The Indian market is not yet fully aware about the benefits of cloud
solutions. Thompson revealed that Salesforce.com is keen on changing that
mindset with the company's newest offering, Chatter
A lot of small and medium enterprises are apprehensive about cloud
offerings in India. As a top cloud service provider, how will Salesforce.com
plan to do in creating awareness about cloud in the SMB segment?
I see growing trust in the marketplace as more and more leading
organizations are placing their bets on Salesforce.com. When major organizations
like Citibank and Japan Post are comfortable with cloud computing, you start to
see the change from interest to adoption. This is what we saw during our last
fiscal year, in which our India customer base grew by 42 percent, winning over
customers like Bajaj Auto Finance. We have 36,000 developers in India, and I
think you'll continue to see more and more developers choosing to build their
applications on Force.com rather than in traditional development platforms.
How many partners do you have in India? What kind of channel plans or
channel expansion plans you have in India for 2010?
We are always looking for strategic relationships with good partners who are
committed to customer success and have the capability to deliver and implement
cloud computing solutions. We have a diverse community of implementation
partners-from cloud computing pure play specialists like Astadia, Lister, CRM
Orbit and Compro to global systems integrators such as, Wipro, Deloitte, and
Accenture-that have established Salesforce.com centers of excellence to ensure
all of our customers, large and small, in every region are achieving customer
success.
A lot of enterprises are hesitant in shifting to cloud because of security
conserns. What is Salesforce's take on such concers?
One of the major benefits of security in a multi-tenant cloud like
Salesforce.com is that all customers benefit from the same rigorous security
standards set by some of the most security-conscious organizations in the world
like Citibank, Japan Post, Symantec, and many public sector organizations. Every
customer benefits from our efforts to exceed those standards. Salesforce.com has
also received formal certifications like the SAS70 Type II and ISO 27001.
How do you plan to market Salesforce Chatter in India? Would the promotion
of the product only be confined to online advertising? Do you feel Chatter would
be able to minimize the usage of e-mails in organizations?
When Chatter is made available later this year, it will be free and
available to more than two million Salesforce.com users. There is no question
that Chatter will decrease e-mail volume-we see this trend within our own
internal deployment of Chatter. Additionally, it will bring with it a host of
smart and friendly collaboration tools that will revolutionize the enterprise
collaboration space.
What would be your focus segment in India, in the context of both CRM and
Chatter services?
The beauty of the Salesforce.com public cloud is that it makes world class
enterprise applications available to both small and large organizations, from
one user to more than 100,000 users. There's a significant amount of interest in
India from customers of all sizes who are looking to implement the public Cloud
as a way to rationalize the cost of their existing IT infrastructure, but also
as a means to respond faster to market requirements with innovative applications
and services.
Brief us about Salesforce.com's future plans in India.
We will continue to build a business that focuses around customer success
that includes strategic partners. We are bullish about India's appetite for
running and developing enterprise applications in the cloud. We intend to
increase our presence in India to capitalize on pent up demand from small and
large enterprises looking for enterprise class CRM that can be implemented in
days or weeks, versus months or years.
We also see an opportunity to work more with developers in India. People are
often surprised to hear that we have 36,000 independent developers in India
developing applications on Force.com, our development platform. Force.com has
created an explosion of creativity and diversity in the developer community and
we believe we're going to see more innovations coming from India in the next few
years.
Bharat Sharma
bharats@cybermedia.co.in