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By Laton McCartney
Formerly the technology editor at eWeek, Peter Coffee is director of platform research at Salesforce.com. He has 25 years of experience in advancing and evaluating information technologies and practices as a developer, manager, consultant, educator and internationally published author and industry analyst. He has appeared on CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and PBS newscasts addressing e-business issues and has been a keynote speaker or moderator at technical conferences throughout the U.S., as well as in India, China, Australia, England, Canada, Mexico and Brazil.
Earlier this week, CIOZone interviewed Coffee about the success of Salesforce and the impact of cloud computing on CIOs and the IT industry.
Salesforce now has almost 70,000 customers and has become perhaps the biggest powerhouse in the cloud market. Where do you go from here?
We now have 100 companies participating in a private beta of Chatter, our real-time enterprise collaboration application and platform. It's very cool. It enables you to stay on top of everything that's happening in your company with real-time updates on people, groups, documents and your application data. We're all using it ourselves. We'll roll it out later this year.
How will the CIO's role change as the result of the cloud and virtualization?
He'll be less of a capital budget and procurement person and more process-oriented. And he'll be sitting at the head table discussing business opportunities and competitive issues. In the past, CIOs would note on their resumes that they successfully managed an SAP implementation for a Fortune 500 company. You're not going to see that anymore.
Where is this new breed of CIOs going to come from?
In the past, they came up through the cargo hatch of the IT or MIS department. Today they're more likely to be a vice president of a business unit who has moved into the CIO slot.
And the IT department itself?
It's growing much smaller and will function less like divisions of infantry and more like a special forces unit with a very specific mission to add value. Capgemini came out with a study recently saying that IT was almost disappearing.
Salesforce is partnering with consultants, independent software vendors and VARs with the idea that they can build customized apps on the Force.com platform for their customers. How do you see this working?
The partnership enables our partners to go to their customers and identify a particular problem and very quickly develop a secure, scalable software solution to address it. I've seen this happen with a half a dozen people around a white board conceiving and deploying apps in a matter of days. This isn't software as a service. It's service as software.
So these partners in theory can build their business around Salesforce and the cloud model enables them to move very quickly?
It also enables them to differentiate themselves from their competitors. For example BT is one of our resellers. As a result of our partnership, it's now offering its SMB customers Salesforce.com CRM capabilities. Now with telecom becoming a utility, BT and smaller companies in this field have something more to offer than a commodity service.
And the SMB customers -- how do they stand to benefit?
They benefit enormously. We have one customer that has reduced the size of its data center by two-thirds since it began using the cloud. Their IT footprint has radically shrunk as has the necessity to continually keep buying and managing new hardware and software.
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