up to RSA standards but clearly heading that way. Microsoft was visibly absent. We're told that at the MS Partner Meeting earlier in the summer nasty things were said by Microsoft about partners playing with VMware and the potential consequences if you did, and this was the quid pro quo. VMware clearly isn't ignoring Microsoft anymore. A lot of the new management team has been hired out of the software industry and its top leadership combined has nearly 50 years of Microsoft experience — CEO Paul Moritz (14 years at Microsoft), COO Todd Nielsen (12 years at Microsoft) came from Borland most recently, as did CMO Rick Jackson; CDO Richard McAniff (directly from 21 years at Microsoft).

VDI Shoes Drop Left and Right

As we anticipated last month, Citrix isn't the only one stirring up the VDI pot. In conjunction with VMWorld Europe, VMware and Intel announced a partnership on hypervisors. This is too faceted a topic to discuss without the benefits of good wine, but there are similarities and differences. VMW is promoting their own hypervisor and point to their long history in workstation products and the current MAC hypervisor as evidence of their chops. Intel of course expresses love and support for the idea, and doesn't talk about their long involvement with the Xen project. In contrast to the Citrix guys, VMW didn't really say anything about the specifics of their hypervisor (Citrix says the goals are very different from a server hypervisor — see I warned you this needs wine!). Then of course there is X-factor — where MS stands with a client hypervisor. We're sure that the MS gnomes are working hard on this somewhere in the recesses of Redmond (who knows PC's better than MS?) but the fact of the matter is that there is no client hypervisor in MS's public plan ("yes, we have no bananas!"). This is not to say that Microsoft doesn't have opinions on the subject. MS may not have a client hypervisor but thigh-order bit is that what really counts is user state virtualization and application virtualization, basic usability and TCO issues (I don't think that VMW or Citrix would disagree), not the prehey have a knowledgeable and articulate client hypervisor spokesman in the person of Scott Woodgate and he gave an analyst briefing on the MS perspective. Scott's sence or absence of a Type 1 hypervisor. MS thinks that Type 2 hypervisors (application mode virtualization) suffice. Although this sort of puts words in Scott's mouth, if every PC came with a Type 1 hypervisor factory installed and the standard software load built as a virtual machine on top, things would be different, but MS believes that factory hypervisors won't happen any time soon (certainly if MS doesn't have and bless one). It sounds a little circular and self-serving (yes we have no bananas but that's cause we didn't get any!) but it's not un-sensible from a customer perspective. See I warned you this requires good wine. Everyone seems to agree that this isn't a big 2009 business issue, but what happens the rest of this year should be a harbinger for bigger moves in 2010.

What a Week

Paul Maritz must have had a reasonable idea of what he was getting into. In most aspects VMWorld was been a smashing success -- large and enthusiastic crowds, a big ecosystem pavilion. Paul did an excellent job on the keynote considering he had been on the job for all of 10 weeks (he was blessed by the fact that Diane Green was truly an awful public speaker so the hurdle was low) that dovetailed nicely with CTO Steve Herrod's excellent technical keynote the next day. Maritz sounded more like the leader of a $2B software company than VMware. The plans sound like business plans: (1) Paul admits they are really a platform vendor and they talk about a Data Center OS, (2) he put a stake in the ground that the Cloud was going to be a real business and (3) that they were getting serious about VDI (now branded as vClient). All of this makes sense if you're trying to answer the question "How will VMware make money?" (the question that Diane never wanted to talk about it). On the other hand, with the collapse of the "virtualization" reality distortion field came a further (and I'm sure painful) deflation of the stock, taking it down well under the initial IPO price. Some of the commentators apparently never realized that VMware really does compete with the big boys. Oh well...