Oops, we forgot to mention an article we wrote recently that’s garnered more than 2,700 “reads.” By the way, “reads” is not my term, it’s what sys-con calls it. I would call them hits or scans. I’m not sure anyone (except me) actually reads anymore.

So, the article starts off says we are openly attacking the vestiges of the on-premise software model because we are providing all implementation and support services for financial firms interested in salesforce.com, for free. We go on to say that our announcement promises to start a new trend among cloud product providers – free services. This is bad news for legacy software vendors who earn millions of dollars from implementation, maintenance and support fees. You can “read” the rest of the article at:

Multitenancy: The Next Cloud Computing Wave?

Is there such a thing as a free lunch? 

After Navatar made the announcement for free services for Salesforce, here are a just a few of several questions I received:

“How will you make money?”

“Free – Ha Ha...”

“Very interesting … still digesting what it means..”

The questions were genuine and their underlying theme was clear – everyone seemed very surprised since they didn’t think it was possible to provide any services free of cost. They were trying to figure out what the catch was.

There really is no catch. This is the way it is supposed to be in the cloud computing model. Cloud products are not physically installed for each customer the way on premise products are.  True cloud products are multitenant and share databases, infrastructure and labor. Which means that the costs of implementing, maintaining, supporting and innovating can be shared too. That’s why, when you buy a cloud product you are supposed to get most services related to product implementation and support free of cost. It’s as simple as that.

All said and done, this is still a concept that will take some time to stomach – particularly, for folks that are like myself and have spent almost a couple of decades in the technology world, have long made a living implementing and maintaining software and have seen several fads come and go (I too spent years helping Deloitte and PwC make money on systems integration work). So their skepticism is understandable.

But there’s another category of doubters – those that have bought into the idea that implementing Salesforce for your business is simple enough to be accomplished with a few button clicks while playing poker.  It’s often hard for them to see the value of what we offer (at least initially) since they are driven by the notion that it’s an easy DIY job.  However, they typically realize after 6-12 months that the task of getting Salesforce to support their business, though not as daunting as plugging an oil well leak, can be extremely cumbersome and distracting.

So the answer is: No, we are not offering free lunches. Cost is one of the important advantages that Cloud Computing delivers – services costs are a big part of the TCO of software that the cloud promises to reduce. Real Cloud Product Companies will offer low cost subscriptions to useful, out-of-the-box (or, shall we say, out-of-the-cloud) products without charging customers for services – which is what we at Navatar are doing. The idea is that every Hedge Fund (or every Broker/Dealer or every Mutual Fund) doesn’t have to spend time and money doing the same thing just to implement and support software. Once customers see that value, they will be the real winners.

Alok Misra

You asked – we delivered. You don’t have to work long hours to manually calculate, create, print and deliver capital call notices any more. Navatar Private Equity now also automates capital call and distribution processes, eliminating all the time consuming manual work on your part.

Your Investor Relations team will not have to spend time preparing spreadsheets and performing complicated calculations. The pre-defined logic in the system computes the capital drawdown/distribution and fee allocations to various limited partners. The system also allows flexibility for exceptions – for example, the allocation for a limited partner can be overridden if their side letter states they don’t invest in certain countries or industries. The system also performs automatic rolls ups for each LP and fund, on various metrics, to help users manage the process efficiently.

The IR team will not have to manually create and mail capital call letters either. The Capital Calls functionality will, in a few easy steps, allow them to:

• Set up custom capital call/distribution email templates using the fund’s logo and branding
• Dynamically populate the capital call notice with relevant contacts, limited partner’s commitment and capital call/distribution information
• Identify the contacts across limited partners to whom the capital call/distribution notices need to be sent based on the limited partner’s preferences
• With a single click, email notices to all the relevant contacts across limited partners

We will continue to add more functionality to increase the productivity of your investor relations, fundraising and deal flow teams. If you weren’t aware, Navatar Private Equity CRM is built on salesforce.com’s cloud computing platform. Follow the link for a demo:

Demo of Navatar Private Equity

Shweta Kumar

Everyone knows how salesforce.com crushed Siebel a few years ago, to become the de facto standard in CRM.  What started with a win in the On Demand CRM battlefield, has now revolutionized the delivery of software through cloud computing. Legacy software vendors under attack from newer cloud providers, are scrambling to protect their turf, like Siebel tried to do in the early part of the decade. However, most of these legacy vendors are fighting a losing battle.

