This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

Does Mobile fall into one of your top 5 priorities for 2012? If so, how will you be attacking it? If not, why not?

Mobile remains a top priority for FPX in 2012. FPX’s core business centers on enabling sales teams to be more successful by responding quickly, if not instantly, to the needs and requests of their prospects and customers. Since every sales situation today is highly competitive, buyers have the power. FPX is committed to equipping our customers to serve their prospects whenever and wherever those customers expect; enabling them to take action immediately. Only a solid mobile component of a greater sales process system can do that.

When sales people have the solutions they need at their fingertips, they have the information they need to give their prospects the confidence needed to buy.

Our commitment to providing superior mobile solutions, beginning with the Budgetary Quotes Mobile App that we released in late 2011, means platform agnostic apps. Our strategy is to continue to develop mobile apps for people, not for a specific device. Our core competency is to exceed the expectations of our customers, allowing them the ability to access their sales systems and solutions from any mobile device.

In 2020, looking back on this decade, what will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth?

Cloud computing, and the Software-as-a-Service model, will prove the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth today and for the foreseeable future. The transformative power of the cloud is driving innovation virtually everywhere, but its most significant impact will come from bringing to bear the power of solutions previously only available through on-premise systems without the inherent expenses.

This is already creating a movement away from on-premise software installs to SaaS solutions, especially under certain conditions. In the CRM and Configure-Price-Quote® marketplace, SaaS provides undeniable benefits including lower initial cost and total costs of ownership, higher ROI, and reduced strain on IT resources to name a few.

FPX is committed to this model. As one of a very limited number of providers of SaaS-based, multi-tenant sales process solutions, we are increasingly attracting enterprise customers who, in the past, would have had to select a big-box on-premise software provider.

This demand is already pervasive. Adoption to the Cloud empowers companies to transform their business models and gain a competitive advantage. The Cloud allows companies to be agile and enable the development of effective virtual business processes, which will facilitate their employees, customers, partners and suppliers to connect and conduct business seamlessly.

According to a recent study by Bain & Company, the cloud computing share of the tech wallet will quadruple by 2020, growing nearly six-times faster through the end of the decade than spend on legacy hardware and software.

Social media and social business are big themes for 2012. In which areas of business will the social movement have the most impact (or most potential for impact)? Why?

Social media and social business will impact sales and marketing more than any other area of business. In B2C selling situations, consumers have always had access to the thoughts and opinions of those they trusted. This provided consumers a limited degree of power in making personal purchase decisions. For the most part, however, retailers have held most of the power.

Online social media has radically shifted the power in the B2C space from retailers to consumers. Consumers in the early stages of the purchase process now have ready access to others who are farther along in that same process. They can search out reviews, polls, comments, and can even engage in conversations about retailers, products and brands with those they choose and trust. This arms them with knowledge long before they enter a store or engage with an online retailer. Further, the input of others can either undermines or substantiate the claims made by expensive advertising and marketing campaigns.

In the same way, those responsible for making purchase decisions in B2B environments now have access to the opinions and experiences of those with similar responsibilities. Using social media including LinkedIn, salesforce.com’s Chatter, Twitter and a myriad of other specialized networks, decision makers have access to credible sources of information prior to and during the vendor selection process.

The use of social media among business professionals levels the communication playing field. A buyer in a B2B situation can quickly investigate any claim made by a sales person or contained in a company’s marketing collateral. Companies who exaggerate their claims do so with a high degree of peril. However, companies that are committed to customer success will be rewarded for their efforts. As the use of social media increases among business professionals, companies selling to other companies must remember that they are ultimately selling to people. Social media has the potential to push the phrase B2B into obsolescence, making P2P the new reality.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

As you look around the globe, which markets will provide the best opportunities for tech companies in the next five years?

Most of recent growth trajectory and net job addition seems to be coming from mobility/ social space. With more and more people accessing their social, email and other day to day functions/ applications via their mobile, app development in mobile is a given. India as a target & growth market cannot be ignored. Tele-density has been increasing at a random pace and the telecom sector itself has been growing at more than 25%. Some interesting dynamics include land line adoption of only ~ 35 million whereas cell phone adoption at ~ 882 million. Recent Mckinsey study revealed that India’s internet users will increase fivefold by 2015 and more than 3 quarters of them will choose mobile access. Gartner sees the penetration reaching 82% in 2014.

