Posts Tagged ‘Force.com

27
May
10

Joel Dietz: VMForce – Battling for the Cloud

By topalovich 0 Comments
Categories: Cloud Computing, Force.com and Platform as a Service
Tags: , ,

Joel Dietz: VMForce – Battling for the Cloud

I just came across a nice post from a Force.com developer on his blog, d3developer.com,  that touches on many of the concerns that are being felt throughout the salesforce.com partner and developer ecosystem regarding the company’s recent VMForce announcement.

Three key points:

(VMForce) raises the question of just who Salesforce is competing with.

Salesforce can no longer simply compete with Oracle business applications, can it realistically think to match Amazon or Google to be a leader in a PaaS (Platform as Service) race?

(Salesforce needs to) Articulate more clearly the gameplan to the developer community.

25
May
10

Glenn Gruber: The Fallacy of Software Factories and the Importance of Talent

By topalovich 0 Comments
Categories: Force.com and System Design
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Glenn Gruber: The Fallacy of Software Factories and the Importance of Talent

Mr. Gruber makes a number of good points in this post regarding the general tendency in IT to try to commoditize talent within the software development space. While we at Delivered Innovation employ a “factory approach” to development, our philosophy regards the standardization of the delivery process itself, and not the application of tacit knowledge to the process of creating value, as the ultimate candidate for standardization. Glenn is spot on in his assessment that many firms within the outsourcing world try and apply a factory model for the purpose of reducing development expertise to the least common denominator, and this comes at the expense of quality design…and ultimately of quality output.  DI has been brought on to a number of large “cleanup” projects in the Force.com space this year to untangle messes created by these so-called software factories where developers are routinely referred to as “bodies” (as in, “We’re behind schedule, so let’s throw a few more bodies at this”), and in every case the customer ended up spending significantly more on the project using resources that may have cost less on a per-hour basis, but ended up costing more in the long run due to the watered-down skill levels and lack of insight into the big picture design and architecture.

Three key points:

…under the traditional outsourcing model success (i.e. margins) is achieved by trying to break any task down into its most basic components so that those activities can be completed by the most junior and cheapest resources.

Tools and methodologies are more like guiderails to reduce mistakes and help less-seasoned developers accomplish more advanced tasks, but don’t necessarily guarantee well written, high-performance software.

Architecting, designing, building and testing products that are tied to revenue, that require high levels of performance, scalability and resiliency is not a task to be done by lowest-common-denominator individuals.

24
May
10

Tom Davenport: Are You Getting the Information You Need When You Need It?

By topalovich 0 Comments
Categories: Analytics
Tags: , , , ,

Tom Davenport: Are You Getting the Information You Need When You Need It?

Delivered Innovation has been doing a lot of work in the area of incorporating analytics into the systems and business processes that we design for the Force.com platform, so Mr. Davenport’s insights into how organizations consume and process information are interesting.  The first question of this recent post is indicative of a common issue we see in organizations: “How fast do you really need your information?” While the mantra may be, “More, more, more,” it’s important to take a step back and really think through how we need to be prioritizing our data streams in this age of information bombardment.

Five key points:

There are many reasons why information comes slowly and inflexibly. Some involve valid business reasons…others are less defensible, including technologies that don’t allow for rapid information access and display.

Not surprisingly, the state of the economy (as well as whether the company is experiencing a crisis or not) is a major determining factor in organizations’ information needs.

…survey respondents across industries clearly stated that some types of information are required more quickly than others. In terms of what information executives currently receive, the fastest to arrive (combining real time and daily frequencies) are sales and news on competitors and customers. The slowest to arrive (i.e., the information is received annually or quarterly) are employee satisfaction, market share, customer satisfaction, and planning scenarios or simulations.

In terms of the information that survey respondents wanted (as opposed to what they currently receive), the categories desired at the highest frequency are competitor news, sales, and news about customers. The information types needed least fast are market share, employee satisfaction, planning simulations or scenarios, and employee productivity and performance.

These results suggest that it is not desirable — even if it were feasible — to make all information available in real time.

18
May
10

ebizQ Forum: What Are the Biggest Downsides to Cloud Computing?

By edward 0 Comments
Categories: Cloud Computing, Force.com and Software as a Service
Tags: , , , , , ,

Delivered Innovation CTO Michael Topalovich recently provided his take on the ebizQ Forum question: What Are the Biggest Downsides to Cloud Computing?  From the Forum:

I’ll substitute “downsides” with “risks” because some of these may be viewed as half empty / half full arguments, but I see the biggest current risks as:

  1. Market confusion. As Peter mentioned, it is a mad dash to the cloud right now. And since nobody wants to feel left out, just about every company in the B2B tech space has re-branded itself as a cloud computing company. I’ve heard this referred to as “cloudwashing,” and the result is that companies will find it more difficult to find services specific to their needs, because of the tendency of providers to water down messaging into cloud buzzwords and ignore basic positioning and value statements.
  2. Cloud sprawl. With the rapid proliferation of cloud services, IT is struggling to adapt corporate service delivery strategies. The results that we have seen have included duplication and overlap of processes and functions due to services being provisioned directly by business units; loss of control of the billing for services because no single entity within the company is responsible for the procurement and management of them; and the equivalent of “shelfware,” a situation where cloud services are orphaned after the champion leaves the company or the business shifts focus.
  3. Lack of cohesive integration strategy. There is no doubt in my mind that the cloud model of service delivery is the one that we will adopt for at least the next 10-15 years of technology cycles, but until the integration of all of the pieces is thought through, the sum of the parts will never add up. My company has standardized our core service offerings around the Force.com platform from salesforce.com to provide the “glue” that holds all of the pieces together, and we “mash up” other cloud services into composite enterprise business systems through API integration, business process orchestration, and data integration using services such as Boomi. But if companies just provision cloud services for siloed requirements up and down the cloud stack (from infrastructure to SaaS), the disaggregation of these services will prove to be a value destroyer.
11
Feb
10

Salesforce ERD: Visio VSD Diagram of Spring ’10 Service Cloud Support Objects

By deliveredinnovation 1 Comment
Categories: Cloud Computing and Force.com
Tags: , , , , ,

Delivered Innovation has noticed a number of requests for entity relationship diagrams (ERD) for standard Salesforce objects within the Force.com developer community, and we have started a program to create these ERD documents in Visio / VSD format.  The first ERD document that we are publishing is for the Spring ’10 Service Cloud.  Subsequent documents will be published for Sales Objects, Task and Event Objects, Process Objects, and other objects within the Salesforce CRM and Force.com environments.

Please download and provide us with your feedback.

Salesforce ERD: Spring '10 Service Cloud 2 Support Objects in Visio VSD format

Visio Diagram by Delivered Innovation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

« Previous Entries
Cloud computing application & service design by Delivered Innovation

Subscribe to Delivered Innovation with RSS  Follow Delivered Innovation on Twitter  Find Delivered Innovation on Facebook