Take the case of Netage, an established vendor that has been providing CRM to Financial Services. Netage will continue to lose deals to Navatar (read River Cities Capital Funds has selected Navatar’s Private Equity CRM over Netage Dynamo). The reason is simple: for a legacy vendor like Netage, winning the cost/value battle against a cloud provider like Navatar is next to impossible unless they can rethink their entire business model.

Legacy vendors typically give the cloud a try, as a defensive move – they launch a hosted offering, available through the internet to avoid losing business. They often try to save money by using all or some of their existing on-premise infrastructure and practice for their hosted offering (masked as a cloud offering), by avoiding the investment in a new technology infrastructure that supports multitenancy. However, the high cost of replicating and maintaining instances for each single tenant (or customer) eventually catches up with them, and their margins get lower as each new customer sucks up more resources (read Why Multitenancy Matters in the Cloud to learn more).

It isn’t just smaller companies – larger companies such as Oracle are faced with the same issue when it comes to competing with cloud providers (read Oracle Cloud Computing and the CFO’s Dilemma). But because of their size and scale, larger companies like Oracle have the ability to change the market demands/dynamics and fight the battle on a different turf. 

The clock, in the meantime, is ticking for most other legacy software providers. If all they do is launch a cloud offering in addition to their on premise offering while maintaining the same business model, they will die soon. Their survival will depend on whether they can make a complete transition to the cloud world.

I recently wrote a post for the InformationWeek Cloud Computing blog, titled Why Multitenancy Matters in the Cloud. I described in my post why multitenancy is the most direct path to spending less and getting more from a cloud application. The blog post was actively discussed on various forums, including LinkedIn and Google groups and several experts raised very good questions. One question that was debated vigorously was whether a single-tenant or a “hybrid” model would or wouldn’t qualify as a Cloud solution.

I think that you can offer Cloud/SaaS products as single-tenant, multitenant or both (meaning one model for Goldman Sachs and another for Peter’s Garage) and also label them the way you want … the main question is that of revenue and cost … or, more plainly, whether you will become a winner in your space in the long term.

The keywords are both “winner” and “space.” If most of your customers can be served through multitenancy, you will have a winning SaaS/cloud product since you will eventually win the cost/value battle over your competitors. If most of your customers, on the other hand, require customizations that make your model single-tenant you may eventually become a winner in the consulting/SI space but not in the product space (someone else will figure out how to offer a multitenant product at a lower cost).

It’s a well known fact that Marc Benioff’s early investors pressured him to also offer single-tenant versions of Salesforce and give customers a choice… we can all guess where salesforce.com would have been had he accepted that compromise. But let me also give you examples from experiences that I have lived (through Navatar).

Our cloud products for Financial Services on the Force.com platform are all multitenant. For instance, 70+ Private Equity firms that use Navatar’s Private Equity product run their own instances of salesforce (where the product is loaded), have made their own configurations (and customizations) … however, they are still able to receive upgrades seamlessly from salesforce.com as well as from Navatar. That’s the architecture we were able to design (force.com surely helped). We sometimes have to stay away from potential customers who want heavy customizations that can prevent us from offering them seamless upgrades (even though we have a consulting practice)… that’s a price we pay.

Another example: Our consulting practice specializes in building products (on Force.com) for others. One such product we recently built was for Points of Light Institute, a pioneer and leader in facilitating volunteering. They offered a client/server product to nonprofits, to manage volunteer activity within their community. The cost of maintaining and supporting their 300 customers/affiliates was too high and the model wasn’t scalable. The new Force.com-based multitenant product allows each customer to customize, create their own web pages etc, without losing the ability to upgrade to the next version (in development). However, it was the targeted saving of 50% in the cost of maintenance/support that made the move to the cloud worthwhile for them … without multitenancy, instead of savings, they would have been building fatter maintenance and consulting practices.

Also, as someone pointed out, multitenancy is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a profitable cloud product business – there are a whole bunch of others, and I complete agree.  It’s also worth mentioning the blogs of those that actively participated in the debate and helped me enhance my own learning on all of this. Here are some of them that you may find interesting:

Customization: An enemy of SaaS, There goes the neighbourhood, Multitenancy in the Cloud, Principal-driven Customization, Trident Capital blog.

