CloudForce

Last week the ExCel centre in London was host to the leaders of the G20 as they continued their attempts to save the global economy. This week, the ExCel centre was host to Marc Benioff on his CloudForce world tour as he attempts to save the global IT economy. Ok, that's maybe a bit tenuous...

On a more serious note, I got a lot more out of the CloudForce event than I was expecting, almost all of it positive. The event started off well (any event being introduced by the music of the Foo Fighters is off to a flyer in my book ;-) with the keynote being delivered by Mr Benioff himself with a few guest spots filled by satisfied customers together with a sprinkling of highly impressive demonstrations of the capabilities of salesforce.com. I was particularly keen on the customer service abilities of what was termed the "Service Cloud" - customer service integrated across a number of different channels from the traditional call centre through to integration with Twitter and Facebook all delivered over the cloud. Impressive.

The afternoon was made up of a series of presentations split into a number of different tracks - I'll have to admit that I spent all of my time in track 3 which was dealing with technology issues rather than the more business and sales-enabling tracks available elsewhere. The first session included an extremely informative presentation from Paul Cheesebrough of the Telegraph describing how his organisation was moving processing into the cloud - and not just with Salesforce.com; they are also using Amazon Web Services for intensive analytics and Google Apps for email and collaboration services. What I found enlightening was how easy it appeared to be for the Telegraph to move data from the salesforce.com cloud into the AWS cloud for analytics work. I find the possibilities opened up by this kind of information technology incredibly exciting.

The second session was around integration of salesforce.com with backend ERP systems - three options were presented:

i) move ERP data to the cloud
ii) copy the data to the cloud and make occasional call-backs to the backend for consistency checks
iii) have the cloud act as a mash-up presenting data hosted on-premises

Very important area, but frankly one that I find a little dull. Of course, with my security hat on, I can see a lot of opportunities for work in this area trying to decide which approach is appropriate for different categories of data and then deciding on appropriate means for transferring, managing and securing data. The latter options also have some interesting implications regarding how you secure access from the cloud into the on-premises systems. Limiting this to web service traffic and implementing something like a Vordel XML gateway may be one approach to making sure that nothing leaks out that shouldn't.

The final session was a salesforce.com presentation on the technologies underlying the force.com platform. Definitely appealed to the geek in me but I would have preferred more detail on the security mechanisms under the hood rather than simple statements around the use of the OrgId to segregate data belonging to different customers.

What were my major takeaways from the event? (Other than the numerous flyers and freebies?)

• The Force.com infrastructure is ISO 27001 certified as well as SAS70.
• Salesforce.com appear to be very good at what they do.
• When they say multi-tenant, they really, really mean it.
• The promised cost and resource savings can actually be realised
  
• Perhaps the penalty of greater lock-in to PaaS and SaaS providers is worth paying if they can provide (and can continue to provide) excellent facilities and levels of service. Certainly something to consider further.
• Salesforce.com appear to be very open and accomodating to having their security measures reviewed by clients - something of which I heartily approve.

If they come back next year, try to go along. Not only is it a good gig, it's free!