Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself a bit, which means you have no idea what I’m talking about. Let me back up. Connection Cloud is a service that answers a question that users have made since the birth of software as a service: “How do I keep control of my data?”

In theory, your data is always yours, and you can move it around or feed it into disparate BI and reporting applications however you like. In practice, data is resident in the platform on which the business systems are built, and connectors must be coded to have those apps talk to each other and report on the same data, not copies of it.

Connection Cloud fills the role of middle man—or middleware, if you prefer—by being a data switchboard with connectors available for everything. It can pull info from any cloud application or group of applications into the reporting system of your choice, and refresh as often as you like. Build a report in any app, whether Excel or any SaaS vendor’s product, and you can populate it nearly instantly with live data. Not a static dump, not a preconfigured subset. Choose the fields you want and make your report happen.

I am very enthusiastic about Connection Cloud, which is strange because my focus is usually on customer experience and the use of social media, not running reports. The fact is, though, businesses run on information. They need to understand more than just what’s happening at the point of service, and that means detailed reporting of operational data. Anything that provides more access and easier management to that data makes it easier for businesses to operate with confidence, and without fear that working with a SaaS provider is a one-way street.

Am I being horribly naive about this? Have I missed something in the past several years? Let me know in the comments, because I think Connection Cloud is dead clever, and it’s doing something necessary and (so far) unique.

Now that I’ve solved the problem, I have to address another one: to wit, my blog presence has more or less evaporated anyway, as I have not been posting over the past several months. Unforgivable, I know, and the reasons for my absence aren’t relevant to most readers. But watch me spin this into a useful post anyway.

Have you ever heard of blogfade? It’s a phenomenon that started to show up in 2009, once the first blush of blogging had worn off. Essentially, any blog, no matter the motivations for starting, runs out of steam now and again. Sometimes it’s temporary, other times it’s permanent. It’s hard to come up with new content all the time, even when you’re an ace writer like me.

It’s not just individually owned blogs (and Twitter feeds, and YouTube channels, and Tumblrs, etc.) that fade; many businesses start blogging with the best of intentions, only to slowly wither. Maybe the person who started the blog left the company and those remaining didn’t see the urgency in keeping it updated. Maybe corporate shut the project down. Maybe nobody was reading it, or there weren’t enough things to say that weren’t already in press releases. Whatever the excuse—blogfade.

A policy on blogfade should be built into anybody’s (or any company’s) rules of engagement for social media. “Thou shalt not abandon thy blog without an explanation, or at least a goodbye.” The reason is simple. Looking for updates that don’t come is frustrating at first, which is bad. Over time it leads to apathy, which is worse. Producing or curating social content is a responsibility once you decide to do it.

Nobody likes to be left hanging. If you’re going to say goodbye, say it. If you need to take a break, say so—or explain your absence once you come back.

Here’s to the return of the Third Idea blog. Let’s see if I can live up to my punditry.

On display at the the SAS Premiere Business Leadership conference were everything from customer stories of how high-powered analytical tools get them closer to their customers, all the way to computing clusters that eat terabytes of data in seconds and spit out detailed reports and predictive models in near real time. I got to watch a live demo of SAS Visual Analytics, a program that makes what used to take an advanced degree to create and turns it into a drag-and-drop tool with as much granularity and complexity as you want. It’s not just a dashboard, mind you—detailed reports with multiple variables and axes (the plural of axis, not the plural of chopping tool) can be built on the fly, several levels deep. The kicker? It’s all processed server-side so you can run it on a tablet as easily as on a PC.

Those servers aren’t necessarily budget-breakers either. SAS has been putting a lot of effort into working well in Hadoop clusters, inexpensive distributed computing environments operating under the Apache Hadoop open-source framework. There’s nothing to stop a company from running SAS on something like an Oracle grid (except maybe Oracle preferring you run Exalytics), but it doesn’t have to. Tremendous power is working its way into the hands of smaller and smaller businesses with each advancement; trickle-down theory doesn’t work in economics, but it works like crazy in computing.

SAS also talked bout products for information management, fraud detection, and hospitality/entertainment businesses (complete with their relevance to the average person), most of which are already in the wild or will be available by December.

An example of that relevance: Imagine a credit card company running multiple loyalty programs for cash back, discounts, etc., across multiple cards, each with a number of messages and contacts for customers. Customer X only wants a small number of contacts per day/week. Analytics can optimize and decide which messages to send for best results. It’s a very complex analysis that could take 4-6 hours. With the new system, running the same SAS interface, the company can do it in 2-4 minutes. Similarly, a retailer can manage pricing across thousands of SKUs and hundreds of shops on an individual level, rather than by region.