Does that mean you can create a profitable cloud business by building your product on Force.com? The answer is–not necessarily.

In reality, most companies struggle to see the return on investment after all their development effort. Here’s why: In a perfect world, seat sales through the AppExchange would happen at the same rate that consumers download music on iTunes. Business buyers, however, are harder to reach and take forever to convince. Both traditional ISVs and startups usually discover they have been overly optimistic not only about how fast they can sell but also about what price targets they can achieve. To make things worse, ISVs find the product development, maintenance, and delivery costs to be much more expensive than anticipated.

Ketan Khandkar, Principal, Navatar Group, will be demonstrating a very exciting and important application, built on Force.com, at the next meeting of the Salesforce.com NJ User Group on Wednesday, December 2nd. The application was built using Force.com Sites and Customer Portal for the Department of Defense and Council On Accreditation Child Care Initiative.

Please join us to meet other Salesforce.com customers in the great State of New Jersey, network, to learn more about this important initiative as well as share your tips and best practices! Hope to see you there!

Date/Time:   Wednesday, December 2, 2009 •  5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Location:      Princeton Overlook – Regus Business Center • 100 Overlook Center, 2nd Floor • Princeton   Location Information

RSVP: njusergroup@gmail.com by Wednesday, November 25, 2009.

Agenda:       

5:30 p.m. – Networking & Refreshments
6:15 p.m. – Introductions & Announcements
6:30 p.m. – Application Demo – Ketan Khandkar, Navatar Group

7:00 p.m. – New Salesforce.com Community Site Preview

Hope to see you there!

In the wake of news reports that Venture Capital fund raising had its lowest quarter since ‘03, you might be surprised that very sophisticated buy-side firms such as Hedge Funds, Venture Capital firms and Private Equity firms often rely on the must rudimentary, home made fund raising methods (see article: Only 17 venture capital firms raise money in Q3 — fewest in 15 years.) For example, many firms are still tracking their efforts in Excel or via notes in Outlook. It’s a very manual, time consuming and arduous way to track and manage their efforts.

Ironically, this is happening at a time when it has never been easier for a Venture firm to switch to better systems with almost no effort. The same browser they use to search for news and research can also be used for the industry’s most sophisticated CRM. No hardware needed other than the laptops they are now using and access to the Internet.

Whether they use our service built on the force.com platform or on top of salesforce.com or some of the other services out there, you have to wonder why, during this time of great stress they are still trying to make do with Excel and Outlook. If it is cost that is holding them back, you really have to wonder. We have priced our service at about the price of a couple of cups of coffee a day on Wall Street. On top of that, our Marketing Department is launching a “buy one get one free” promotion.

If you are in one of these financial firms and suffering from the funding drought – maybe it’s time to think about improving your pumping equipment?

At least 5 people asked me that question in the last 2 weeks.  These people are customers, competitors as well as our partners. Everyone has been surprised at our success in the Financial market with our Force.com based services (or products, as some would call them) to manage operations for Capital Markets and Asset Management firms. But then, they figured it makes sense since Navatar is offering the lowest cost option to those who have no money to spend these days.

Is it true then, that our Financial Services solutions for Force.com are popular because they’re low cost? Of course. Navatar’s solutions to manage CRM, Operations and Portfolio for these firms are probably the most cost effective alternatives. They deliver on the Cloud Computing promise – to lower costs and enable scalability as financial firms navigate the turbulent waters of today and prepare for the future. You can read about how Transparent Value, a Guggenheim Partners Company is achieving this, in the article, Asset Management Firm Moving Apps to the Cloud, written by Penny Crosman at Wall Street & Technology.

However, there is another important aspect to all of this.  Around 60% of our financial customers bought from us since someone (another firm) recommended us.  You would think the recommender probably said, “Yes, indeed, the cost is low and the product has all the features we need.”  In reality, our recommenders endorse us for much more than that - they are happy to recommend us for the combination of product features and the service they receive from folks well versed in Financial Services. They like the idea of a one-stop-shop they can turn to, for anything related to running their operations efficiently. And it’s all baked into the cost of the service.

