Salesforce apps extend the functionality of the CRM cloud platform, and an online marketplace offers many choices. And there is little doubt that Salesforce is the leading value-added cloud business platform. But the maker of CRM software also had foresight to realize that not every business need could be anticipated. Or that one solution would be appropriate for every enterprise. So it set out to create a marketplace where independent software vendors (ISVs) could offer their wares for use in conjunction with Salesforcean exchange for Salesforce apps that is something like the App Store for iPhones.

Accordingly, Salesforce AppExchange was born in 2006. Experts state its about choice and giving customers freedom to build the best suite through best-of-breed applicationsnot something that comes out of the box and works for only a portion of businesses. Talkin Cloud asked industry insiders to discuss the more utilitarian Salesforce apps that add functionality for MSPs and other cloud businesses.

Salesforce Apps for Contracts and HR

Some of the stickiest problems cloud companies face include contract reviews and human resources (HR). Of course, there have been many standalone solutions designed to tackle these problems from DocuSign and Adobe Sign to PeopleSoft and Workdayin fact there are Workday Salesforce apps connectors. But there was something about building Salesforce apps atop Salesforce that motivated three C-level executives to leave DocuSign and go to Conga, a document and contract automation solution, which describes itself as No. 1 among all paid Salesforce apps in Salesforce AppExchange.

Conga Composer is one of the most popular and most downloaded apps on Salesforce AppExchange, says Sienna Quirk, product marketing director, Conga. Built on the Salesforce platform, Composer helps users optimize their Salesforce investment by removing roadblocks associated with document creation. Composer enables users to build and distribute robust, sophisticated documents including presentations, sales documents and reports by merging data from any standard or custom object into templates.

This should help customers save manual work every month, improve report generation time and eliminate excessive spending by automating document generation, according to Quirk. Composer is a slam dunk for big and small enterprises looking to cut admin tasks and streamline business processes, Quirk says.

For Salesforce apps that can make or break the job in HR, some industry insiders recommend Sage People, which transforms productivity among HR departments across the world. According to these experts, Sage People Salesforce apps enable increased engagement, performance and retention, while making it easier for companies to acquire talent. For example, a current Sage People customer improved productivity and reallocated time and resources with Salesforce, enabling one HR generalist to oversee 100 employees, versus 65 without the software.

Salesforce Apps for Professional Services, Financial Management

From a pipeline efficiency standpoint, professional services can be major beneficiaries of Salesforce apps. For example, according to its Salesforce AppExchange listing, Kimble is the most feature-rich professional services automation solution on the platform. It goes on to state that its proven end-to-end management solution reduces complexity across the business allowing Kimble clients to grow 25 percent faster than competitors.

It also claims users can benefit from performance metric accuracy that Kimble apps provide, including for utilization, effective rates, sales pipeline and revenue forecasting. According to Kimble, users find increased profitability, less time spent manually forecasting or sifting through leads and that processes allow for minimal monthly variability. As proof, Kimble says a current customer reduced monthly close dates from five days to one day due to Kimble software.

Of course, FinancialForce, which claims to be the No. 1 ERP solution native to Salesforce, has Salesforce apps available for professional services automation as well as financial management. Having heard from FinancialForce earlier in the year regarding the state of the cloud and Salesforce apps, the company is more specific now about how integrating its Salesforce apps into Salesforce works.

Native to the Salesforce platform, integration between the front and back office is streamlined and seamlessrather than bolted onenabling FinancialForce to unify data across the enterprise in real time, says Fred Studer, CMO, FinancialForce. By integrating predictive insights into its financial management, professional services automation and human capital management, FinancialForce allows businesses to optimize time and talent with customers at the center.

For example, FinancialForce customer Greenway Health, after a merger with two other companies, had three different service management systems. To keep its key business applications on one platformwith one customer record across CRM, finance and servicesGreenway selected FinancialForce professional services management. FinancialForce has saved the company 1,040 hours a year because it no longer wastes time identifying customers, opportunities, projects and schedules, Studer says.

Salesforce Apps to Protect Data Quality

We all know that a CRM system like Salesforce is only as good as its data. The various customer records that result from sales, leads, touches and so on need to be correctly correlated with the customer account information or it is useless. One of the largest hazards to this data quality comes from the possibility that duplicate accounts and account contacts may be created. Salesforce apps that can successfully execute data deduplication, or dedupe data, will go a long way toward protecting data quality.

At the end of the day, any database depends on the quality of data stored, says Amar Trivedi, president and founder, Amdee, a website design and development agency. Duplicate data is a menace. We have helped many clients clean up their Salesforce instance because it had duplicates. By using DupeCatcher Salesforce apps we know we will alleviate the possibility of duplicates and keep the database clean. With a clean database, clients can focus on making real connections and having accurate data to present to their boards and committees.