If you’re wondering at the amount of attention I’ve been devoting lately to high-end hardware, middleware, and enterprise software that the typical customer will never see or even know exists, let me explain. As much as I love the intimacy and immediacy of social CRM, customer experience, and all things SMB, it doesn’t happen ex nihilo. Businesses can track your preferences and history, make decisions about you as a customer, and provide compelling offers only because of advanced analytical engines running on powerful computing backbones. While it’s nice to imagine a team of elves personally interacting with you and evaluating your account, the fact remains that those elves are actually massive computing resources digesting millions of lines of database entries every second. Unstructured data—the kind that comes from social tools—is especially hard to manage, and the amount of it is growing at a rate that has storage vendors drooling.

Analytics, grid computing, in-memory operations—these are how the sausage is made, and the more advanced it gets the better the sausage tastes. Understanding what’s happening behind the CRM suite and the social platform makes me that much better at my job.

Besides, all that metal, silicon, and Big Data feeds a deep-seated geek desire in me for tech porn with MOAR POWAH! Petrol heads and overclockers know what I’m talking about. The possibility that all this face-melting power will make my life more science fiction than it already is sets me all a-quiver.

There are two reasons this was a mistake (three, actually, but only two of them matter to you). The first is that NetSuite’s CRM prowess, while not the thing that brings most customers to the door, has been consistently excellent over the years, good enough to rival any CRM vendor’s offering. Second is that the company has found a way of making ERP relevant to customer experience, which is no mean feat—more about that in a moment.

The third reason is that the NetSuite team is composed of some of my very favorite people in the industry, and I’ve done them a disservice by not staying in touch. It has nothing to do with the lovely dinners and bottles of liquor they’ve bought me in times past, not the CES-level swag that often accompanies their conferences and other gatherings. I mention that because it’s always a good idea for people like me to disclose what might serve to bias us in a company’s favor. It takes a lot to bribe me, though; I’m perfectly happy to pee in a vendor’s Cheerios if I think there’s something wrong with their products or strategy, no matter how nice they’ve been to me; the best they can hope for in such a case is that I’ll try not to be mean about it. Fortunately, NetSuite has given me no reason for any cereal micturation.

Here’s what got me back in the business of observing NetSuite. The company showed off a very snazzy e-commerce engine that runs directly on top of the two-tiered ERP system that’s part of NetSuite OneWorld. I say snazzy because there’s nothing basic-looking about it; you get a highly polished front end for the minimal required work of setting a few parameters and telling the system what colors and logos it should use.

The two-tier ERP concept is pretty clever in its own right; the system allows users to run NetSuite OneWorld ERP at subsidiaries and satellite offices, while maintaining the value of its existing investment in on-premises ERP software (in this case Oracle’s) at the home office.

I am probably assuming facts not in evidence, but the sample we were shown seemed superior to anything I’ve used as a consumer—uncluttered, sensible, and minimalist, yet vibrant and friendly enough to draw the user along the buying process. I haven’t had a proper demo—as I said, we’ve been out of touch—but I plan to rectify that ASAP and let you know what’s going on with NetSuite behind the pretty face.

I will caution you not to take my initial enthusiasm as anything more than that; because I have recollections of NetSuite products from just a couple of years ago, and am impressed with what little I’ve seen, I am inclined to think the company’s offerings are still strong. However, I also recall a notable lack of redundant data centers just a couple of years ago, and it appears they still only have the one. It should also be noted that there’s a good reason for NetSuite to be present at an Oracle conference: Larry Ellison owns a consiberable stake in NetSuite, and in fact his money is what founder Evan Goldberg used to get started in 1998. If Oracle wants to buy itself some new toys, NetSuite is always a possible target—and that has to factor into any assessment I make.

As long as I’ve known the company, Oracle’s direction has been hard to pin down, largely because it keeps acquiring companies from widely diverse fields. The acquisitions have continued, but I believe they’ve become more focused. I’m happy to report said focus (at least what I’ve been paying attention to) has been social-powered CRM, analytics, and knowledge management. These acquisitions combine nicely with Oracle’s internal development to make a strong case for customers who want to strengthen their B2B and B2C capabilities with social tech.

That said, I can’t say there’s anything truly new on the applications side. New for Oracle, yes; new to me or customers of its new purchases, not so much. For example, the company put a big push behind the kickoff of Oracle CX (formerly RightNow CX) and rightly so—but I’ve seen it all before. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because I love RightNow and the people who work for it, and think its inclusion in the Oracle footprint will do wonders to humanize Oracle’s customer-facing capabilities.

