For the past few months I've been wishing that the Salesforce Einstein Analytics product was available at price point that matched Tableau. Well today those wishes were, kind of answered.....

Salesforce has just announced that they are acquiring Data Analytics platform Tableau in a $15.3 Billion deal.

Salesforce has been gaining traction in data analytics since the launch of their Einstein Analytics product at Dream Force 2016, however traction has been limited to large SME's and Enterprise.

Whilst Einstein is incredibly powerful, its functionality and price point have been beyond the reach of many businesses seeking a data visualization and reporting tool. On the flip side the price point and depth of functionality of Tableau has made them a market leader across SME and Enterprise.

Partner programs were a vital part of the development of Clear Business Dynamics and Accodex. My consulting practice centred on providing high quality implementation services for a range of cloud software. Over the past 6 years I have partnered with over 40 different software companies and have experienced the good and bad aspects of all of them. 

Building a successful partner program is crucial in todays fast paced and ultra competitive SaaS market. As the rate of product development increases SaaS vendors need to focus their limited resources on creating a market leading product, leaving the tedious implementation process to Partners on the ground that can ensure your product is properly adopted by customers. 

From my experience I have put together a list of must haves for any successful partner program. 

My last blog post detailed how Cloud Software Platforms are emerging as a core part of the tech stack for many companies. This blog goes into more detail on the features and characteristics of a cloud software platform.

There are a lot of software vendors who refer to their product as a software platform, however the reality is that most of these are software tools which manage a specific business function. The key concept to understand is the difference between software tools and software platforms. 

• Software tools - Focus on a narrow function of business such as marketing, finance, project management or collaboration.

• Software platforms - Consolidate information and workflows across a range of business functions. 

Over the past few years “moving to the cloud” has been a key objective for many companies. With full cloud adoption in SME’s expected to reach 60% by 2020, the next challenge comes through the integration and standardisation of business processes across the various cloud software systems, driven largely by the accelerating advancement in machine learning and predictive analytics.

The strategy to move to the cloud was a gradual one for many businesses, over time one business function after the other would be migrated to cloud based SaaS (software) solutions. However, as cloud technologies matured, many companies were left with an expanding stack of cloud software applications that became increasingly misaligned as business and user requirements changed. In fact it takes an average of 15 Cloud Software applications to enable an SME to be 100% cloud. 

I’ve just got back from the craziest tech conference on the planet, Dreamforce. 

Since becoming a Salesforce customer, attending Dreamforce has been high on my priority list after countless tales from others in the Salesforce community. 

I’ve been to a lot of big tech conferences over the years, but the stats on this years Dreamforce were on another level.

• 171,000 Attendees
• 3,200 sessions
• 600 Product workshops
• Attendees from 83 Countries. 

All of this spread out of about 5 city blocks of San Francisco. 

Trying to summarise the learnings and experience in a blog post is difficult, so here are my highlights.

Cloud software vendors are at war.

For the past few years, the cloud software world has been dominated by the concept of add on’s. Each software add-on will generally focus on a specific industry vertical or business function, such as retail, point of sale, reporting or time management. 

These front-end software applications focus on making a set of business processes more efficient than their non-cloud counterparts, before shipping pieces of information (data) into a complementary application such as Xero or Quickbooks, where further processing of the data occurs. 

Recently i've been reviewing past cloud software implementations to find trends in successful implementations. Through this process I have confirmed a theory i've had for a number of years, moving to "the cloud" is a journey, not a destination.