For example, Amdee works with clients who use Salesforce as a case management tool. And when cases are entered, contacts are created manually.

When we dont have a deduplicator, we end up with multiple contacts and accounts, Trivedi says. This creates a huge issue. Then you can have the same contact being served by two different case managers because they were created twice.

Emulate Deal Data in Salesforce Apps for Future Success

Every successful sales organization holds up its biggest deals that have been closed and challenges its salespeople to emulate them. Scientifically speaking, the art of the sale is just thatmore art than scienceSalesforce apps makers have made progress pushing the envelope. Salesforce apps have been developed that capture every step of the sales cyclefrom critical success factors that won deals to meeting and email trackingand dynamically add them to the system. Some of these are the most highly trafficked plugins on the Salesforce AppExchange.

The Bigtincan AI-powered sales app is the most downloaded sales-enablement app in Salesforce AppExchange, says David Keane, co-founder and CEO, Bigtincan, a mobile-first sales-enablement platform. Multichannel sales teams for MSPs use the app to gain on-demand access to marketing materials and sales data so they always have the right information at the right time during every phase of the sales cycle.

According to Keane, one of the biggest benefits for MSP sales teams is just-in-time learning. It enables them tap their portfolio of products to understand and address customers cloud needs, while having up-to-date information on their product portfolio.

Salespeople use the app to shift sales conversations quickly, without losing prospect interest, Keane says. Each and every user has the ability to seamlessly emulate successful deals gone by. The app is a de facto personal sales assistant that knows who the next meeting is with and what specific pieces of marketing content will resonate with them. The app uses AI to analyze historical knowledge of every related deal that has closed in the past, surfacing recommendations based on best practices.

Salesforce Apps for Sales Call Scheduling

Ask any salespersons and one of their top concerns will be the amount of time they have to devote to scheduling, confirming and completing sales calls. To resolve that issue, it seems an entirely new crop of scheduling Salesforce apps has come on the scene recently.

One problem can be the tendency for even top Salesforce growth hacks to make appointments outside of the CRM platform, where they go untracked. In fact, most calls, emails and social touches happen outside the system, according to some tech CEOs.

Salesforce is an indispensable tool for many sales teams, but it has one key gap: it doesnt help reps execute selling activities, says Manny Medina, CEO, Outreach, a sales engagement platform. This is where Outreach comes in. Reps do their work, and it automatically logs all activity in Salesforce and analyzes which activities drive the best outcomes so reps become more effective.

Outreach claims its customers land 30 percent more opportunities and drive 10 percent to 25 percent more revenue.

Another Salesforce apps maker, Confirmed, a one-click instant scheduler, thinks the solution to getting more sales appointments made and verified is to reduce the friction of the process. For example, if the customer is offered a range of times that fit her calendar and can choose one with a single mouse gesture, sales reps call quotas will fill much faster.

Confirmed makes it easier for your prospects to say yes to your meeting requests, and less likely to say no, says David Radin, CEO, Confirmed. Your invitations by email, SMS or LinkedIn allow your prospect to choose, in a single click, the best time to meet and the best place to meet. Then, follow-on workflow makes sure snafus dont happen due to mistakes in scheduling.

Confirmed claims its Salesforce apps increase customer meeting acceptance rate by 14 percent to 25 percent and decrease time and effort to schedule meetings for sales teams as well as logs reps communications into the appropriate Salesforce records.

Another competitor among scheduling Salesforce apps, TimeTrade, actually does function directly within Salesforce, and helps users leverage the power and experience of Salesforce in a new way, according to the company. Benefits to sales teams using TimeTrade include:

An appointment-driven, personalization solution, TimeTrade empowers businesses to connect with their customers, partners and employees in new ways, says Gary Ambrosino, CEO, TimeTrade. Customers can book and receive meetings from within Salesforce to generate more qualified leads, hold more conversations and close deals faster.

According to TimeTrade, more than 500 of the worlds most successful brandsincluding the largest banks, retailers and healthcare systemsrely on TimeTrade to power live customer conversations and improve the customer experience.

Originally posted here:
Salesforce Apps Add Functionality to Cloud Computing - Talkin' Cloud

Redmond View

The company must now aim for strong cloud gains that doesn't come at the cost of its legacy business.

Microsoft's customary annual reorg last month went beyond the usual reshuffling of business groups and executive promotions or reassignments. The company let go thousands of employees largely in sales and marketing roles, ranking among Microsoft's largest downsizings to date. But these headline-grabbing layoffs weren't just intended to reduce costs. Effectively, Microsoft has signaled that it's changing the way it does business.

