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The Facebook Imperative Cannot Be Stopped

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. In it, he responds to critics of his last guest post arguing that enterprise software should be more like Facebook.

Two weeks ago on TechCrunch I posted “The Facebook Imperative,” which posed a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” It was the next iteration of the question I asked in 1999 that spawned salesforce.com, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com.” If you have read my book, Behind The Cloud, you are well aware how that one question launched a company, and a movement. Its been an exciting decade. But the real excitement is just starting.

Frankly, I’ve been amazed by the huge amount of responses, tweets, and comments (aka “the ruckus across the blogoshere,” as Joe McKendrick calls it). It only strengthens my conviction that we are about to see the greatest revolution in enterprise software, ever. Well, really, the most exciting revolution in computing, ever. It will create more value for users, customers, and vendors by an order of magnitude over what we saw in the last wave. And, it’s really starting to happen right now. It is realtime. It is social. It is mobile. And, it is about time. Literally, it is about productivity.

I’m energized by the excitement I see for a new generation of collaboration software in the enterprise to replace antiquated Microsoft Sharepoint servers and IBM’s Lotus Notes. I’ve enjoyed seeing my observation—that Lotus Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg—reverberate around the web. But, the reality is the Facebook Imperative contained more than a funny line. It hit a nerve. We are all responding—debating—a question that is an imperative because we all need to take software to a new level, and now is the time. Microsoft and IBM have maintained the status quo on enterprise collaboration software too long, and it’s time for a change.

There are an overwhelming number of you who agree that its time to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. We are betting salesforce.com’s future on it. Approximately 40% of companies are already deploying or planning to deploy a social computing platform, a number that’s expected to rise, says Irwin Lazar of Nemeretes Research. Not everyone agrees, mostly the vendors that are milking their cash cows. But, make no mistake about it, this generation of social platforms is very different than the last.

Charles Zedlewski emerged from a long blogging hiatus to argue that Facebook is designed for entertainment—not productivity. Well, that’s not surprising given that he works for SAP, one of the companies I have previously referred to as “innovationless”—in my view they remain the Anti-Cloud. Their actions speak for themselves. Still, I’m astounded that more enterprises haven’t figured out how to tap into the real collaborative power of Facebook and Twitter, and the new social models that they have pioneered.

I consider Facebook and Twitter—and the ability to tap into my network of friends and followers—one the most productive ways I can start my day. Using these new Internet phenoms, I’ve tested new ad campaigns and elicited great customer responses, promoted my book to a large audience of people who cared, and with the help of my network, even named new products—all before I sat down for breakfast. I’m not alone; ask Vinnie Mirchandani for a sneak preview of his new book and read how Starbucks, Avon, and Pepsi are using these new social services to increase productivity in their enterprises. Or, look at how Causes, one of Facebook’s most popular apps, is having a fascinating impact on the future of philanthropy.

While my admiration for Facebook is no secret, the fact is that the Facebook Imperative—much like The Amazon Imperative of 1999—is just a metaphor. Like all metaphors, they are terrific catalysts to introduce an idea and orient people. They are rooted in inspiration, but they do not funnel down to the granular details. And, there are details that make this movement entirely new in practice. The power of this new model is to create the next level of productivity, collaboration, and learning in the enterprise. And, I see it happening now in our own company.

For years we’ve been reading about the potential for institutional memory to transform a corporation into a learning organization. But, have we seen it happen beyond very few unique organizations? A true paradigm shift occurs when the barriers of entry are removed for everyone. That is changing fast. With these new social models, there is a way to immediately leverage the knowledge of an organization. People with expertise and relevance are instantly looped in, can participate in the conversation, collaborate, and make contributions more simply than ever before. That will be the catalyst of this new productivity revolution—delivered through these new social enterprise platforms.

We have deployed Salesforce Chatter internally through our own beta program, and we are now using the social models proven by Facebook and Twitter to run our company. Our new social enterprise is built atop our existing business information and applications. It’s not partitioned off from other enterprise applications, but is an integrated part of it—offering a new view of the data that is more productive and easier to use. Through enterprise sharing models, filtering and discovery tools, users have full flexibility over which people and data they follow—allowing them to fully maximize the value of their own feeds and eliminating the risk of “pollutants” some critics fear.