Yet with all this growth, infrastructure is a challenge and it isn’t going to be easy. Of the country’s 100 million Internet users, just 12.5 million have broadband, compared with 450 million households in China. Internet speeds are sluggish compared to international average of 5.6 mbps. Policymakers are trying to solve this by utilizing cable TV lines. However there are couple challenges to this approach-most of the subscribers only have analog connection and upgrading infrastructure isn’t going to be cheap. Secondly it isn’t going to be easy to up convert an analog box to digital box. Given the demographics, companies might have to push the box at real low price.

Now, where there is a challenge there is an opportunity. Mobile content and applications could be the answer.

There are over 850 million registered mobile numbers (these numbers are skewed as there are multiple accounts registered to the same user). Average revenue per registered number has fallen over the years and service providers are constantly looking for ways to up that. Mobile apps if delivered at affordable prices and with the right content will deliver attractive returns to content and application development companies. As long as the applications are compelling and tuned to local demographics (more so with all the different languages spoken and read) and the pricing right (in order to attract the low end of the demographics), all players can make some money. With mobile advertising picking steam, local ads could be another money spinner.

If email takes a backseat to Facebook, Twitter, and SMS for business communication in 5 years, how will that change your business strategy? What are you doing today to prepare for that possibility?

It is true that new channels have come up but I think there is a synergy between new channels and email. You still need an email to login to Twitter and Facebook. You still get notifications via email for updated info and new followers. It is true that web based email is starting to take a back seat but that is web based. Mobile email usage is skyrocketing. In fact comscore’s own numbers show that about 30% of American mobile users regularly access email via smartphones / mobile devices.

Numerous studies have shown that email is still one of the most effective ways to drive online and offline sales, and is the preferred method by which consumers are notified of offers. Sure, there are better ways to communicate a single line or a short message but the way twitter and Facebook is set up, it is difficult to imagine that someone would send a contract via social sites.

While in about 5 years Facebook and the probably likes may take over intranet communications, for all external communications email still might make sense. I wouldn’t change the business strategy yet…

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

With various forces combining to transform the IT landscape, how do you see the role of the IT department evolving?

This year, a majority of cloud spending is coming from the corporate IT budget rather than business unit people buying SaaS on the side, which you saw in years past. More and more, FinancialForce.com is being introduced to customers by the IT department. A number of years ago, the IT group saw the cloud as a threat, but now IT actually sees the cloud as strategic and something that they can evolve around as well. They are clearly starting to embrace it. I see that there is a distinct move towards corporate budgets buying these cloud solutions now, not departmental budgets trying to work their way around IT departments. This starts to take us close to a tipping point, where people are using cloud technologies, not as a sideline, but as a mainstream part of their business. From an IT spending perspective, I suspect that we are going to see more spending on cloud technology and we’re going to see IT budgets increasingly allocated to it, rather than cloud expensed ad hoc against departmental budgets.

Social media and social business are big themes for 2012. In which areas of business will the social movement have the most impact (or most potential for impact)? Why?

Social media, enterprise social media in particular, is coming along at the right time. Companies today are increasingly leveraging virtual business models utilizing more subcontractors, home workers and geographically dispersed employees. Social media apps like Chatter do a great job of connecting people and the business information held in your business applications, regardless of where they sit in the world or where they sit on the organization chart.

That’s almost an expectation in something like the professional services space. I think this is why you will see professional services organizations lead in the adoption of social media in businesses. They have the killer use case for social media. They operate virtually and work in teams. In that business, your teams need to be in synch and collaborate in real time across sales, services and finance. The project work is social by nature, so the lines need to blur across teams and encompass the customer. We are very focused on this area and are delivering innovative applications to help our customers collaborate not just internally, but also collaborate more closely with their customers. For instance, FinancialForce.com’s professional services customers are using Chatter to follow project activity on a project wall, so that disparate teams can monitor a project’s progress and gain visibility to project management conversations.

When you think about it, most companies are working “socially” already, but they are doing it the hard way – conference calls, voice mail, IM and email. Worse, those conversations are all disconnected from core business systems, with no audit trail and no connection to customer or project data. It is difficult to run a virtual company this way. Companies are using really expensive, hardworking people to bridge the technological data gaps with phone calls.

