Today, we drop another another segment in the Rulers of the Cloud series, focusing on SalesForce.com, the cloud innovator that re-invented the rules of CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

SalesForce is growing into a big company, recently announcing over a $1 billion in revenue annual run rate. Yet, the company is still an agile organization focusing on upheaval of the enterprise through cloud services. The newest release brought a major new services focus, SalesForce Chatter. We took a look and found that this product may be the service that brings the company further into the enterprise as a dominant enterprise cloud and collaboration vendor.

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Chatter is an industrial-grade collaboration framework that is designed for mixing following and deal flow, and finding the place where communication drives sales. Chatter feels like Twitter for the enterprise, with the advantage that its multi-tenant approach can be hosted and segmented for your organization. The toolkit was recently opened for select developers as part of the company release, dubbed LadyBug.

We’ll take a look at the core business and how this product may inspire IT leaders to create real-time tools for the enterprise.

A Critical Asset: The Business Forecast

To plot out the company’s future, we want to highlight the past and present briefly. The company competes with big enterprise vendors such as SAP and Oracle for CRM. From day one, SalesForce has had a “No Software” mantra focus on the power of cloud platform approach. The lightweight, easy-to-install platform has lots of tools for the management of hardcore customer information including the scenario shown here.

A Critical Asset: Developer Tools

SalesForce’s offerings for the enterprise are evolving. Key updates to the platform continue to roll out, as these shown for the Spring 2010 Ladybird release.

In our recent briefing of SalesForce Chatter the thing that impressed us most is how the development community can use all of the SalesForce platform APIs in concert with the new Chatter services. In this case, a developer of “Chatter Bubbles” has taken chatter experience back to the future with a closer parity with Twitter.

This demonstration peaked our interest, seeing how the Chatter experience could easily tug the “I could build a better Twitter” emotion. Now, each enterprise team that deploys Chatter can customize microblogging for the company or salesteam on top of the SalesForce collaboration cloud.

A Critical Asset: Platform as a Service

We noticed that SalesForce.com has a deep set of partners and relationships to technology companies. For this reivew, we took a look at the SalesForce and Adobe partnership as an example of where the company has, like its relationship with Google, created a partnership that brings the organizations’ developers together.

In the announcement here, the we see that Adobe AIR and the Flash platform are being enabled to consume SalesForce objects and to create persistent rich client applications. AIR has seen a lot of exposure in the Twitter application space, with very popular applications living on its client technology.

Killer Enterprise Apps are Right Here, Right Now

If we put all those things together, we see a new class of application emerging in the enterprise, literally a Tweetdeck-like, keyword-filter powered command center for each facet of the organization. We think enterprise software is headed there, and with the pieces SalesForce has put together, it could be built.

This Tweetdeck screenshot sparked our imagination of how we could build a rich client for the enterprise.

In the example shown, we can see the streams flowing further together to cross the enterprise to social bridge. In this perfect world, we see @GigaOM as our CIO, and @TechCrunch as head of marketing. Demi Moore is our CEO and wants to know your deal is flowing.

In this not-so-distant future, we see the threads of decisions, meetings, and key concepts fly by in real time, and simple, user-controlled filtering could give personalized views to any stream.

The Cloud Opportunity is Still Evolving

In a way, SalesForce’s biggest challenge is opportunity. The platform works; it has an obvious opportunity to chip away at the CRM market and adjacent markets through the dynamics it has been founded on.

We wonder how platforms bind themselves to SalesForce and how the enterprise cloud might evolve. Here’s a few we’ll be interested in learning more about.

• Should the company go much further in building a developer community, or should it integrate the communities within other platforms (Google, Adobe, Microsoft).
• As a platform company, will SalesForce.com also be able to build the killer app for Chatter? Is it addictive? From our view, the question isn’t will Chatter beat other tools, but instead, will it be a dominant form of communication? Will chatter beat email? From what we’ve heard so far, it has promise, but we’d like to see it.
• How does the Force.com cloud map to cloud efforts at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and VMware? Will there emerge a deeper integration between online and offline cloud resources, or a peering of services between SalesForce and Amazon, SalesForce and VMware? What is SalesForce.com’s trajectory with core services like compute, storage, and other things that are getting clouded in the enterprise?
• Do multi-vendor collaboration platforms work? Should we expect that both Buzz and Chatter will be at our fingertips, or will in the end, one application win? We see the advantage of being “the message bus”, like Twitter, and enabling smart clients to define experience, similar to TweetDeck’s relationship with Twitter. In this case, it is the application (Tweetdeck) that decided to support other social apps (social clouds) such as Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. Perhaps we’ll see the same in enterprise collaboration.
• Will SalesForce.com update its brand to show off the breadth of the opportunity? As an example, Apple Computer became Apple, Inc. to represent itself. Could SalesForce.com become Force? Does it need to?

Personalities Matter: Are you Social with Your Boss?