I have learned more about my own company in the last three weeks using Salesforce Chatter than I have in the last three years. It reminds me of the time we went live with http://ideas.salesforce.com. The awareness I have today of what is happening with our employees, our customers, our products, our customer service escalations, and even the deals we are closing is spectacular. Social computing for the enterprise is about seeing what matters to your company, what is happening with your products, and among your people. It’s about the information you need to make decisions finding you. I’m amazed at the potential of this technology. There is just no way I can explain it to you in writing, so here is an actual screen shot that I took off my desktop to give you an idea of the flow (click to enlarge):

It is time to let go of the past and start to create a compelling future for the software industry. I’m energized by the skeptics. It’s familiar. They all eventually convert to what’s important to customers, or become increasingly irrelevant. You don’t have to look any farther than last week when Steve Ballmer spoke to the University of Washington telling them Microsoft was finally “All-In” the cloud. Well, that only took a decade or two. No more software plus services, now they are 100% cloud too. Sure.

I’m living in the post-PC revolution. I’m in a desktopless world that is about feeds and profiles running in all my browsers and mobile devices, and interacting in exciting new ways. It doesn’t matter if I am in the office, at home, or at Starbucks—I am productive wherever I am. The enterprise is not just going to the cloud, it’s now going social, and it’s going mobile. Facebook and Twitter have shown us the way. Like Microsoft, and IBM, not everyone has to get it yet, but eventually they all will. As they say: Shift happens.

Radian6 Launches Powerful Social Media Engagement and Monitoring Console For Brands And Agencies

Brands are engaging in the conversations that are taking place on social media sites now more than ever. But in order to tap into the social conversations that are taking place on the web, brands and agencies need to have a powerful tool to track, measure and engage sites such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and others. One of the leaders in the social media tracking space, Radian6, is launching a new Engagement Console to streamline this process.

A desktop client built on Adobe AIR, the engagement console lets your both track and engage in the conversation taking place on blogs, videos, forums, boards, Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, Facebook fan pages, public discussion groups, and mainstream news sites. The site also allows for assigning of tasks from within the platform, enabling users to access workflow from within the client.

You can customize a tracking grid of social media sites by breaking out your conversation into stacks by broad or specific topics, tagged customer lists, or even user assignment. Stacks can also be separated out by media type.

Th workflow feature allows you to tag, assign, and route posts to team members, and track the status of the assignments. Any conversations a user engages in, whether it be on Twitter, Facebook or with a co-worker, will be recorded for both the user and the administrator. And of course, the console allows you to Tweet, reply, retweet, and send direct messages, shuffle through user profiles, and follow new contacts right from the platform. Similar to many of the consumer focused social media clients out there, Radian6 allows for unlimited accounts and includes a URL shortener.

With respect to Facebook, the client allows users to respond to status updates, wall posts, comments, and “likes”. Users can also view news feeds for Facebook friends, and see new photos or videos that have been uploaded from within the console. The dashboard also provides analytics from within the console, such as post volume, and engagement stats.

Radian6 has had considerable success in terms of serving big-name clients. The company is currently helping over 10,000 brands track social media sites, including Comcast, MTV, Dell, UPS, GE and Microsoft. And this engagement console has all the bells and whistles to make any brand marketer content. The console, we are told, will be in private beta until April. That being said, there are plenty of other offerings for companies and agencies to track social media and this is a competitive space. Radian6 faces competition from a number of startups including Scout Labs, Visible Measures, Viralheat, HootSuite and PeopleBrowsr.

Brazil: Copy Cats? What Copy Cats?

I’ll say this about Brazilian startups—they’re certainly not dominated by Web copycats. Perhaps it’s because there aren’t a huge number of Brazilians who’ve made it big in the Valley transmuting the local way of doing things back home or because there’s not a lot of US venture capital flooding into the country. Perhaps it’s the country’s noted isolationist streak, or perhaps it was just the startups I lucked into meeting.

But whatever the reason I saw fewer “We’re-the-fill-in-the-blank-Web-company-of-Brazil” ventures than I have in any other market to which I’ve traveled in the last few years. Many Brazilians I spoke with said it’s just part of their nature, that they’re not competitive (tell that to fans of opposing soccer teams), and that they’d rather chase “green field” – or, as they say, “blue ocean” – opportunities. See, they don’t even use the same color to describe opportunities.