The moves at Microsoft not only portend a new era underway with regard to how customers and partners will interact with the company, but they also mirror many of the changes the company sees taking place within many IT organizations -- or at least would like to see. Microsoft's rationale is that it needs to accelerate and execute upon its new focus on cloud computing services, analytics and digitization.

Consequently, Microsoft has determined it needs fewer salespeople with expertise in traditional software and datacenter technology and more with technical proficiency in its new cloud computing offerings, machine learning, automation and the shift toward software-defined infrastructure.

Microsoft, like IBM, Oracle and other incumbent players, is confronting the challenges presented by more nimble cloud-first companies, such as Amazon Web Services, Google and Salesforce, which don't have the legacy business models to protect.Microsoft has clearly stated that hybrid is here to stay. As Microsoft makes competing more aggressively with its cloud-only rivals a prime priority, the company must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater in its attempt to accelerate those ambitions.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

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Microsoft Reorg Reflects Accelerated Cloud Push - Redmondmag.com

Cisco says it is deeply regretful after admitting losing Meraki customer data from what it described as an erroneous policy change.

The data affected from Cisco Meraki, which offers cloud-controlled Wi-Fi, routing and security, included custom logos, floor plans, audio such as hold music and voicemail greetings, as well as custom enterprise applications. The companys tagline reads: Secure and scalable, Cisco Meraki enterprise networks simply work.

On August 3rd 2017, our engineering team made a configuration change that applied an erroneous policy to our North American object storage services and caused certain data uploaded prior to 11:20AM Pacific time on August 3 to be deleted, the company wrote. The issue has since been remediated and is no longer occurring.

In the majority of cases, this issue will not impact network operations, but will be an inconvenience as some of your data may have been lost, the note added. Your network configuration data is not lost or impacted this issue is limited to user-uploaded data.

As noted elsewhere, a fair amount of this data will be in the inconvenient rather than disastrous category, as hold music and logos can be reuploaded, voicemail intros can be rerecorded, and so on.

Engineers had been working over the weekend to resolve the issues and assess what data could be recovered. The company is expecting to update by the end of August 7 with which resources will be made available to restore functionality.

You can read the full note here.

Originally posted here:
Cisco admits to losing Meraki customer data in 'erroneous policy change' - Cloud Tech

Peter Levine, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, has an interesting working theory. He believes that cloud computing is soon going to take a back seat to edge computing and we will very quickly see the majority of processing taking place at the device level.

As crazy as that sounds and he fully recognizes that it does Levine says its based on sound analysis of where he sees computing going and he believes his job as an investor is to recognize where the industry is heading before it happens.

He theorizes that as devices like drones, autonomous cars and robots proliferate, they are going to require extremely rapid processing so fast, in fact, that sending data up to the cloud and back to get an answer will simply be too slow.

When you consider that its taken the better part of a decade for most companies to warm to the idea of going to the cloud, Levine is saying that we are already about to supplant it and move onto the next paradigm.

Thats not to say that the cloud wont continue to have a key place in the computing ecosystem. It will. But if Levine is right, its role is about to change fairly dramatically, where it will be processing data for machine learning purposes, acting as an adjunct to more immediate data processing needs.

Levine isnt alone in this thinking by any means. Other companies are beginning to recognize this, too, and we could be about to witness a massive computing shift just as weve begun to get used to the previous one.

If the idea of processing data at the edge sounds familiar, it should. Levine points out computing has gone in massive cycles, shifting from centralized to distributed and back again, and the coming move to the edge is just another manifestation of that.

Photo: Peter Levine

In his view, it only makes sense that the next trend will swing back to a distributed system driven by the sheer volume of Internet of Things devices. When the number of devices on the planet is no longer limited by the number of humans, it has the potential to raise the number of computers in the world by an order of magnitude, and that will force a change in the way we think about computing in the future.

Levine says we are at the very beginning of this change, as we start to see the development of autonomous cars and drones, but he sees a future where this will eventually lead to the on-going proliferation of an abundance of smart devices and its going to happen quickly.

As Levine puts it, Think about a self-driving car, its effectively a data center on wheels, and a drone is a data center with wings and a robot is a data center with arms and legs and a [ship] is a floating data center He adds, These devices are processing vast amounts of information and that information needs to be processed in real time. What he means is that even the split-second latency required to pass information between these systems and the cloud simply takes too long.

If a car needs to a make decision, it needs the information instantly and no amount of latency is going to be acceptable.