The service aspect really is the crux of the Cloud Computing model.   A cloud service provider is a company that delivers cloud services as part of its business model. The public “Cloud” will be an abstract place through which service providers will deliver things like storage as a service, software as a service, or maybe even sushi as a service in Indiana one day.  But the common link between all those things is, and ever shall be, the delivery of “service”.  That quote is from an article Delivering Cloud Services: ISVs – Change or Die or both! written by Daryl Plummer at Gartner.

So, let’s ask the question again. Is it really the cost?  My answer is that the big differentiator is the value that the Cloud Computing model enables us to provide.  It makes us successful and it is exactly that value which will help our Financial Services customers take advantage of the new upcoming opportunities in this downturn.

Mary Hayes Weier of InformationWeek poses some great questions about Oracle’s desired switch (according to a recent announcement) to subscription-based pricing, in her article Oracle Mulls Shift To Subscription-Based Pricing.  “How is Oracle going to do subscription-based pricing, and is that going to require Oracle to invest heavily in a multi-tenant architecture,” Mary asks.

Let’s tackle the first part of the question. It is, indeed, a huge shift, moving to a subscription based pricing model.  Oracle probably has a twofold objective – to protect the current customer base (probably a bit easier because these customers have already spent millions on software/consultants and are seemingly ‘locked’ in) as well as acquire new midmarket customers that haven’t yet had a taste of Oracle’s software.  Can Oracle potentially repackage what customers would have paid into annual license and ongoing maintenance fees into a monthly subscription fee spread over the life of the contract, and protect current revenues as well as get new customers?

I don’t think so. When it comes to midmarket, vendors more grounded in the SaaS world (or the multi-tenancy experts) will surely come with lower priced options and Oracle will have a tough time competing.  The answer would have to be lower revenue per customer. Which means that just to produce the same revenue numbers, Oracle will need to acquire more customers. More customers implies more salespeople, more infrastructure, more support, more (you fill in the blanks).  In summary, that means incurring higher costs but getting the same revenue.  Safra Catz will not like that.

Which brings me to the second part of Mary’s question – will Oracle need to invest heavily in a multi-tenant architecture to solve this? Absolutely. Multi-tenancy will be necessary to deliver cloud services and shift to subscription-based pricing, while protecting the bottom line at the same time. Yes, building and delivering that kind of architecture isn’t Oracle’s forte. But their industry and financial stature gives them so many interesting choices that it shouldn’t be that hard for them either. They could go and buy a company (and a platform) tomorrow. They could sell more database licenses to salesforce.com and then use Force.com as the platform to build and deliver multi-tenant versions of Oracle apps (Peter Coffee points out in his blog entry What the Cloud Entails how increasingly complex multi-tenant apps are being built in a faster timeframe on Force.com). Or they could hire the best cloud talent and build the multi-tenancy infrastructure themselves.

Did I miss any other options that Safra has? I’d love to hear your comments. Oh, and of course, here’s a  (free) whitepaper (from yours truly) that may have a useful point or two about the pitfalls and benefits of the subscription-based pricing world:

Whitepaper: The Dos and Don’ts of the transition to Cloud Computing

Jim Sinur from Gartner poses some very good questions about IT’s role in the Cloud world, in his blog entry The Secret is Out: The Business is Building Processes and Applications. The question is: Will IT continue to play an important role within their organization, when the business now has the option of getting their apps developed on platforms such as Force.com, without IT involvement?

Jim also poses more great questions, such as:

“As the business relies more heavily on these new infrastructures, will they be able to hold up to high scale? Will the business folks really want to take on the tasks to maintain these processes and applications? Who is going to build the integration components to glue these new processes apps together? Will the business folks build and IT be stuck with the results? How does one make sure there is not rampant duplication of processes and applications?”

Another good blog post Force.com – CiO’s dream or nightmare? by Ian Gotts (who heads Nimbus Partners) also outlines some important implications for a CIO, in the new cloud world order.

