Case Study 3.4 - Salesforce.Com: Cloud Services Go Mainstream

Enterprises around the world would be wise to heed 50 Cent’s mantra ”Get Rich or Die Tryin’” when considering the implications of not “getting” to the public cloud. We at Cocolevio, an implementation partner of Mooor Insights & Strategy, estimate that over 50% of IT spend will be going to public cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services or SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com Inc. by 2019. This means there is around a $140B opportunity in this space. The cost savings, reduction in capital spending, speed to market, flexibility and global access derived from public cloud mean those enterprises that effectively use the public cloud are better positioned to “Get Rich” than their competitors who have higher cost structures and less nimble IT platforms. This trend is only set to continue as the business case for moving to public cloud only becomes more compelling, with the traditional arguments against public cloud around security and lack of control diminishing. Vendor lock-in will continue to be a concern but we see many companies willing to sacrifice a bit of lock-in for the many, many benefits of public cloud.

There are several advantages of using Cloud Computing, for example: “To begin, businesses can have lower cost computers for users.” Alijabre explains that cloud computing can be very beneficial for the businesses. Moreover, businesses will bring great amount of profit into their company, and it will be easy to use it. Alijabres goes on to provide several examples why cloud computing is better. One of of the most important reason why companies are moving towards cloud computing is the lower cost of the system. “To begin, businesses can have lower cost computers for users.” He explains that small business will not need computers that are high performance based. Business can get less expensive computers and store all of their data online instantly, without having them to worry about the space in a

Salesforce.com was formed fifteen years ago with the vision of revolutionizing the entire concept of CRM in the cloud computing system. It leads to the development of a new philanthropic model for all the others to follow, and it was only achieved by the wholehearted dedication and sincerity of its employee force, which have over the years formed a pillar of strength for the company. The stakeholders and the customers have all shown their immense support in the system, and it is because of their faith in the system, today it is known as the leading enterprise in the cloud-computing ecosystem. Industries and companies can now get connected to their consumers in a whole new way by the use of the latest innovations in mobile technology, cloud

Within the past 10 years our societies technological advantages have been somewhat space age like, even alien like characteristics. Technologies, which ten years ago only existed in our dreams but yet, have become reality. Things like, the revolutionary iPhone and its almost seamless touch-screen tech; as well as the new advancements in our cultures most prized possession, The Internet. In this subject-based paper, I will take a closer look into a fairly new emerging technology, which is simply referred to as…Cloud Technology. The synopsis will cover, what and how cloud technology works, its

Cloud computing is provided by an outside organization; it takes the place of an existing system, usually an internal network, and moves it to a web based service where all information in the company will be processed and stored. Internal IT infrastructures can be costly due to maintenance and personnel. Cloud computing reduces costs by removing the need for an internal system and the people to run it.

Amazon: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Amazon EC2 is simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction. It provides you with complete control of your computing resources and lets you run on Amazon’s proven computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing you to quickly scale capacity, both up and down, as your computing requirements

Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) is the world leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software specifically designed for small and medium businesses, enterprises and government organizations. Salesforce.com was the first enterprise software company to break the $1B barrier of CRM sales on the cloud computing platform (Salesforce Investor Relations). It is also the first company to successfully orchestrate complex product and services strategies entirely on the Internet. This company's ability to orchestrate connectivity, cloud integration, enterprise storage and enterprise-wide applications is revolutionizing the economics of cloud computing today (Hedgebeth, 49). The strategic direction of the company is to expand quickly off of its sales base of applications, into customer service and support (Salesforce Investor Relations). As research studies from Gartner have shown, the majority of software sales in CRM today are in Customer Service and Support (34%) followed by Sales (26%) and Marketing (20%) (Salesforce Investor Relations). Salesforce.com reported $3B in revenue for their latest fiscal year and a $270M loss. Salesforce.com's success in enterprise CRM against entrenched competitors including Oracle and SAP is noteworthy, as both of these competitors rely on an on-premises application delivery model. The on-premises model is significantly more time-consuming to implement and often requires companies to

Some of the immediate advantages of cloud computing involve lower equipment costs, scalability and online collaboration. A company can take advantage of cloud services without major upgrades to their existing equipment and infrastructure. Using a web browser, most company employees can access “Software as a Service” or SaaS. This service runs on a cloud provider’s server with no installed on the local server within the organization.

In the current business world, organizations depend on cloud computing as a strategy of delivering IT services to clients. Cloud based platforms provide cost effective ways for organizations to maintain a high level of reliability and availability for applications. Cloud computing promotes business continuity and helps in organizations during disaster recovery (Molen & Brace, 2010).