RightNow/Oracle CX has made one notable change in Oracle’s approach to the topic of CRM. To paraphrase Anthony Lye, senior VP of cloud applications, CX is a larger strategy of which CRM is a component. Works for me. I don’t care what you call it—as long as the customer retains voice and agency in the relationship, it’s all good.

Lye illustrated the intersection of CX and CRM with an example from Starbucks. When McDonald’s launched its McCafes, a lower-cost option than Starbucks with good coffee and backed by a ubiquitous brand, Starbucks found itself having to deal with a major competitive force for the first time. It figured that out of every 10 people, 2 would always choose Starbucks and 2 would always choose a low cost option like McCafe. The question, then, was how to get the names of those other 6 people?

The solution was to extend the loyalty program. A free cup of coffee for every 15 purchases and some special direct offers in exchange for contact info. Oracle real-time analytics lets the customer know which local shop has the shortest lines, so they can minimize the wait, and order from home or smart phone and pick up their beverage where it’s most convenient. And the loyalty card has a failsafe policy; if the loyalty card POS fails on you for any reason, you get your drink free. Starbucks is not my favorite purveyor of earthy black goodness, but I have to give the company credit where due; using customer experience in a competitive way is something it’s always done well, and feeding the CRM system with it like this is beautiful.

One net new thing on display at OpenWorld was Fusion Tap, Oracle’s mobile framework for Fusion apps. This is not a dumbed-down mobile UI for tablets and smart phone—it is a mobile pathway direct to Fusion. If you can do it on your desktop, you can do it on your tablet with Tap. Native support is already available for some phones and tabs, with more on the way, supplementing its support of HTML5. Naturally, users can operate offline and cache their work for later upload. A report created in a Fusion application is available in Tap’s KPI area, and any fields changed in CRM are automatically updated in Tap, because it’s all the same data from the same source.

Fusion Tap is essentially free, in that it’s built into the license of whatever Fusion-enabled SaaS products you have. It’s SaaS-only for the moment, and includes recent acquisitions Taleo and RightNow. (No, you can’t have a discount if you don’t want Tap; I asked.)

Certain users, such as the C-suite, field personnel, and salesfolk, can potentially do all their work on a tablet thanks to Tap. An accountant or PR account executive could too, but it’s not likely to be very comfortable or efficient for them. If you have to attach a keyboard, you may as well be using a notebook, right?

In summary, this was the best Oracle OpenWorld I’ve attended in a few years. Critics will say the keynotes and briefings were light on specifics, and they are right. I don’t come here for that—I get deep-dive briefings with executives during the year that answer that need. No, I come to OpenWorld to take the pulse of the customers, see how the endless string of acquisitions are being integrated into the Oracle brand, and get a sense of whether the company knows where it’s going. Those needs have been satisfied.

Tune in next time when I devote an entire post to a company that piggybacked a couple of events onto the conference, and reminded me why they need to be considered in the big picture. NetSuite, I’m talking about you.

Influencers in CRM and customer-facing technology (some consider me a member of that group) have been critical of Oracle’s strategy the past few years, because it hasn’t been terribly clear. We respect the company’s position as a “fast follower” (in Anthony Lye’s words) where applications are concerned, but we expect some kind of leadership and vision nonetheless. The messaging has been focused on hardware and middleware, things that turn on the server farmers but don’t apply directly to line-of-business personnel. This year, the reason for all the investment in infrastructure products was expressed clearly for the first time in quite a while.

Large enterprise applications and infrastructure are expensive. Oracle Database 12c running on Exadata X3 metal and silicon makes that level of power much cheaper and greener. While this is good news for big companies, it also means that smaller entities will have access as well. If—as Larry Ellison and others claim—the new tech has 100 times the power, then it follows that you can have the current level of power with one one-hundredth the infrastructure.

Let me be clear. Oracle is a big corporation, whose customers are one level removed from the ones I’m typically most interested in—the customer’s of Oracle’s customers. But Oracle’s technology combined with its sheer size can drive economies of scale that benefit the person on the street. Trickle-down economics doesn’t work, but trickle-down technology does.

Data management is also getting a shot in the arm. Oracle announced Oracle Database 12c—”the c is for cloud”—which is claimed to be the first multitenant database. Nobody is saying that Oracle invented multitenancy, but all of the databases and other systems that did MT were built on old technology that wasn’t really intended to support it. This new one is designed from the start to be multitenant, allowing better performance and security than one that had to be tweaked to do the job.