I do agree with Jim and Ian about the change that’s looming. CIOs need to do some serious thinking and figure out how they’d add value. It seems to me that there’s clearly an anchor role that needs to be played so that all of this comes together within an organization. Take the example of large banks such as Citi or JPMorgan Chase. Retail banking and investment banking are two disparate business functions within each bank and neither function really cares what the other is implementing technologically. But someone would have to figure out how to get these two functions (and others) within a bank to play together so the bank can benefit from a coherent cloud strategy. I also think that that someone would most logically be the CIO (although large Cloud Service Providers may compete for that role in future – outsourcers want that role but they’re unlikely candidates in my view).

Ian provides some very good pointers for the CIO. Another great post when it comes to pointers, is from Thomas Bittman (also, from Gartner) titled If You Build a Private Cloud, Will Anyone Come.  “We’ve got to get our IT people to stop thinking about products and technologies and even architectures first, and instead to focus on understanding their service requirements first,” says Thomas.  I completely agree. Thomas advocates making ROI decisions based on SLAs and costs for each service, before getting mired in architectures.

I think this is a big paradigm shift for a CIO.  But then, aren’t CIOs smart people? If I can figure this out, so can they.  What may be harder for a CIO, though, is to change their IT organization to become more service-focused and less obsessed with ownership. If a CIO can pull off that change, he/she will be in the drivers seat.  Otherwise they will open opportunities for others.

I just read the announcement from Wipro and Oracle about their Cloud platform for software companies in this article, Wipro Offers Cloud Computing Service, from Mary Hayes Weier of InformationWeek.  According to the announcement, Wipro and Oracle are providing a service which will let software companies offer their existing applications as SaaS in a multitenant model. They claim they can move your apps into the Cloud at 50% of the cost.

Wipro is, undoubtedly, a very smart company. So is Oracle. And it definitely makes sense for two smart companies to generate some headlines. However, that’s all I see in this news item – no more. We only wish moving a software company and their customers to a SaaS model was that simple. I would understand if they were talking about providing manpower to maintain an app at 50% of the cost (that is the core business of Wipro – providing cheaper resources in India for tasks that are commoditized). We, at Navatar Group, live and breathe this every day (we help software companies move to Force.com, salesforce.com’s Platform-as-a-Service).

So what is the big issue, you may ask? The most important issue is that SaaS is more than just a technical platform. It is a business model to help you provide a “service”. A software company will die sooner if they move their existing software to a SaaS platform in this fashion. They will cannibalize their existing revenue, tick off their salespeople, lose their customers to startups and will be writing checks forever to meet daily customer demands.

Cloud Computing is a paradigm shift. A software company mustn’t jump into the SaaS model just because it’s cool and everyone else is doing it or even because it’s 50% cheaper now. They will probably survive a bit longer if they stick to their core competency – selling a “product” as opposed to providing a “service”.

To learn more about the issues faced by large software vendors like Thomson Reuters and CODA that have done this successfully, download this free whitepaper:

The Dos and Don’ts of the transition to Cloud Computing

Alok Misra

A couple of weeks ago we launched the first Online Event Registration product on Force.com Sites (view demo). After launching some pioneering Financial Service products for Private Equity, Hedge Funds, Mutual Funds, M&A and Capital Markets on the Force.com platform, this is yet another “first” from Navatar Group on Force.com sites. We were flooded with inquiries in the very first week. Everyone was very intrigued and interested, but also confused. I thought it would be worthwhile compiling some common questions that prospects have been asking.

Does the world really need another Online Event Registration system? Yes, the world needs an Online Event Registration system that is integrated with your salesforce CRM. Let me ask you this. Wouldn’t you want to track attendance in events, conferences, webinars or trainings, in your salesforce system? It would help you understand your customers and prospects for upselling, cross-selling or better service. Navatar’s Online Event Registration system built on Force.com Sites is completely integrated with salesforce.

Aren’t there other existing Event Registration systems that are already integrated with Salesforce? Sure, there are. The key difference is that Navatar’s Online Event Registration system runs on Salesforce.com’s cloud. In other words, it is completely native and is hosted on the Salesforce.com servers. You do not need any other hardware, software or integration solution. It is all done for you.

So how can the event registration system help me? Try to answer the questions listed below. If you find yourself answering yes to some of them, this system may be for you.

1      Publishing events: Do you want to, without IT’s involvement and with a few clicks, publish an event on your website, open it for registrations and then remove it after the event is over?