No matter the reason, after nearly 30 weeks of emerging market travel it was refreshing to go to a country and see things that are unequivocally new, even if risky and a bit, well, wacky. To make the point, here are three of my favorites: Companies that make bugs, houses and diamonds.

The World’s Ickiest Factory: Bug is one of most aptly-named companies in the world. This company makes bugs. No really, I saw the factory: Millions of eggs, and jars and jars of larvae and cocoons. There’s a “cook” on staff who makes up the peanut-buttery solution these bugs feed on and each room is kept at an optimal temperature for that stage of bug development. Like something out of a sci-fi movie, the company is growing natural predators for common agricultural pests, so that farmers can move away from pesticides in accordance with a growing wave of worldwide safety regulations and the organic food movement. It’s combating a caterpillar with a wasp—like nature intended– but rather than selling live wasps, it sells wasp-infected caterpillar eggs and cocoons. Think of them like thousands of little Trojan horses being dropped into Brazil’s sugar cane, tomato, and soybean fields.

Brazil is the second largest agricultural country in terms of exports and the largest pesticide user in the world, recently overtaking the United States. The company is only doing a few million in revenues but is hugely profitable. That’s the good thing about growing something found in nature—it’s pretty cheap once you figure out the optimal way to do it.

But even without all that, I would love this story because Heraldo Negri, one of the co-founders, is just obsessed with bugs. Since he was 19-years-old he’s photographed pictures of bugs in every stage of life. He has albums and albums of them and even started a niche publishing house to produce his bug books for the masses. He doesn’t seem to think this is weird at all. When he handed me a stack of his books on bugs he exclaimed, “Your husband will love these!” (Note: My husband has a horrible fear of spiders.) That’s Negri above, standing on the left. What you can’t see from the picture is that he’s holding two fistfuls of larvae. Here’s a close-up….

Negri—a former college professor who lives several hours outside of Sao Paulo— always wanted to be an entrepreneur but says he never quite had the guts to take the plunge. But the sheer obsession with the idea and technology drove him to take a sabbatical (which he intends to be permanent) from his university teaching job to run this company full-time.

Bug is funded by Fundo Criatec, a government-sponsored venture fund. It’s one of its hottest companies and Francisco Jardim (standing to the right in the main photo), who’s in charge of the fund’s deals throughout the state of Sao Paulo, drives out to Piracicaba meet with them several times a month.

Bug was a risky investment deal in a country that doesn’t take a ton of venture risk. The technology was there, but several VCs walked from negotiations because the company didn’t yet have local certification to sell to farmers. Now, it is one of the only ones that does, and its biggest problem is meeting demand, so it’s investing in better, larger bug-growing facilities. (Right now they’re largely using a series of houses and an old supermarket.) Certification is a process that takes several years, and tellingly, some big multinationals and other upstarts recently applied for certification, Jardim says.

How to Build a House in One Day: It doesn’t take much travel to see that millions of people in the emerging world need better housing—hell, you could just watch “City of God,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” or earthquake footage from Haiti. Or just visit 16th and Mission in San Francisco. Much of the emerging world is living in makeshift structures that are missing walls, doors or decent ceilings. That’s what makes BS Construtora so potentially exciting not only for Brazil but the entire emerging world.

BS Construtora was started 14 years ago and for many years was just a small business known in agriculture sectors for its ability to build structures such as silos faster than the competition. 2006 was a bad year for agriculture in Brazil, and the company had to look around for other customers. The founder Sidnei Borges dos Santos, a former brick layer, was looking at a shoebox when he had the idea for how to build a prefab house quicker than the competition. Rather than pre-make parts and assemble them wall-by-wall and beam-by-bean, what if he made a mold that could lay the concrete for the whole room in one big piece, add the shutters, paint it and throw it on a truck? The molds leave room for plumbing and lighting and plop the houses on the ground just like the inspiration–an upside-down shoebox.

Today the company can build a house in 24 hours. It’s currently building a whole city complete with 1,600 houses, electricity, phone lines, Internet access, schools, a hospital, a police station, a fire station and a shopping mall in the Amazon for a crew building a hydroelectric dam. The photo of the village I saw looked eerily like where “The Others” live in Lost, but a house built on the cheap in 24 hours isn’t for show—it’s for necessity and speed. And there’s a ton of need in the world for this product. The company is meeting with governments of South Africa, Ghana, other parts of Latin America and Asia to talk about expansion.

