On-Demand Shift by Astadia

Results in Minutes by Connecting Google and salesforce.com in the Cloud

2008-07-22T16:35:00.003-04:00

Overview of how a recruiting firm recently benefited from implementing Astadia Report Collaboration for Google Spreadsheets to streamline interactions with clients.

SaaS and Professional Services

2008-07-04T09:53:00.003-04:00

Astadia recently presented at SaaS University in Boston hosted by Softletter. The audience was primarily made up of executives from SaaS vendors and platform companies interested in better understanding how to build a successful professional services practice focused on SaaS.

Suman Sharma who leads Astadia's Global Delivery Center in India presented and facilitated a spirited Q&A session titled How to Maximize Your Professional Services Revenues in a SaaS World.

Ideas Go On-Demand

2008-07-04T08:35:00.004-04:00

Business web applications have gone well beyond managing and automating business processes to unlocking employee and customer innovation in an effective way.

Over the past year salesforce.com has been slowly introducing a new category of on-demand business application, salesforce ideas. A new product which enables employees and customers to share ideas then have them rated, allowing the best ideas to rise to the top. This is a great demonstration of tapping the power of social production with Web 2.0 technologies. The base technology appears to have come through Salesforce.com's acquisition of Kenlet LLC, the parent company of crispyideas.com.

Several high profile websites are now using salesforce ideas such as Dell IdeaStorm and My Starbucks Idea. At Astadia, we are using salesforce ideas internally from within salesforce.com to identify new SaaS product ideas, improvements in consulting methodologies, employee benefits, and business strategies.

The following video quickly demonstrates the power of this SaaS application.

Venture Community Taking Interest in SaaS

2008-06-30T23:27:00.002-04:00

Ernie Riddle, CEO of Astadia, presented at the AlwaysOn Venture Summit East in Boston sharing the background and emergence of Astadia as a SaaS focused professional services firm. Here is his presentation:

Driving Performance with Salesforce.com

2008-06-16T02:02:00.003-04:00

India is joining the On Demand Shift. This month Astadia and Salesforce.com hosted a city tour in New Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai. The event focused on how companies can leverage SaaS SFA solution to drive business results. Here is a copy of the presentation:

Salesforce.com and Google Extend Partnership

2008-04-14T15:30:00.003-04:00

Astadia was invited to participated in the announcement and launch of Salesforce.com for Google Apps, where users can now use Google Apps productivity suite within Salesforce.com. For the first time you can collaborate on documents and connect them to enterrpise CRM data seamlessly.

Presentation of Astadia Apps for Google and Salesforce.com are available at minute 43 of the launch event webcast and press release.

Theikos Merges with Astadia to Better Serve SaaS Clients

2008-03-25T16:00:00.002-04:00

This combination enables the first SaaS focused consulting services firm with a rich set of services and offerings to help clients maximize their use of on demand solutions. Press Release and Presentation Highlights of Merger

2.5 Minute Business Case for Google Docs

2008-02-08T11:32:00.005-05:00

Google Docs not only Rocks....it unlocks collaboration and innovation for teams.

My organization has been using Google Apps for about a year now with a globally dispersed team, we are using Google Docs for delivering client projects, marketing content development, publishing corporate policies, and business planning - the list is endless. Our users have completely shifted to on-demand documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from Google Docs as their tool of choice vs. traditional desktop based Microsoft Office.

This YouTube video clearly articulates why on-demand docs is simply a better collaborative model for reaching higher levels of productivity.....It's clear as day!

OpenSocial for Salesforce.com

2007-11-04T20:27:00.003-05:00

Thursday night Google formally announced OpenSocial. OpenSocial is a framework of 14 common APIs that implement social interactions. Google refers to a web property that implements OpenSocial as a container. Interoperability is achieved using Google Gadgets. This can be thought of as write once run anywhere. In other words the same gadget can be run on Orkut, Salesforce.com, LinkedIn or any OpenSocial container.

Within the next week or so Theikos (through our products division AppFactor) will be releasing our OpenSocial gadget for Salesforce.com. Our application, which will be free, is meant for customer facing professionals to visualize how their organization has touched a given customer. All of the raw data is available in Salesforce.com but is generally only available through reports. More importantly it’s not very easy to figure out who knows the customer best. OpenSocial makes it possible to visualize and drill into the nature of customer relationships.

Using the OpenSocial APIs we’ve built a tag cloud representing interactions between a given customer (Salesforce.com Contact) and a given organization.

No doubt many more interesting applications will emerge in the coming days. One of the more interesting concepts to consider is how the behavior of an OpenSocial gadget originally built for one container (i.e., Salesforce.com) will behave when installed in another container (i.e., Orkut).

Campfire One: Introducing OpenSocial

2007-11-02T07:33:00.001-04:00

Theikos was invited to participate in this intimate launch event for Open Social. As a salesforce.com and Google developer we are excited to implement Open Social within salesforce.com to make the Business Web more social. Theikos and Salesforce.com come in at minute 43, right after LinkedIn.

