Presenter: Trae Chancellor from Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com has become successful and famous for moving their entire business operation online and into ?the cloud?. Trae began his presentation with a big logo on screen saying “no software”.

The company drew up a vision of their business operating in the cloud:
Salesforce IT Vision: Get Salesforce on Salesforce
Organisation = Improve productivity & innovation
Operations = Improve efficiency
Infrastructure = reduce costs

Here are Salesforce.com?s 5 stages to transformation:

1. Implement CRM - implement Salesforce applications.
* Implement change management strategy.
* Centralize Salesforce administration into IT.
* Define & build operational processes.

2. Customize - create business specific requirements.
* Eliminate rougue spreadsheets, manual processes & databases.
* Review project portfolio for cloud opportunities.
* Train all IT Employees on Force.com.
* Develop integration strategy & solutions.

3. Extend - Add complex functionality.
* Organisational alignment with cloud model.
* Agile development methodology to develop “5 times as fast with half the cost”.
* Refine business & IT rules and processes to “reduce project requests by 70%”.

4. Commit - Design, build & deploy mission critical applications.
* Transitioned 30% of IT staff to development.
* Delivered projects “5 times faster”.
* Deployed complex business automation. Cost avoidance of $120k capital & 22% reduced maintenance for one project.
* Reduced datacenter footprint with 40% reduction in cost.

5. Iterate - Run the business in the cloud. Continuously improve existing apps & deliver new apps
* Human capital management
* Finance
* Customer service
* Sales & marketing
* Development
* IT Infrastructure
* Compliance & Risk

Salesforce cancelled all Microsoft agreements and now use Google Apps for their office suites. They also created a few of their own integrated Apps for the cloud.

In the end Salesforce believe they have leveraged the cloud to deliver a significant business impact

They feel that this is a truly transformational time for IT. This economy makes it even more crucial to transform to the savings and speed of cloud computing. This can be aspirational for your team.

Q&A Session
Whose cloud are you using? Mixed cloud ecosystem. Google Apps has best data suite in cloud. Workday was best for Human Capital Mgt. Some straight onto own cloud at Force.com

Whats your definition of the cloud? Must have a platform (Ie Facebook, Salesforce, Google). The cloud host are responsible for the entire datacenter. Mulit-tenancy.

Any issues with data protection? No, we worried about it but its to an issue. Can enable a protection capability immediately across entire platform.

Customer success stories? Schumaker Group in Louisiana health care industry dumped their data centre and went to cloud with great success.

Thoughts on private cloud? Trae doesn’t like private cloud computing. He feels performance improves when using public cloud with constant feedback and tweaking. Public cloud is much more secure due to constant testing.