ODB 12c is a pluggable database, serving as a database of databases (wow, that’s meta). Rather than managing disparate DBs in their own silos, 12c becomes the management platform for all of them.

Since it’s cloud, ODB 12c is being touted as enabling infrastructure as a service: IaaS, or infrastructure in the cloud. The X3 hardware allows such high volumes of throughput and in-memory computing that more of the computing load can be done remotely.

Does all of this work? I have no idea, but I really hope so. Not only do they have the potential to be game-changing in their own areas, but they extend the capabilities of any software applications you care to develop. Developers have access to a whole new level of processing power and data management, and it will cost users less to access it.

There is always the question of customer lock-in, especially as Oracle has stated its intention to own the business technology environment, from racks to apps. This doesn’t need to be the case; while Oracle will likely get a huge bump as its customers trade their now-obsolete tech for new, they will be buying the tools to let them develop their own tech, which will compete with (and in some cases outperform) Oracle. Yes, Oracle wins no matter what, but they don’t necessarily monopolize the industry.

Tune in next time when we review what this all means to Oracle line-of-business applications and software in general. Expect there to be a lot of interest in how the new toys will crank social data analytics up to eleven.

Not so briefly, though, that I could just write, “They’re all totally on target. The end.” Smart they may be, but not so smart that I can’t have a variant opinion or two.

Context services and real-time customer intelligence are the first two topics in Lauren’s article, and that makes some sense; the two can go hand-in-hand in many cases. Think about it: If much of the context info is coming from mobile devices (as Ray Wang posits), and that information is processed immediately (as Esteban Kolsky hopes), it stands to reason that there’s an opportunity to use that intelligence to reach out to the customer at the point of engagement. Granted, a business that could take advantage of this would have a structure that I can’t picture, but it’s possible. What’s more likely is that these two technologies will give businesses a better sense of macro trends in the customer base over shorter stretches of time, and allow them to adjust campaigns on the fly for better immediacy (and better incremental sales).

Television as a customer engagement channel is next, with Brent Leary predicting a convergence of CRM tech and TV tech. I’m going to come down hard here, which shouldn’t be seen as a reflection on Brent’s wisdom; he’s very smart and a good friend, I just think he’s wrong here. I’ve been following HDTV since the late 1990s—before there was content for the expensive-as-a-new-car sets that existed then—and the same hope was expressed then as now. “Digital TV will free bandwidth for added content and two-way interactions,” they said. It has happened, in limited cases with limited success, but the idea has never really blossomed. The idea that TV can be a customer engagement channel is as old as TV itself—where do you think commercials came from? The fact is, nobody wants their TV time interrupted with sales pitches (Super Bowl ads notwithstanding). The “Is this ad relevant to you?” bar at the top of my Hulu window doesn’t seem to have any effect on what I’m shown, either. Now, if the engagement was something where the consumer could quickly and unobtrusively request information from an ad to be sent to a PC or mobile device, I could get behind that. It would answer the advertisers’ need to know if they’re having an effect, and give the consumer something of value without getting in the way of the show. Also, anything coming from a Nielsen report on usage trends is a bit suspect nowadays, if my February edition of Pint of View carries any weight. It should be up on CRM magazine’s site any moment now. EDIT: Here it is.

Virtual meetings, according to Denis Pombriant, will change the way people do business. I say they already have. We travel less, have more teleconferences and Webinars, and have tools that allow us to get more done in virtual meetings than in real ones. The technology will continue to advance—it will have to, especially if we run out of oil before the newer energy sources can take up the slack and nobody can travel—but all in all this is a safe prediction. I’d love to see what we have in five years’ time, but I hope I can still go to work in my PJs and slippers, as is my right as a self-employed kinda dude.

Unified communications (UC) also gets a mention, from Paul Greenberg no less. Like virtual meetings, I feel this is something that has already arrived, and will continue to grow. There is not only a place for it, but a real need—while I say UC has arrived, it isn’t nearly universal enough. If you don’t believe me, see how well an IVR hands you off to to a live agent sometime. A lot has been done here, and I am thankful for things like screen sharing in customer service, and the ability to engage in multiple channels, but more is better. (Paul is also found earlier in Lauren’s article discussing in-memory and distributed processing technologies like SAP-HANA and Hadoop, but I’m not knowledgeable enough about them to weigh in—yet.)

