CEOs Mr. Marc Benioff, Mr. Christian Chabot and Mr. Lars Björk

Your stocks have tanked the last couple of weeks. Part of the reason is that you’ve over-promised your shareholders and set financial expectations too high. That was bound to happen at some point given the demands on your business to achieve hockey stick growth quarter to quarter. Your competitors in Microsoft and Oracle are facing similar challenges. But I would like to offer you an alternative set of reasons why licensing and product usage may have plateaued and what you might be able to do about it.

How are you Servicing Middle to Late Adopters?

Your primary users have had success with your platforms and you wouldn’t be enjoying the growth  the last five years if you weren’t successful courting the early adopter users. But CIOs and business leaders have to demonstrate success across a wide variety of users including those that are slow to adopt new technologies and others that are confrontational to changes in technology and business processes. You need to make these users more successful with your platforms if you’re going to continue growing.

These users need easy on ramps to learn your user interfaces and simple to find help videos to learn basic capabilities. They need really easy ways to personalize the UI to work with a wider variety of data without a lot of effort or expert help. Most importantly, your tools have to be easier to use and provide more value than the spreadsheets, presentations, and documents these users prefer. I can’t believe that some CRM tools still have limited grid edit capabilities to make it easy for users to batch edit a group of records. BI vendors need to make it easy for users to leverage a centralized dashboard, enable the 4-5 dimensions they need to drill down on and configure the columns of data that’s important to them. If the average user can’t figure out how to self-serve and configure screens themselves, there isn’t enough expertise in the enterprise to service these users. You can grow your user base and increase adoption by improving and simplifying capabilities to the middle to late adopters.

How are you Helping Developers?

I applaud all your efforts to create and simplify APIs, web services, PaaS capabilities and other ways for developers to extend your platforms. You’ve surpassed the decades old reputation of enterprise platforms of being too expensive and too difficult to extend and integrate.

But you’re work isn’t complete. I went to one of your developer conferences only to see a kiosk giving away dozens of thick books so that developers can learn your platforms. That’s better than others that leave it up for training, conferences, and DIY approaches to learn how to best architect applications in your platform or to integrate with other platforms. You need to find ways to enable the top 10-20% of developers – the really good ones – to become experts in your platforms in as little as six months.

But even more concerning is whether your platforms enables basic SDLC practices. Can I easily store the source code I develop in a version control repository? Sadly, the answer for some of your platforms is either a no, or not easily done. Are their mechanisms to perform test driven development or continuous delivery? Do you have anything resembling an object oriented framework to enable repurposing and extending an object, a form, a dashboard, or a report in a new context? Do you have any tools that enable profiling or diagnosing performance issues? Yes, you offer significant benefits developing in your platforms versus custom software development, but you have to start investing more in these basic capabilities if CIOs, CTOs, and application architects are going to continue to develop on your platforms.

Thanks for listening. I know some of you have these capabilities, but remember that if they are only accessible to users with five years experience on your platform or for enterprises with deep pockets to bring in the experts then you’re missing out on a growth opportunity.

Isaac Sacolick
Blogger, Social CIO