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Big news this morning is the announcement of a deal that sees salesforce.com acquire GroupSwim (more on GroupSwim here). It seems the announcement came today but this has been brewing for sometime, GroupSwim VP of Customer Success Jason Rothbart’s Facebook status is showing him as a director of salesforce since August of this year.

According to the GroupSwim site, existing users still have access “during this transition” but GroupSwim is not accepting any new registrations.

The entire GroupSwim team (both US and Sweden based) has now been rolled into salesforce itself.

Given salesforce’s recent acquisition/deal with Coda2go (now FinancialForce) and the recent *announcement* of salesforce chatter, this deal sees salesforce really starting to round out a complete business productivity suite, all able to be built, developed upon, and delivered on the force.com platform.

I spoke with Rothbart who was understandably reluctant to give out much detail. He did say that:

Salesforce.com and the GroupSwim team share a common vision for cloud computing and the next generation of collaboration for business. Stay tuned because we’re going to do exciting things with the technology.

Which doesn’t really say much at all 😉

At this stage they’re not addressing any questions on product roadmap but will update in the months to come.

No details of the deal were available – however given the difficult economic climate and the relative dearth of information coming out of GroupSwim in the past few months, I can’t imagine it was a deal that set the world on fire.

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I’m a proponent of social media, not because it’s the “latest greatest” bandwagon to jump on but rather because it really has the ability to shorten the customer to supplier distance and drive quicker and better response times. It’s always nice to be able to write about real world examples of that process, and recently an interesting one came across my desk, especially because it involves two companies that I’ve written about in the past.

Zuora (see coverage here) is a SaaS subscription vendor while Syncplicity (see coverage here) is online synchronization and central file management provider. They had an exchange which is well worth looking at….

Syncplicity signed on as a Zuora customer in in March 2009 for a new offering it wanted to launch later in the year. Being a tech company, they decided to self-implement Z-Billing with little direct help from Zuora. Syncplicity then went live with basic functionality in April. In July, Syncplicity was experiencing a bunch issues with Zuora, some technical and some not – but most attributable to sub-optimal communications and customer support.

In frustration, Syncplicity CEO Leonard Chung posted a scathing comment on LinkedIn. Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo saw the comment and, after a reportedly sleepless night, contacted Leonard wanting to repair a very public falling out. He assigned his top engineering exec to the problem. In turn, Chung assigned his key person to work with Zuora on the issues.

The process to fix Syncplicity’s issues took 3 months but at the end of it all there was a successful roll out of the new Syncplicity product in November and, in a happy ending to a sad story, Chung is now a reference customer for Zuora and is pretty positive given the history, as he says, “we had a rocky start, but they really pulled through for us”.

After speaking to Chung about the incident I was really keen to hear Tien’s perspective. Bear in mind that Tien is a salesforce.com alumnus – his career developed watching the great marketer and visionary Marc Benioff sell the world on his vision. It’s not surprising that Tien is widely acknowledged, by both friends and competitors, as a master marketing mind.

However the Syncplicity affair shows that perhaps Tien overstated what Zuora was capable of back in early 2009. Perhaps a degree of hype got in the way of a clear description of what Zuora could, and could not, do. I put this to him and his reply was refreshingly honest for such a showman:

There is a fine line between hype and vision – articulating an exciting vision can galvanize people to achieve. Zuora has been running fast since its inception, the Syncplicity event was a wakeup call to focus on the core tents of creating tools that make business more successful

The event spurred Tien to embark upon what he’s internally labeling “Zuora 2.0” – a transformation of the business into a more reflective place that is focused on customer success. Of course sometimes that means exerting control over customer sign on and deployment. It’s indicative that Elizabeth Tse, who in a previous role ran eBay, has joined the Zuora management team as Vice President of Customer Operations. It indicates much more of a focus on internal customer advocacy.

Sometimes then, a failure is a positive thing. For Zuora the affair, although unfortunate, has led them to a mantra simple articulated as “deliver 100% customer success”. 2010 will show what that actually means for customers.

Overall, social media has shortened the feedback loop for both companies and made a big difference in the customer service process – people can easily find the CEO and other key staff easily, and contact them directly – it’s exceptionally empowering and, used wisely, can bring immense value to an organization.