2      Event Marketing: Do you want to prepare a list of participants based on last year’s events attendees?  Do you want to further filter this list to filter out email opt-outs? Do you want to drive email marketing campaigns to send out mass email invitations?

3      Multiple Sessions: Do you want to manage multi-session conferences? Do you want to allow participants to register for multiple sessions within an event?

4      Multiple Discount Types: Do you want to allow for various kinds of discounts based on the number of registrants, type of registrant, and type of registration- full/partial?

5      Multiple Payment Types: Do you want to give the registrant multiple payment options to choose from? Do you want to provide online credit card processing?

6      Registration Confirmation: Do you want to automatically send out acknowledgement mails confirming event registration?

7      Event Attendance: Do you want to track attendance and no-shows for the event?

8      Private Events: Do you want a mechanism to facilitate online registrations for a private event that won’t be posted on your website?

9      Event Analytics: Do you want to run analytics to gauge an event’s success? Do you want to generate a list of confirmed attendees to prepare a seating chart? Do you want to know how many different types of meals to order for an event? Do you want to know the names of registrants for each session of your event?

If you want to learn more about the product, you can view an online demo.

For further inquiries, you can reach our sales team at sales@navatargroup.com or 212 461 2140.  You can also write to me directly at skumar@navatargroup.com.

I recently reviewed a book titled “Thinking of …. offering a Cloud Solution? Ask the Smart Questions.”  Great book, if you are looking to build a Cloud product on one of the platforms such as Force.com or Azure.

We find that an ISV usually realizes that moving to the Cloud isn’t optional, before they come to Navatar Group for help. The ISV doesn’t realize, however, that simply Cloud-enabling their On-Premise software won’t translate into a profitable business model. We recommend this book as a ‘must-read’ for every ISV so you can make an informed choice between selling a ‘product’ and providing a ‘service’, based on your customer needs and your ability to change. Answering the Smart Questions will provide a basis for a realistic cost benefit analysis as well as help you understand what will resonate with your customers and where you will need advice or partnerships.

You can buy the book at Amazon. The link is:

Thinking of … Offering a Cloud Solution? Ask the Smart Questions.

Join salesforce.com and Navatar Group for the Force.com Tech Talk webinar, Architecting Commercial Applications on August 4th at 10AM PDT.   This webinar will help you answer several critical questions, such as:

• Benefits of a native app
• Pure platform or extending SFDC
• salesforce editions that your product will support
• Force.com features that you will be using
• How to create a rapid prototype
• Benefits of Visualforce vs. Standard Page Layouts
• When to write Apex Triggers
• Reporting/analytics requirements
• Benefits of Sites and Customer Portal
• Incorporating Security Best Practices
• Maintaining your product
• Supporting your product

Learn from top Force.com experts Sati Hillyer, Force.com Evangelist, salesforce.com and Ketan Khandkar, Principal, Navatar Group.  Also read the new article Architecting a Commercial App as well as Ten Common Mistakes Architects make when building a Force.com App.

View recorded webinar now.

Who is Rexlo Joe? He is one of the top Cloud architects today, with some of the most complex salesforce Financial Services products under his belt. (Read the Success story of Rexlo Joe).  He directs the Navatar Force.com team in New Delhi, India on all architecture issues.

How did he begin?  By simply jumping in.  Register for the Force.com Cloud Developer Challenge, happening now through July 31, 2009. By registering you will be able to submit your application for the challenge, and receive additional communications such as hints and tips.

Submit an application and you will receive a t-shirt (while supplies last) from salesforce.com. Impress us with innovation or creativity and you might be rewarded with an Apple MacBook Pro, iPod nano or touch.  Who knows, you may also be on your way to becoming one of the top Cloud architects.

Go to the Force.com Cloud Developer Challenge to learn more.

Are you ready?

Most of us living in India weren’t surprised when our population crossed a billion. Most Indians also didn’t pay attention when salesforce.com became the first Cloud Computing company to cross the $1B mark. Now some analysts suggest that the Cloud Computing market in India is expected to cross $1B soon. This is noteworthy given that companies in India are still very skeptical about the cloud model. “I don’t want to put my data on the web or some server outside my office or some unknown datacenter” is a line we often hear from prospects evaluating salesforce.com.