Gamification bats cleanup in the article, and Brian Solis gets the thankless task (except for where Lauren thanks him) of predicting what will happen with something that is still a buzzword fantasy for many people. I think gamification has the potential to fundamentally change the way businesses and customers interact, and can also have serious positive implications for the workplace itself. I have some thoughts on this that should be published soon, so I can’t expound on them here yet, but gamification is big. It’s not for every brand or every person, but it opens up possibilities that are as yet untapped. EDIT: Here’s a link to the article, by Ryan Zuk.

Of course, these are all just my opinions—and you know what they say about opinions. A difference of them makes a horse race. Wait, what did you think I meant?

I love InfusionSoft. There, I’ve said it.

I’ve known the company for several years, and every time I meet with a representative or take a briefing, I come away thinking, “These people have a really good product and a really good attitude; I wonder what they’ve got in store for us next.” It’s not that they have some secret alien technology on their side or anything like that—they just have a knack for cutting away all the crap and finding out what users need, and delivering it in a simple yet powerful format.

I took a briefing today with Laura Collins and Rebecca Sprynczynatyk to discuss the company’s Winter 2012 release, and I was reminded again of just how good InfusionSoft is. The updates they showed me weren’t flashy, but they were well thought out and their value to the business user was immediately obvious. Some highlights:

The social media tools let you quickly publish campaigns to your Twitter and Facebook lists. Lead capture goes beyond the list, though: If those readers like, +1, or share your content, you know about it and can follow up with a thank-you or special offer to the sharers. The campaigns can include hosted email and Web forms, so people who click through can get what they’re looking for without wading through a ton of stuff that isn’t relevant to them—but you still have them as a qualified lead.

Usually, I advise against broadcast marketing via social channels, but InfusionSoft permits users to do it in a way that isn’t intrusive or heavy-handed. Yes, a business could still screw up a campaign, but it’s not through any fault of the InfusionSoft tools—they are geared toward the gentle touch.

The CRM and lead nurturing section of the Winter 2012 release is nice and simple. Lead tracking is all handled on one page, and you can add notes and tags, or create tasks, appointments, and entire follow-up sequences without navigating away from your hot leads. The automation can be stopped at any point, so you aren’t blindly continuing with your email reminders two weeks after the prospect has already bought your stuff.

We breezed through the e-commerce portion of the briefing, so I only got an overview of most of it. The shopping cart has been streamlined and the order processing code has been tightened up, which is always a good thing. The special offers and promo codes are more visible and easier to work with, and creating product descriptions is quicker and easier than in previous versions. The part that really sparked my interest—and it should, because it’s geared toward businesses like mine—is a set of shopping cart options for information brokers. InfusionSoft’s cart provides good support for selling documents, and for subscriptions and memberships. Whether it’s paid content or just an annual signup, InfusionSoft makes it easy.

One more thing, but it’s really important: The shopping cart and the marketing automation systems are fully integrated. The handoff from prospect to new customer is automatic. Action sets that apply to people who haven’t bought yet come to an end when they become customers. The days of manually transferring from lead to lifecycle are over. Huzzah!

Okay, maybe it doesn’t merit a Huzzah, but it is a big deal, especially for companies who presently use different systems for lead nurturing and e-commerce. InfusionSoft has once again topped my list of marketing automation/CRM vendors to recommend, and I’m eager to find out what they have on offer at this year’s InfusionCon in April.

We’ll be adding some additional functionality over the next few weeks, and kicking it off with a new ebook for you very soon. The content creation engine—that is, me—will be back to work presently.

Here’s hoping 2012 will be a happy, healthy, and prosperous year for us all. I look forward to experiencing it with you.

Thanks,

Marshall

Salesforce, as Carlson says, has maintained a steady focus on being a platform company for several years. But it has done so through relatively few acquisitions of “platform” entities—Sendia and Heroku are the only ones on her list, versus more than a dozen in the apps column. We need to ask what more Salesforce requires to build out its platform capability, and that’s where things get muddy for me.

As a cloud apps provider, Salesforce doesn’t need to have a clear line between what is an application and what is part of its underlying platform. Sitemasher and Jigsaw are both considered applications acquisitions, but they add to the whole package, and can be leveraged by any Salesforce user to some extent—clever developers and homebrewers can use these apps (among many others) in Salesforce’s development environment to create something unique. All it takes is imagination and some computer savvy.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff knows this, and is himself a creative visionary. Building the platform means adding apps, and building the apps means growing the platform. It’s hard to make a mistake when every move you make is a net positive. The way to answer the question Carlson poses in her article is not with one bucket term or the other, but by imagining what would add the most to what’s already under the Salesforce umbrella.