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I’m a proponent of social media, not because it’s the “latest greatest” bandwagon to jump on but rather because it really has the ability to shorten the customer to supplier distance and drive quicker and better response times. It’s always nice to be able to write about real world examples of that process, and recently an interesting one came across my desk, especially because it involves two companies that I’ve written about in the past.

Zuora (see coverage here) is a SaaS subscription vendor while Syncplicity (see coverage here) is online synchronization and central file management provider. They had an exchange which is well worth looking at….

Syncplicity signed on as a Zuora customer in in March 2009 for a new offering it wanted to launch later in the year. Being a tech company, they decided to self-implement Z-Billing with little direct help from Zuora. Syncplicity then went live with basic functionality in April. In July, Syncplicity was experiencing a bunch issues with Zuora, some technical and some not – but most attributable to sub-optimal communications and customer support.

In frustration, Syncplicity CEO Leonard Chung posted a scathing comment on LinkedIn. Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo saw the comment and, after a reportedly sleepless night, contacted Leonard wanting to repair a very public falling out. He assigned his top engineering exec to the problem. In turn, Chung assigned his key person to work with Zuora on the issues.

The process to fix Syncplicity’s issues took 3 months but at the end of it all there was a successful roll out of the new Syncplicity product in November and, in a happy ending to a sad story, Chung is now a reference customer for Zuora and is pretty positive given the history, as he says, “we had a rocky start, but they really pulled through for us”.

After speaking to Chung about the incident I was really keen to hear Tien’s perspective. Bear in mind that Tien is a salesforce.com alumnus – his career developed watching the great marketer and visionary Marc Benioff sell the world on his vision. It’s not surprising that Tien is widely acknowledged, by both friends and competitors, as a master marketing mind.

However the Syncplicity affair shows that perhaps Tien overstated what Zuora was capable of back in early 2009. Perhaps a degree of hype got in the way of a clear description of what Zuora could, and could not, do. I put this to him and his reply was refreshingly honest for such a showman:

There is a fine line between hype and vision – articulating an exciting vision can galvanize people to achieve. Zuora has been running fast since its inception, the Syncplicity event was a wakeup call to focus on the core tents of creating tools that make business more successful

The event spurred Tien to embark upon what he’s internally labeling “Zuora 2.0” – a transformation of the business into a more reflective place that is focused on customer success. Of course sometimes that means exerting control over customer sign on and deployment. It’s indicative that Elizabeth Tse, who in a previous role ran eBay, has joined the Zuora management team as Vice President of Customer Operations. It indicates much more of a focus on internal customer advocacy.

Sometimes then, a failure is a positive thing. For Zuora the affair, although unfortunate, has led them to a mantra simple articulated as “deliver 100% customer success”. 2010 will show what that actually means for customers.

Overall, social media has shortened the feedback loop for both companies and made a big difference in the customer service process – people can easily find the CEO and other key staff easily, and contact them directly – it’s exceptionally empowering and, used wisely, can bring immense value to an organization.

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At the defrag conference in Denver in November, many attendees were intrigued, excited and committed users of a product from Colorado company EventVue. EventVue was founded in 2007 by Josh Fraser & Rob Johnson. And they’re alumni of the inaugural class of TechStars. Originally the EventVue offering focused on attendee list functionality, giving conference attendees a chance to introduce themselves and learn about each other before they arrive. They provided attendees at the May 2009 Glue conference with their tools and, frankly, I wasn’t overly impressed. Oh what a difference six months can make.

Originally a part of their standard community product, Chatter was born a few months ago when they started having significant technical issues with this feature which rendered it pretty much useless.  As a result, several of EventVue’s customers passionately complained about the broken chatter functionality.  While it was a rough experience for them, it was good because it helped them identify the one feature that drew real passion from their customers.

The criticism drove them to look at the ways that people currently participate in conversations at conferences and made them realize that there was a lot that could be done better.  Enter Chatter, a stand-alone, real-time conference stream application that really is the best way to talk about an event online.