For more details on Open Social go to: http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

On-Demand Shift Hits the '08 Presidential Campaign Cycle

2007-10-26T16:22:00.001-04:00

Campaign Fundraising Goes Web 2.0: Mitt Romney Team Visionary for Next Generation Campaign Management Platform

The '08 Presidential Campaign is the first major election that truly leverages Web 2.0 and on-demand technologies, and the Mitt Romney team has lead the shift by using the salesforce.com platform. Political Campaigning is a long-standing institution, and to see a Campaign take such a huge technology leap is very exciting. The Mitt Romney for President team’s approach to fund raising and campaign management has been nothing short of visionary and revolutionary, setting the stage for the upcoming election cycle and establishing a model for future campaigns.

Prior to even announcing his candidacy for President, Romney had a vision for the potential role of Web 2.0 technologies. The Romney Campaign understood that there was huge potential for utilizing social networking, team collaboration, and fundraising with the right solution.

Beyond salesforce.com, The Romney Team is using YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook for public-facing communication, and they embraced the salesforce.com on-demand relationship management system on the back end. The team was able to hit the ground running and get ahead of their opponents, since Salesforce can be implemented quickly and requires very minimal infrastructure. This allows the Romney team to focus on their core work and objectives without the distractions of technology maintenance and support.

Commit (the Campaign name for the fundraising tool) provides the Romney Finance Team with unprecedented insight into their fundraising activities, with real-time reporting capabilities. The key Fundraisers have unprecedented access to the Campaign staff, with everyone logging in to the shared environment. The core elements of Commit are for fundraising staff communications and activities, donation management, and reporting.

Consumer and business web technologies are enabling the Romney team to stay connected and present a more cohesive message and face to the public, as well as to produce more accurate reports on campaign progress. What is especially interesting is that these technology advances have simultaneously brought politics back to the grassroots level. Whether a contribution is for $25.00 or $25,000, a donor feels like they are involved/participating, they have a voice, and they can make a difference. People can stay connected more easily, and really be able to see the value of their role. Moving forward is bringing the personal touch back – which is exactly what Web 2.0 technologies are supposed to do.

This is a turning point for political campaigns, and a proving point that the Force.com platform extends well beyond the typical business notion of customer relationship management. This is a breakout application for salesforce.com, and an incredible demonstration of the mainstream use of traditional business applications in a non-traditional way. Theikos has been working with the Romney campaign for more than a year to execute and manage their online fundraising solution built on the Force.com platform.

Dreamforce 2007 Keynote by Marc Benioff

2007-09-22T23:03:00.000-04:00

Marc's keynote at Dreamforce 2007 was full of energy and excitement. John Chamber's, CEO of Cisco Systems, keynote discussed the shift from command and control to collaboration. If you missed the keynote I strongly encourage you to take the time to see the recorded version online through the link above.

Theikos @ Dreamforce 2007

2007-09-22T18:20:00.001-04:00

This was Theikos fifth year sponsoring salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce User and Partner Conference. As promised, Dreamforce 2007 delivered on being the SaaS event of the year. The Theikos team enjoyed connecting with salesforce.com executives, clients, partners, and developers.

Beyond the opportunity to connect with the salesforce.com community, there were over 200 sessions, several exciting key notes, and enough announcements to keep the bloggers busy for weeks.

Dev Life Making the Shift

2007-09-20T21:49:00.001-04:00

Now there is a theme song for the On-Demand Shift. Salesforce.com recently announced the launch of Force.com and Visualforce (press release), now salesforce.com is a real platform player. This music video is a fun representation of this landmark shift to on-demand for the software development community.

Force.com Launches, Creating New Opportunities for Businesses Globally

2007-09-19T22:40:00.000-04:00

Salesforce Unveils New Name with Force (eWeek.com) representing the shift of salesforce.com from a CRM application to an on-demand platform, unlocking a new level of technology innovation without the traditional stack of infrastructure. Force.com creates new opportunities for enterprise clients and services firms who embrace this new model for delivering applications over the internet to any device, anywhere, anytime.

I believe many of the attendees of Dreamforce 2007 and the market will take several months to fully appreciate the impact of salesforce.com's Platform as a Service model. CIOs and IT Managers can start to look at their backlog of projects and disparate applications as opportunities vs. a black hole of cost, risk, and complexity. ISVs and Professional Services Firms focused on Force.com have an opportunity to rapidly create rich Web 2.0 solutions and applications.

Salesforce.com Partners Hoping for Big Profits (eWeek.com) as the AppExchange crosses the chasm to the mainstream market opportunities ahead. Till date the results for salesforce.com partners, especially ISVs have been limited.

Salesforce.com has consistently delivered exceptional quality and innovation with their CRM applications, the launch of the AppExchange, and now Force.com. Their vision, culture, innovation, values, and commitment to being the best has propelled them to $700M in annual revenue and headed for the $1B club (only 24 software companies have exceeded $1B in annual revenue). The attributes which have made salesforce.com such a great success will be the foundation for their success as a platform. Scale is the next critical attribute for salesforce.com to become a major technology platform, with subscribers approaching 1 million they are well on their way to achieving scale.

Force.com is the key to unlocking the mainstream market opportunities for the salesforce.com ecosystem.

Force.com...The Platform is a Service

2007-09-17T16:20:00.000-04:00

The story of the On-Demand shift told through video...
This brilliant video illustrates the history of computers, networking, the internet, SaaS, the rise of salesforce.com, and the emergence of Force.com.

Wallstrip - Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM)

2007-07-12T21:56:00.000-04:00

CRM Workshop Parody focused on salesforce.com published independently by Wallstrip on YouTube. Good corporate humor I'm sure you'll enjoy.