So, I think we will see collaboration and social apps become even more mainstream inside companies in the coming years. I think business people had a hard time grasping why they would need Facebook or Twitter-like functions inside their companies. I fault the industry for selling it that way. Tools like Chatter are encouraging collaboration inside companies in ways we haven’t seen before and it is paying off in a big way. FinancialForce.com customers are breaking down the barriers between sales and accounting, for instance, to help collect cash and reduce bad debt as a team, and essentially providing a better service to their customers.

Does Mobile fall into one of your top 5 priorities for 2012? If so, how will you be attacking it? If not, why not?

Without question, mobile is now part of enterprise IT planning. Mobile devices will soon become a primary way people consume cloud applications. We’re going to see a lot more action around tablets with mobile applications and analysts predict that there will be more than 20 times the current amount of mobile cloud based applications by 2014. Technology is changing the way we socialize and the way we socialize is influencing the way we build and use technology. We have several apps on the drawing board for 2012, including some designed exclusively for senior managers and some for field employees, such as doing project time entry from your mobile phone.

As such, I see the conversations on cloud as a topic going down, and the conversations on mobile and social applications coming up, although the cloud is the enabler. There is much more to these applications than just being in the cloud in an IT sense – there is genuine business value in them and there are genuine ways for people to innovate.

Our customers may be visiting a client, for example, and want to know the current payment status before they walk into the meeting; or they may be on the road, but need access to the latest KPI’s and financial reports. FinancialForce Mobile leverages the Force.com mobile application platform, enabling customers to use a variety of mobile devices including Blackberries, iPhones and iPads to access financial and project data. Essentially, FinancialForce.com mobile applications enable customers to access accounting and project services information anytime, anywhere, boosting productivity and saving valuable time.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware

This interview was originally published in SIIA’s Vision From the Top. The 2013 Vision From the Top will be released at All About the Cloud, May 7-9 in San Francisco.

Social media and social business are big themes for 2012. In which areas of business will the social movement have the most impact (or most potential for impact)? Why?

Let’s Talk: Making B2B Apps More Social

Go to just about any business event, attend a webinar, download an ebook or whitepaper, and social media invariably comes up.

And it’s for good reason. From a business perspective, social connects us to prospects and customers like never before. When people make decisions about where they are going to eat, what hotel they will book, what conference to attend, and, yes, what vendor they’ll sign with, that decision is increasingly a social one. We want to know what our network of friends and colleagues think.

That has changed the game for app developers, who are increasingly designing in an interconnected ecosystem. Consider this: 20 million Facebook apps are installed each day. Clearly, people like it when their apps connect with their social world.

So our expectations have shifted. That apps work together seamlessly is taken for granted. My Spotify will tell my Facebook friends what I’m listening to. I can update Twitter and LinkedIn simultaneously from TweetDeck. Edits to a Google Doc can be done right from my Box account.

Our apps are not social simply because they push status updates to Facebook, but because they communicate with each other. I push a button in this app and it updates another app. It just works.
While this is the norm when it comes to consumer apps, the B2B industry has been slower to accept this change. The B2B infrastructure is fragmented. For too long, companies developed services as if they were in a vacuum, designing products that solve one particular pain point without thought for how it would work in the larger app marketplace.

That’s too bad because if anyone needs social apps, its B2B customers. We deal with long, often complicated sales cycles. To win these deals we deploy an always-growing selection of apps to grab buyers’ attention, educate them and earn their trust. But when these apps live in a silo, unable to talk to each other, we’re left with spotty data, a pile of spreadsheets and incomplete picture of the targeted buyer’s behavior.

In other words, if the attendee data from the webinar I just ran doesn’t connect with the platform I used to market that event and the CRM my sales team is logging into every day, I’m just painting by numbers. I can’t see how the different apps I’m running are impacting the sale. And without knowing the revenue the app helps generate, the harder it is to justify paying for it.

The industry is adapting. Expect more announcements about developer centers and centralized marketplaces where apps work in concert. Features like social sign-on, which make life easier for the buyer and the seller, are taking root. An email sent from iPad can get recorded in my marketing automation and CRM systems.

Put simply, B2B apps need to be more social. The market demands it. As social media alters the professional landscape, apps give us the ability to adapt on the fly. But not if they only work boxed up in a vendor’s platform.

It won’t be enough to create a “cool” app this year. In 2012, the killer app is integration.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the SIIA software division on Twitter @SIIASoftware