So what makes EventVue Chatter so great? A few defining features:

Speed – It’s way faster than Twitter search, TweetDeck or just about any other twitter client that I tried at the event.  EventVue uses the streaming API which is often faster than twitter.com itself.  The app automatically shows new updates as they come in which makes for a faster experience than Twitter search which just notifies when new items come in instead of actually showing them.

Inline commenting – There are comments!  Yes, you can actually have threaded conversations FriendFeed style in EventVue (see screen capture below)

Be loud without pissing off your followers.  Anyone who attended defrag will attest to the fact that I hit Twitter pretty hard during the event. While my non-attending followers had some interest in what was going on – it was really liberating to be able to comment on conference related messages within Chatter (see screen capture).

So… the six million dollar question. Job and Josh are lovely guys but niceness doesn’t pay the bills. How are they actually going to monetize the product. Josh reports that;

We’re currently working on adding some premium features to chatter in addition to opening it up for every event (right now it’s only available for a hand-picked selection).  Some of the premium features we’re considering are the ability to “claim a page” which would allow organizers to add branding, include chatter as a widget and have moderation tools and analytics on the backend.  We’re still working out the pricing for everything but are pretty excited about adding an additional revenue stream to our existing community sales.

I really hope EventVue crack it. Chatter is a truly useful product, Rob and Josh are genuinely nice guys and both of those things (in my books anyway) count for a lot. I’m already looking forward to using Chatter again at Glue conference next May.

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I’ve written before about billFLO, a service that enables users to send and receive machine readable invoices straight into their accounting system. They’re announcing this morning a deal which is a great case study to show the value that…

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Anyone who contends that we’re not reaching some kind of critical mass with complete solutions from cloud services should really look at what’s going on behind the scenes. Initially used for just point solutions by way of SaaS, and then infrastructure plays (Gmail replacing exchange, Amazon Web Services for hardware), we’re now rapidly getting to the point were entire service requirements can be met in the cloud.

One of the last services needed to round out this pool is cloud storage in a user-friendly way. Sure anyone can store something on S3, but until such time as we can have a cloud storage drive that looks, feels and works just like a disk within our own machine, the barriers to adoption will remain.

Rapidly however, we’re achieving this goal. In the past two weeks both Rackspace and Syncplicity have introduced cloud drive offerings and Google’s long rumored GDrive is getting closer to being an in-market reality. So first a quick review of what the newly released offerings can do;

Rackspace introduced two products, Rackspace Cloud Drive & Rackspace Server Backup.

Rackspace Cloud Drive allows users to access and store files online, via a network drive on their computer. It’s cross platform. And on top of the standard cloud drive functions also lets users;

• Store and share files between other employees and/or team members
• Synchronize folders across one or more computers
• Use Rackspace Team Sync to ensure that team members are always working with the most recent version of a file
• Set up automatic backups of data to the Rackspace Cloud and easily restore that data in the event of a hardware failure

Rackspace cloud is $4/user/month for 10 GB of storage.gdrive

Rackspace Server Backup enables you to automatically backup your Windows or Linux based server data to the cloud for $5/server/month, users get 10GB of storage space and an automated control panel to set , and forget, their backup routines.

Syncplicity Business Edition also provides for centralized file management, automated backup, synchronization, sharing and collaboration for business users.

On top of the expected storage, sharing, backup and synchronization service that Syncplicity provides, it also offers an open platform that allows web applications to be integrated through to the desktop allowing, for example, a Word document on a users desktop to be associated with their Google docs account.

The new business edition includes the ability to allows users access to files from any device or web app no matter where the files were first saved. It also allows administrators to centrally manage data both inside and outside the firewall. It’s also integrated with Microsoft Office and provides for versioning to boot.

Syncplicity Business Edition is $45 per month for 3 users and 50 GB of storage, or up to 60 GB with an annual subscription.