So, I guess, things are expected to change soon. I have been working at the grassroots level, selling to companies’ hand-in-hand with the salesforce.com Account Executives (if you weren’t aware, Navatar Group works closely with salesforce.com in India also). My own experience is that there’s still a lot of evangelizing that needs to be done to raise the level of general awareness and reduce the fears. I would imagine that the Cloud providers are already at work, getting the message out.

The next important issue that I think needs to be addressed is accessibility. Although the internet is penetrating deeper and India is only next to China on the mobile user count, infrastructure is still a major bottleneck in India. Because of that, we find that prospects here give very serious consideration to an offline version of any cloud service. I still don’t see a lot of infrastructure providers paying attention to the opportunity that the cloud may offer, particularly in the SMB sector. We got a real taste of this after we sold our Capital Markets salesforce product to R. K. Stockholdings, a leading broker-dealer in North India with over 40 branches in small and mid-sized towns.

The other big issue so far has been affordability. It is true that the Cloud model offers a less capital-intensive alternative for businesses. But Indians are always looking for better deals. Due to an abundance of technical talent in this country, businesses are not scared to assemble software on their own since they still see that as a cheaper option. Cloud providers have been offering some discounts. But, they need better pricing models based on demographics and usage patterns.

The good news is that VCs are beginning to take notice. Rajeev Kumar, VP Sales at Navatar was recently invited to present to top Indian VCs in Mumbai around the Cloud opportunity for ISVs. We just attended Salesforce.com’s first partner event in Bangalore. We are finalizing a cloud contract with a large Indian bank and have several others in the pipeline. I know it’s just the beginning but I’m very optimistic about the change.

Amit Chaudhary

I recently came across a good posting from Daryl Plummer at Gartner titled Delivering Cloud Services: ISVs – Change or Die or both!.  This article highlights the opportunity as well as issues related to an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) migrating to the cloud. It points out that “the vast majority of ISVs will have a very difficult time” taking advantage of the opportunity that a move to the cloud may offer them.

Why? According to the article, “It is not enough to just cloud-enable your software. You still have to deliver it as a service and that is simply not the business of most ISVs. So, you might have to change.”  Further, “some software vendors will either change their business entirely, or go out of business if cloud computing becomes the mainstream norm for delivery of systems.”

We agree. We at Navatar have been helping several ISVs (large and small), that have an existing On-Premise business, “cloud-enable” their products on salesforce.com’s Force.com platform-as-a-service.  We find that, not surprisingly, most ISVs are convinced that simply migrating their product to a cloud platform would turn them into a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) or a Software As A Service (SaaS) provider.  Since they do not understand the change required to shift from a product-based to a service-based model, their Cost/Benefit analysis for the effort is often flawed. As a result, they are able to SaaS-enable their product, but they struggle to make money on it.

For more on this subject, download a whitepaper that we recently wrote, at http://navatargroup.com/WhitePaper.html. You will learn about the experiences of ISVs such as Thomson-Reuters and CODA as well as opinions from Deloitte Consulting experts. The whitepaper is free.

Alok Misra

“No one’s social (yet),” says CRM Magazine’s Marshall Lager in the June edition. In other words, based on a study by ES Research, social media isn’t a big factor in closing B-to-B sales … yet.

But, it’s clear that going “social” is the new bandwagon to jump on.

Below Marshall’s article there’s a big excerpt from The Facebook Era by Clara Shih, the head of social media alliances and product strategy at salesforce.com. The full (and really long) title of her book is, The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff.

According to one reviewer on Amazon, (Adam Smith,Bainbridge Island, WA), “The Facebook Era is a bleeding edge guide to how social networking portals such as Facebook can give astute businesses a leg up.”

We know a trend we see one. The “no software” folks are leading the charge into social media CRM selling.

Expect a tidal wave of new sales books coming out with titles like Strategic Conceptual Facebook Selling for Complex Sales.

Seriously though, we have just downloaded Shih’s book onto our Kindle2 and look forward to reading it during the commute home from Wall Street tonight.

Have a great day!