Danielle Merfeld, VP at GE Global Research, says her company faces a similar kind of issue. GE makes huge machines like locomotives and gas turbines, generating tons of information, and they realized a few years ago, as the sensors on these massive machines generated ever-more data, it was going to require processing on the device itself at the edge, while moving only the most valuable data to the cloud for machine learning purposes.

Each machine leaves data exhaust, and if they share the best data in the cloud, and deliver it back to each individual machine, they can begin learning from one another in this virtuous cycle of data creation, processing and recirculation.

Deepu Talla, VP and GM at Nvidia, the company thats making GPU chips that are helping fuel AI and robotics, says there are a number of reasons companies move to the edge, but it starts with a need for speed and pure practicality.

Talla says its not just big machines that Merfeld and Levine are talking about. For some Internet of Things devices, like connected video cameras, it also ceases to be practical to send the data to the cloud just because of the pure volume involved.

As an example, he points out that there are already a half a billion connected cameras in place today with a billion expected to be deployed worldwide by 2020. As he says, once you get over 1080p quality, it really ceases to make sense to send the video to the cloud for processing, at least initially, especially if you are using the cameras in a sensitive security zone like an airport where you need to make decisions fast if there is an issue.

Then theres latency. Talla echoes Levines thinking here, saying machines like self-driving cars and industrial robots need decisions in fractions of seconds, and there just isnt time to send the data to the cloud and back.

He adds that sometimes there are privacy issues where data could be considered too sensitive to send to the cloud and might remain on the device. Finally, companies may want to keep data at the edge because of a lack of bandwidth. If you are dealing with a location where you cant stream data, that would mean having to process it at the edge. There wouldnt be a choice.

AWS and Microsoft are always looking for whats coming next, so it shouldnt come as a surprise that the biggest public cloud providers have some products aimed toward the edge market already. For AWS, its a product called Greengrass, which is providing a set of compute services directly on IoT devices when public cloud resources arent available for whatever reason.

For Microsoft, its Azure Stack, which offers a set of public cloud services inside a data center, giving a customer public cloud-like resources at the data center level without having to move it back and forth from the public cloud.

Its only a matter of time before we see other vendors and whole new companies begin to offer their own take on edge computing

In fact, if this change happens as Levine predicts, he thinks its going to have a profound impact on computing as we know it. He believes it will require new ways of programming, securing and storing data, and will change how we think about machine learning. Every area of the compute stack gets upended as we see distributed computing come back, he said. That would represent a tremendous opportunity for both startups and VCs especially those that get in early.

And just as we saw companies ahead of the cloud and mobile curve a decade ago, Levine says he is starting to see companies planting seeds in this area. After this video and blog series went out, weve seen companies come in, and I didnt know they existed, and they are pitching me, he told TechCrunch in an interview.

As weve seen, no form of computing ever quite goes away when a new one comes along. IBM is still selling mainframes. There are client/server networks inside many organizations across the world today and mobile/cloud will still exist, if and when Levines vision comes to pass. But it could change how we think about computing, how we build computers and how we write programs.

Levine firmly believes that the time to start thinking about this is right now, before the change takes hold. After we are in the middle of it, the best ideas will already have been taken and it will be too late.

Originally posted here:
Edge computing could push the cloud to the fringe | TechCrunch - TechCrunch

Cloud computing is well established now and everybody knows everything they need to know about it, right?

If that's not ringing true to you, this list should help. Here are five books on cloud computing that IT leaders should read:

1. Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models by Michael J. Kavis

If you're confused by all the service models, this book gives you an in-depth look at the fundamentals of cloud computing to help you figure out which services may be right for you.

SEE: Special report: The art of the hybrid cloud (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

2. Why Buy the Cow? How the On-Demand Revolution Powers the New Knowledge Economy by Subrah S. Iyar with Cindy Gordon

Even at 10 years old, this book by the founders of WebEX can help you overcome your own or co-workers objections to buying over building your own.

3. Cloud Computing: From Beginning to End by Ray J. Rafaels

This books gives an overview of not only technical but the business aspects of cloud computing, with case studies to help you prepare for your own migration.

4. Business in the Cloud: What Every Business Needs to Know About Cloud Computing by Michael H. Hugos and Derek Hulitzky

How does your business strategy change once you're in the cloud? This book covers that, as well as broader implications on things like organizational structure.

5. Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology and Architecture by Thomas Erl, Zaigham Mahmood, and Ricardo Puttini.

What tools do you need to run things in the cloud? You'll get some specific advice in this one.

Now you can get your head out of the clouds, and put your data and computing there instead!

Also see:

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Top 5: Books about cloud computing - TechRepublic