The problem is thin margins. So far BS Construtora has been financing itself mostly through working capital while trying to dramatically increase capacity. It can build 20,000 houses in a year and CEO Marcelo Miranda wants that up to 30,000. In another year, the company will start looking at raising some funding to help grow faster, he says. For now, he wants to give the valuation some time to build, given all the growth the company is seeing. The houses go for between $15,000 and $140,000, for nicer-non-Lost-like models. The company is also developing some new four-story models to get farther into the commercial market.

BS Construtora gets a few big corporate or government funded projects like the village described above—a $120 million-plus project—but the bulk are developed and sold on the real estate market. The former is likely lower margin but less volatile, and the latter is the opposite. Between the two, though, the company generated an impressive $100 million in revenues last year – made all the more impressive by the fact that this is a startup that hasn’t received any external funding, operating in an emerging market.

In a decline-of-America-side-note, Miranda recently completed Stanford’s Sloan Program for management which is like a mini-one-year MBA. He got 13 other job offers upon graduation, including some impressive ones to head up multi-national divisions in Brazil. (He asked me not to disclose specifics.) He gutsily chose to take this rather uncertain post at BS Construtora last year—at nearly half the pay he was offered elsewhere– despite the fact it was mostly an idea with little execution.

Why’d Miranda go back to Brazil? Part of it was a desire to build something in his homeland. Part of it was when he interviewed at companies in the US they intimated that there was pressure to hire only Americans. “It was the wrong time to be there,” he says. “The feelings were not good for a foreigner like me.” Looks like that brain drain isn’t limited to India and China.

Drilling Your Teeth the P-Diddy Way: Another Fundo Criatec investment is CVD. (I know, it’s not nearly as well named as Bug.) This company makes man-made, multi-crystal diamonds, with technology spun-off from the Brazilian equivalent of NASA, INPE. Aeronautics was big during the dictator days and there was a need for super-hard materials that were durable and wouldn’t corrode, so it started experimenting with growing diamonds and using them in space. Much like the early days of NASA gave American things like the EKG and Tang, Vladimir Airoldi (left) is working to make this diamond technology applicable to everyday life.

The key to CVD’s edge isn’t so much the diamond itself, it’s the way it preps the diamond to be adhered to another surface. The first product is tips of dentist drills. Diamond powder is already used on drills, but it doesn’t stay on well. Because CVD’s adhesives are so much stronger it can drill with an ultra-sonic, not rotational motion, which means no pain, no bleeding and no anesthetic, the company says. Early adoption has been a challenge. Dentists are trained a certain way and don’t like to deviate. So far just 5,000 dentists in Brazil have tried it and 3,000 are still using it. Another early use is drilling into the earth. CVD did a pilot-sale of some diamond-adhered drill tips to Petrobras a few months ago.

The hope is to turn CVD into a platform company that can spin out lots of these ideas, and partner with others to take them to market. Obviously, the challenge here will be the latter. The technology is there, and Airoldi, a CalPoly grad who got his ideas about tech transfer from his experience in California, can come up with dozens of use cases of the top of his head. Focus is going to be a key for this company.

But, like Bug and BS Construtora, CVD is trying to introduce new technology into industries that many other entrepreneurs have forgotten about. If that’s going to be the new green field – or blue ocean—opportunity, Brazil is a good place to bet.

Kyte Now Offering Broadcast-Quality Live Video Streaming Backpack

Live video streaming on the web is becoming more and more popular, and for news organizations and brands who don’t want to shell out thousands of dollars a day for a satellite truck there is another option. At SXSW, Kyte is going to release a new product called Kyte LivePro Unwired with Spin magazine.

LivePro is a computer in a backpack connected to six data cards all uploading live video at the same time, balancing the load across three different carriers (Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon). It is made by LiveU and Kyte will be reselling it to its larger customers. (LiveStream uses the same technology in its Livepack).

Kyte CEO Daniel Graf came by my office the other day to show me the technology (see video below). It is incredible that a backpack can now replace a satellite truck. You won’t get HD quality, but you can get broadcast-TV quality, and it is certainly better than uploading video from your mobile phone, which Kyte also allows. He says that typical livestreaming rates with the backpack are 700 kilobits to 1 megabit per second.

Some customers using Kyte’s online video platform include Fox News, MTV, and Calvin Klein. Graf says Kyte is now streaming 100 million videos a month across its network, up from 50 million last summer.