Allan Siegert

Will Google’s cloud-based email platform eventually kill MS office? We don’t know, but companies have surely started looking at Google’s platform more closely. Leena Rao of Techcrunch points out in her article at http://tcrn.ch/1rg that Google struck a partnership with Valeo, an automotive components manufacturer, to deploy Google Apps on the company’s entire global workforce of about 30,000 internet-using employees. We already know about Genentech adopting the Google Cloud platform for 20,000 users.

It will take some time before large companies start replacing MS Office. However as third parties create more commercial products in the Cloud that are tightly integrated with Google Gmail, docs, calendar etc, we may see more organizations considering the switch from Office to the Google platform. We will be testing the waters soon with Navatar’s Financial Services products for Force.com, taking advantage of the tight partnership between Google and salesforce.com. 

Stay tuned!

Alok Misra

Placement Agents have been in the news a lot recently and some of the stories haven’t been particularly friendly to the profession. Now, there’s some good news – a product that will make their jobs easier.

The product is designed to:

Manage prospective clients (both sell side and buy side)
Manage sell and buy side relationships
Manage fund sales
Conduct Due Diligence on Funds (Fund Managers)
Quickly and easily generate client reports and client metrics (dashboards)
Track CRM activity including calls, meetings and emails Mass mailings

Navatar Group has built this product on top of the force.com platform (it is 100% native to the salesforce.com programming). We are long-time salesforce.com partners headquartered in New York (44 Wall Street). We specialize in financial markets (hedge funds, fund of funds, mutual funds and private equity).

Allan Siegert

During a late afternoon conversation, the CFO of a Private Equity firm tells us what starts off easily quickly becomes like a complicated Russian novel. Toss in lots of emails and attachments and it really becomes headache inducing. Especially when you have to create reports.

“You have to track who you talked to when and what you talked about. Later, are those people you talked to still interested in investing or not? And, ultimately track what they chose to invest in or not and as what entity and in what fund.”

Helping you easily keep all this straight is the problem we solve for essentially the price of a daily cup of coffee (we are talking about the one we used to buy across the street at Starbucks on Wall Street, not the lower priced McDonalds in Westport, CT). Navatar’s Private Equity is built on the salesforce.com platform so all you need to access your data is a browser. Of course, seeing is believing. We are always happy to give a quick demo so please don’t hesitate to ask.

Allan Siegert

Sometimes we get criticized in the salesforce.com world about not highlighting all the good things that Navatar does. Yes, we are shy at times. So this time, let us draw your attention to some good things being said about us – a recent one related to one of our most popular products, the Private Equity CRM for salesforce.com, which continues to ride high. It was great to receive a glowing review from Glenn Oken, one of the most seasoned Private Equity pros and Managing Director at Mangrove Equity Partners, LLC, a Tampa-Florida based lower middle market private equity fund. Here is what Glenn had to say:

Thank you Glenn. It is great to have you as a customer.

Oh yes, and to learn more about Navatar Private Equity for salesforce.com, or to see a demo please visit:

http://navatargroup.com/industry_solutions_private_equity.html

Alok Misra.

We liked the way VentureWire said it – “noteworthy for who isn’t included…” The lead paragraph from their story is below and pretty much says it all.

Allan Siegert

Cloud Standards Effort Could Turn Into A Dustup
VentureWire, May 04, 2009

“A trade organization whose members include IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and a laundry list of other tech companies announced this week that it has formed a group to create standards for a way of accessing information over the Internet known as “cloud computing.” But the new effort is just as noteworthy for who isn’t included: Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Salesforce.com Inc. and other Internet companies….”

We have always been cynical about mobile CRM.

Maybe it’s a left over feeling from the early mobile stock market devices we sold for Reuters … they were the size and weight of a brick and if you moved too far from a window, they blanked out – of course, that was about a decade ago.

We have been playing with mobile CRM on a Blackberry and it’s surprisingly good. Okay, we are not an early adopter of this salesforce.com mobile but we now like it a lot. You can see data or add data regardless of connectivity. That’s because the application and the data are loaded on your device. So, for example, you can quickly add a meeting report during an airline flight. The data synchronizes immediately when you land and are connected again.

The only problem is that we have a Pearl (8130). That’s the one with the really small screen (about the size of two postage stamps) – so, we have to carry a magnifying glass to see our accounts and tasks. Maybe this is an excuse to upgrade to a new phone.

Allan Siegert