A lot of organizations are awaking to enterprise social opportunity, including the small and growing Yammer and Jive. These companies are bringing next-generation communications to the enterprise.

There seems to be a communication landscape change, where the boundaries of “water cooler” and “board meeting” will meet. It will be interesting to see how these tools promote themselves and how social etiquette will evolve.

Will our CEO send us an inspirational quote of the day, like so many others do on Twitter?

Or, instead, next time you log on, will there be a direct message: “Come to my office”?

This brings us back to SalesForce.com. For many in the enterprise, the question isn’t only “What’s happening”, like it is on Twitter, but instead “Did you close?”.

This is where we think SalesForce’s core premise of building a strong core business from CRM, along with its well-formed APIs give it a path to meet its ambition for delivering on leaderships thirst for knowledge.

We wonder, will SalesForce.com power your CEO’s real time view of your organization?

Discuss

The move to virturalization leaves stone is being left unturned. It touched the public network via EC2 (and now a host of hosts) it formed the Cloud and fused a new generation of the Internet. Service orientated also hits the data centers and this means things like switches, servers, and disk.

At the core of the movement of virtualization movement is freedom of the physical environment. Optimize hardware performance and set the workload free. In the process of doing this, a promise of cost savings has set a off a storm in re-factoring the data center.

This is the first in a series of posts taking a look at areas of the data center and how an openness strategy become a driver for winning customers by bringing costs down.

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We took a look at the storage landscape from the eyes of Hitachi Data Systems, “HDS”.

We spoke with Hu Yoshida, CTO of HDS. He gave us a practical overview on how the needle of enterprise costs are being reduced focusing on reducing operational costs.

One thing the he mentioned was that Hitachi’s HDS division was able to grow in the storage business in this tough climate, which is amazing considering it is an industry that follows economic spending as a whole.

Yoshida attributes part of this to HDS decision to deliberately disrupt their own “closed” box solution where storage and management are sold together. This allows IT shops to have more choice, and decouple vendors. He said that this was a big decision for the company, as it opened up more competition to a core business.

Protocol vs. API

Yoshida said that the team at HDS decided it was inevitable for this protocol level standardization to exist. His team felt that HDS needed to be a leader in this opportunity. He cited a customer that uses an HDS head as a management function that had NetApp behind it as a pattern they supported that several years ago would have been done by partnership rather than protocol level support.

Although in this scenario HDS didn’t win “all tiers” of this storage solution, it was able to be a fabric and join a customer that “loves NetApp” and loves HDS too.

Mr. Yoshida said that his company decided to fully embrace the protocol level integration with the surrounding systems, instead of only releasing only APIs, as a means to allow more competition – and cooperation in the ecosystem through technology rather than selective partnerships.

Considering the Tiers

An area of storage that is ripe for cost savings is supporting different types of solutions, e.g. production vs. development and classes of storage based on the application.

In his blog post, New Considerations for Tiered Storage, Hu examines reduction of costs.

Looking under the covers we see that there is a lot of questions to ask in the details of these strategies, and marketing matters in how solutions are perceived and how different types of hardware (for example Seagate vs. HDS) make a difference for buyers, and that to be a leader, it is key to have answers across the industry ecosystem.

When we look at the decision being on moving the cost needle down for operations management instead of hardware savings, it becomes clear that playing nicely pays. HDS is a company that plays on both sides of the storage spectrum (management layer and disk) and it’s partnerships include relationships with HP (as OEM) and companies like Cisco and Brocade as go-to-market partners. It is tempting to “hardwire” solutions together, but it is a bigger win when instead these are loosely coupled and partner-ready.

Looking at it from the angle of cost reduction for open standards gives the pivot point to consider this natural tension offered by virtualization has a promise binding vendors together to optimize their solutions for the plug-and-play data center.

Does an open protocol powered data center reduce total costs? IBM, HP, Cisco, NetApp, Oracle…Hitachi thinks so, do you?

Discuss

Google has announced that it is working on an operating system based on Google Chrome (their browser). The company says the project is an attempt to "re-think what operating systems should be."

The OS-in-progress is simply called Google Chrome OS,  it is open source, and it will initially be aimed at netbooks. The announcement came on the same day that Google dropped the "beta" tag from Google Apps.

"Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve," VP Product Management Sundar Pichai and Engineering Director Linus Upson say in a joint blog post.

Google says the key aspects of Chrome OS are:

- Speed
- Simplicity
- Security

"We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds," Pichai and Upson explain. "The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work."

The company has been making quite a big deal about speed lately, particularly on the web. Google recently launched a "let’s make the web faster" campaign, calling on webmasters all over the web to help make their sites faster.

The Google Chrome OS code will be open sourced later this year, and Netbooks that have Chrome OS running on them will be available in the second half of 2010.

It’s interesting to see Google finally go right at Microsoft’s core business now that Microsoft has become so aggressive going at Google’s. It looks like we may have some interesting times ahead.

