Salesforce.com and Web 2.0: Who Owns Your Data?
When I started my previous business, The Planning Studio Inc., in 2002 we went with Salesforce.com. We were a young start-up with three employees and at the time the flexibility of Salesforce.com was amazing. It was instantly available, was quick to set up, and gave us added features every quarter (part of the promise of software as a service, no upgrade fees) that instantly helped our business grow. We spent hours customizing the portal to our workflow, our custom fields, and our goals. I am an enterprise developing, UNIX using, Oracle database normalizing IT guy.. so I knew it was all just forms and database commits, but it was done well and we didn’t have to maintain it.
Also, at the time I was in the Windows XP world and the integration with Outlook (we had yet to have an Exchange server) was also amazing. It was about $300.00 a month (in one year contracts) for three people, but that was more than ok for the forecasting, sales targets and management of our very vital contact data all in one place. The customer self-service, integrated with our website, was also very productivity enhancing as it allowed our clients to submit tickets and track progress online without a phone call to support.
Then it started happening around 2004… The Quarter releases started offering new products.. but when they were released, there was no tabs added to our account. The thing that got our attention most was “Products”. It was the ability to assign products and pricebooks for services and then publish those pricebooks online and more importantly to attach those products to prospects so you knew not just some fuzzy “predicted revenue” about a prospect but how much the contract would really be worth and how it related to what services and what services were selling.. all wrapped up in to forecasts for all to view. It was amazing! But it didn’t show up…
I called.
Turns out, that was now a “new” feature we had to add to our contract for $100.00 per employee! per month. It was then we started to get worried. More features rolled out, contracts (ability to track contract terms and automatically send out expiration notices to clients), supportForce.com, ect. Each new release was more money if we wanted the functionality. We knew their game, and we wanted out. Our entire business was in their web portal, and we needed to get it out.
Except, we couldn’t.
Ever since 2003 I had this “export” option in my admin menu that made me feel comfort and control. If I ever needed to move my business away from Salesforce.com, say to a SAP or other Oracle product that could scale higher and offer more features, I could do so. The data was mine after all, right? Turns out, that was only for Professional subscribers, and weekly backup only for Enterprise Customers. What’s worse, the export is comma delimited format, with no meta-data or export to ACT! or SAP or anything useable. Oh, migrating the information from those applications was one click. The other way, not so easy. We stayed with them.
So, having had that experience, I decided to look at oh-so-non Web 2.0 products like SAP and on the lower end (but cheaper) Filemaker Pro. For most, you can be forgiven thinking Filemaker Pro is a Microsoft Access clone. You would be wrong. You also would be acting very unfairly. In a world where people build entire enterprise applications on MySQL, Filemaker Pro is one of the most powerful mid-size business database available, with complex scripting, form development, JDBC, and complete web application exporting. Using Salesforce.com as a template, I built an entire clone with those expensive “extras” in one week, accessable to everyone no matter if they are on Windows or Apple. Granted, it’s not scalable beyond the Server Edition, but if you are growing to the point of needing Oracle licenses you outgrew both Filemaker Pro and Salesforce.com.
Our workflow is back, no monthly fee.
Lesson? In the world of “web 2.0″, never forget to ask the biggest question when uploading your photos, importing your contact information or spending hours getting your online apps “just right”. Will all that work go to waste? Who owns your data?
December 1st, 2005 at 9:44 am
amen brother.
sorry to hear about your salesforce experiences. very useful insights there.
here are some of my thoughts on being able to back out of services being as important as being able to get into them. if you’re interested:
http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/000933.html
January 6th, 2008 at 1:25 am
[...] Way back in 2005 I wrote at length about the danger we all face putting data online. Back then, I was running The Planning Studio Inc., and we had experienced a lot of expansion and were outgrowing Salesforce.com as a Sales/Contact manager. When we became aware that extracting not just our data but also the relationships between those data, I wrote a word of warning to the blogosphere about data. I would have assumed three years later there would have been a common and demanded way to export your data. Sadly, that is not the case. Scoble became a victim of this with Facebook, and what shocked him was what occurred to me back in 2005: In Web 2.0, you don’t own your data. [...]