Abstract. The Internet is permeating all aspects of our lives. This includes business and organizational endeavors as well as our personal lives. Businesses have become to depend on the Internet for their supply chain, advertising, and sales. E-commerce has experienced a tremendous growth in the last decade. Organizations are looking for new ways to leverage the Internet for business growth. Web Services is a growing technology in the Information Systems field. Data Management is also an ever-increasing endeavor for many organizations. The need for information is

One of the main benefits of cloud computing is that the company’s resources are used in other different ways and reduce the overall costs. It eliminates the need for a physical hardware computer and replace it with an online storage or a software delivered over the internet. For instance, government agencies are shifting its government IT infrastructure into the cloud and launch mobile and e-services for citizens and businesses. As an example of cloud applications in some countries: In China a company named Wang Fu Jing has deployed cloud services to share supply chain information and implement B2B e-commerce with suppliers (Kshetri, N. ,2011). Another example is in South Korea: IBM’s cloud computing centre provides architecture, skills and pilot projects for banking, telecommunications, and IT hosting services (Kshetri, N. ,2011). An Indian bank named ICICI’s uses Zoho’s applications to develop services such as personalised insurance for diabetes (Kshetri, N. ,2011). Cloud computing offers many services to companies and government agencies; applications, operating systems and data are secured in the cloud environment rather than on a physical computer that is exposed to the risk of lost, stolen or hardware failure. Compared to client-based computing, cloud-based software is easier to install, maintain and upgrade. Furthermore, mobile applications based on cloud computing are becoming increasingly popular. Ericsson estimates that there

Whether it’s called Cloud Computing or On-demand Computing, Software as a Service, or the Internet as Platform, the common element is a shift in the geography of computation. When you create a spreadsheet with the Google Docs service, major components of the software reside on unseen computers, whereabouts unknown, possibly scattered across continents. This affects all levels of the computational ecosystem, from casual user to software developer, IT manager, even hardware manufacturer. Recently, a lot of vendors have started talking about “cloud computing” in their marketing materials. Citing a research published by Merrill Lynch entitled “The Cloud Wars: $100+ billion at stake,” Merrill Lynch has estimated a $160- billion addressable market opportunity, including $95- billion in business and productivity applications, and another $65-billion in online advertising for Cloud Computing. But the main question is whether the users are ready to give up using services on their local machines and shift to the Cloud since shifting to cloud computing has both advantages and disadvantages for all possible users; nevertheless, they may have different level of importance for different users

The world is moving from manufacturing to more service-oriented day after a day. According to a survey of the U.S. economy conducted in 2010, 15% of the U.S. economy is driven by manufacturing, 5% in agriculture and other areas, and the remaining 80% is related to the service industry (Hwang & Dongarra 2013). Also, based on IDC, International Data Corporation, the cloud service market reached $17.4 billion globally in 2009 and is predicted to grow to more than $45 billion by the end of 2015. Cloud Computing can be explained as the delivery of computing resources over the Internet and is generally categorized under three layer: IaaS- Infrastructure as a Service, PaaS- Platform as a Service, and SaaS- Software as a Service (McKay, 2011).

Cash-strapped organizations look for alternatives which can reduce their capital investments involved in purchasing and maintaining IT hardware and software so that they can get maximum benefits of IT. Cloud computing (CC) becomes a natural and ideal choice for such organizations and customers. Cloud computing takes benefit of many technologies such as server consolidation, huge and faster storage, grid computing, virtualization, N-tier architecture and robust networks. It delivers highly scalable and expensive infrastructure with minimal set up and negligible maintenance cost. It provides IT-related services such as Software-as-a-Service, Development Platforms-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-asa-Service over the network on-demand anytime from anywhere on the basis of “pay-as-you-go" model. It is a fast growing concept changing the IT related perceptions of its users. Elasticity, scalability, high availability, priceper-usage and multi-tenancy are the main features of Cloud computing. It reduces the cost of using expensive resources at the provider’s end due to economies of scale. Quick provisioning and immediate deployment of latest applications at lesser cost are the benefits which force people to adopt Cloud computing. Cloud computing has brought a paradigm shift not in the technology landscape, but also in the database landscape. With more usage of Cloud computing,

Cloud Computing is the use of common software, functionality or business applications from a remote server that is accessed via the Internet. Basically, the Internet is the "cloud" of applications and services that are available for access by subscribers utilizing a modem from their computer. With Cloud Computing, one simply logs into desired computer applications - such as sales force or office automation programs, web services, data storage services, spam filtering, or even blog sites. Generally, access to such programs is by monthly or annual paid subscription. Through Cloud Computing, businesses may prevent financial waste, better track