Just because Chrome OS is starting on Netbooks, don’t think it will end there. Google has already said that it was designed to power computers from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.

If Google makes good on its promise of allowing users to get right to the web in seconds, the OS will likely be appealing to a lot of consumers who are used to Windows. The Google brand, which is already so powerful among consumers may be more appealing than other alternative operating systems (like Linux) to the average non-techie consumer.

As I said, interesting times are ahead. What are your thoughts on a Google OS for the PC? Discuss.

The rage to milk money from Adsense continues into 2009. While there are many different ways to do this, it’s no secret Google is keeping a watchful eye on spam sites which automatically generate pages consistently on a daily basis.

Every now and then, Adsense ‘experts’ would introduce a ‘fresh’ new way of generating pages which Google “has not caught on yet”, be it article, directory or backlink generators.

While these software are very good at what they do, you can’t solely depend on them for long-term success. It’s a natural tendency that automatically generated content just doesn’t look like quality pages with highly informative, up-to-date content, but it’s my personal observation.

Most run-of-the-mill, ads-on-topfold Adsense sites lack substantial sections and deeper structures to be interesting enough to make visitors think they should come back to check them out more often. While generating as many pages as possible is crucial to get them indexed and thereby build substantial presence in search results, these types of pages should only complement principal content that reflects what your site stands for and the selling point it serves to maximize its overall value. There used to be a question that goes, “Is building Adsense sites a business?” My answer is: Adsense is secondary.

Of course, like you I do want Adsense to be my primary source of income. The secret is in emphasizing content and value, not Adsense ads. You may have felt resigned to say, “Does that mean more work?” Not really. Here’s another secret inspired by a quote from Albert Einstein: You can’t solve your Adsense income challenge at the same level of thinking.

Truth is: I have build a good number of Adsense sites, but my main Internet Marketing site which I treat as my core business earns more than some of them despite my intention not to make it Adsense-focused, all the more so when it has absolutely nothing to do with high-paying keywords and the tremendous amount of time that goes into keyword research…which leads to the next secret: create a site with a subject or niche you know you can continually express and expand on instead of getting stuck with a ‘lucrative’ keyword you may run out of ideas on in the long term.

This is as good as saying Adsense is not just a keyword value game; it is still the classic “How do I get and retain traffic” game, and traffic is not some scoreline, but real people with genuine interest.

eHow.com is an incredible example. It’s a free site that shows people how to do a lot of different things. The best way to explain the site is just for you to go have a quick look now. They have hundreds, possibly thousands of pages of content on all sorts of subjects and the way they get traffic to their site is through the search engines.

Every page on the site has an Adsense box on it and that’s how it makes money. They also have a Alexa traffic ranking of around 2000 which is great.

Of course, it doesn’t make sense to write or purchase that much content by yourself. eHow.com succeeds in getting its visitors involved in content contribution. There’s also a wikiHow to get contributors involved in constant update of a common topic or article.

For a start, here are suggestions on the type of sections you can integrate into a site:

1. Lead capture page with freebies or incentives
2. Article directory
3. A ‘Contact Us’ page
4. An ‘About Us’ page
5. Forum: The challenge lies in the time and effort needed to build up momentum to encourage forum participants to write in
6. An archive section of some kind, for selected articles for example
7. Blog/podcast pages
8. Reciprocal link directory
9. Sitemap

It doesn’t take much to think of these standard sections. Even a products section makes your site look good besides providing another source of income, and then you replicate these sections site after site, niche after niche.

4th secret: Only sites with a general theme can afford to be massive-looking. Examples: Entrepreneur.com and Dogomania.com. Then you break the theme down into specifics like gathering them under an umbrella: dog training, dog hygiene, dog naming, dog psychology, doggy habits etc. Accurate targeting of Adsense ads depends on specific subjects as reflected on page. One thing to note is it is better that specific sections are inter-linked in some ways. If you run a site on everything about cancer, because “colon cancer” and “breast cancer” are not intrinsically related, visitors interested in one section may not want to take a first glance at another.

5th secret about content: write from a ‘consumer’ perspective instead of the ‘opportunist’ or “how to make money” perspective. What is it your visitors are looking to buy? Ads normally target and appeal directly to consumers. It’s pointless to put up content about how to make money with car accessories when there are hardly ads on “how to make money”. Stick to introducing car accessories and let the ads do the selling. If an accessory or equipment catch visitors’ attention and they click on the ads, you got Adsense dollars.

That’s about all the ideas I have at this moment. You should be confident now and maybe have some more new ideas I haven’t thought of. For sure, Adsense is a major income source you should seriously explore and make it big if you haven’t done so. This is one of those money machines that will make you money-on-demand pretty much for the life of Google.

Nelson Tan is the webmaster behind Internet Mastery Center. Download $347 worth of FREE Internet Marketing gifts at http://www.internetmasterycenter.com

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5 Money-On-Demand Secrets To Creating Great Adsense Sites