Which brings us inexorably to GDrive… the famed, fabled, feted and as yet unreleased Google cloud drive solution. Expected for \over two years now, GDrive. While not yet released, we do have some information about GDrive from Google as the following string tells;

// Localized product category of GDrive
_CI_messages.CI_GDRIVE_CATEGORY = ‘Online file backup and storage‘;
// Localized short description of GDrive (1st
// of 2 description lines)
_CI_messages.CI_GDRIVE_DESCRIPTION_1 = ‘GDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents‘;
// Localized short description of GDrive (2nd
// of 2 description lines)
_CI_messages.CI_GDRIVE_DESCRIPTION_2 = ‘GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, anytime, and from any device – be it from your desktop, web browser or cellular phone‘;

The interesting this about Google’s cloud storage offering is that, all things being equal, it should be a slam dunk. Look at what Google has in its favor;

• Economies of scale that make other vendors shake
• User numbers already in place for it’s different offerings (Picasa, GMail, Google Docs etc)
• Market awareness
• Pockets deep enough to take a short term financial hit in order to get customers

Bear in mind that Google is agitating heavily over ChromeOS and, while they’re pitching it right now as a Netbook offering, strategically it’s important for them to have GDrive in place and the various different business applications well integrated over a storage offering in order to leverage ChromeOS.

While we’ve been waiting for years – my pick is a GDrive unveiling within the next eight weeks – the upstarts are positioning themselves and Google needs to move soon to avoid being seen as a mere imitator.

Either way, and putting GDrive to the side, an integrated cloud storage offering that integrates with both desktop and web applications and across the different areas a user might need is a key milestone in a move to the clouds. Evens of the past few weeks (and if my prediction is right, of the next few weeks) will give this move yet more impetus.

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One of my favorite posts was written over two years ago, back when I was still trying to tie down this SaaS thing. In my post I called for an approach by SaaS vendors to recreate parts of the OpenSource ethos in order to build their customer base and even their product. I said in my post;

Imagine if you will a situation where a revenue generating SaaS product builds a community of such committed users that they become the salesforce, an integral part of the development team and the PR gang.

I was talking recently to a SaaS vendor who is starting to think about how best to build multi-lingual capabilities into his product. It’s a difficult call for this particular startup – they’re self-funded, have the unfortunate situation of having a widely spread geographical base and are limited in terms of available development time. No easy answers or so it would seem.

Enter Zendesk, a great company that I’ve written about many times in the past. Zendesk had this problem a couple of years ago when they were still a small Danish startup (before, that is, the post that allegedly started them on their meteoric growth curve 😉 ). As a small company they didn’t have the time or resource to create their own multi lingual capability. What did they do? The built the functionality and then turned to the customers to populate the actual language data. I talked to CEO Mikkel Svane who commented that;

Within just a few weeks of releasing the Zendesk internationalization tool we had support for more than 25 languages, and hundreds of customers had already enabled the new languages on their support portals. We see this as a trend that clearly shows companies are amenable to living with minor inaccuracies in favor of agility and speed

But here’s where it gets interested – Zendesk didn’t have to invest hundreds of developer hours or thousands of dollars to do this – they merely went out to their existing userbase, and the wider social media community and asked people if they were keen to help. The image above shows just how many foreign language speakers are happy to share their knowledge – and all for the simply price of an (admittedly very cool) Zendesk t-shirt.

It’s yet another reminder of the value of the community, letting your userbase feel some sort of ownership and, quite simply, reaching out. So there ya go Dave, there’s an opportunity for you to do similarly.

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Big news for the Kiwis out there – Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell is leaving the company at the end of the year. The Microsoft position was a bit of a coup for New Zealand, one of our own filling a high profile role for a (very) high profile company.

Liddell himself seems upbeat, saying that;

My time at Microsoft has been an outstanding experience, and I am delighted to be leaving the company in such great shape, we have built a world-class finance team and established strong internal accountability. Microsoft is coming out of the economic downturn with not only great product momentum but also strong discipline around costs and a focus on driving shareholder value.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was muted in his comments saying that;

Chris and his finance team have accomplished a great deal over the past four and a half years, the team is deep and strong, and has an excellent record of building value for our shareholders

It reads to me like Liddell is seeing the pain MS will face in the next year or two as it transitions from it’s traditional cash cow product mix to a different one. That transition is going to be corrosive to their revenue streams and share price and he’s no doubt looking at what that will do to his career path.

It’ll be intensely interesting to see where Liddell ends up next. Apparently he is;

looking at expanding beyond being a CFO – He’s looking at CEO gigs and the private equity space

Watch this space.

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