Salesforce.com Cloudforce City Tour: Social Networks, Enterprise 2.0 and Mashups

Ken Cavallon, DocuSign’s Business Development Manager, recently returned from a four city journey, the salesforce.com Cloudforce City Tour. The Cloudforce Tour is salesforce.com’s regional city tour for customers, prospects and developers to help them get more productive on the force.com Cloud Computing Platform.  He went to Atlanta, Santa Clara, New York City, and Boston. DocuSign sponsored the latter three. Other companies that attended included Seattle-based Starbucks, Facebook, Business Week, Orange Mobile and many others.  

Ken learned a number of things on the tour… not the least of which is that Marc Benioff, salesforce.com’s CEO at approximately 6′7”, is a giant of a man with a giant idea. His idea is to do for business computing what LinkedIn has done for professional networking. LinkedIn has taken professional networking from in person, phone and email direct connections up to the Cloud. People can learn from each other and share their expertise, connect with each other and discover opportunities within their networks. The paradigm shift powered by salesforce.com with its force.com Cloud Computing platform expands a sales management tool via a Cloud Computing business process platform that eliminates companies’ need for data centers and IT staffs to run them. Force.com is far more than CRM, it’s truly a Business Computing Platform in the sky… 
 
Flashback to 2004: What was the Timing of Convergence between Social Networks and systems in the Enterprise?   

 
The big question was: “Were social networks a time sink, or were they helping employees be productive?”   Flash forward to 2009 and it’s now clear that Mashups provide an example of social networks having a place in the enterprise. For example, combining Customer Service Portals on Force.com and Facebook has resulted in a mashup that allows its users to track relevant conversations, adds to the corporate knowledge base and then shares that information with the relevant community. The ability to sift social networks for highly actionable enterprise content and leverage the wisdom of the crowds for the enterprise is now seen in actual implementation…the convergence between social networking and enterprise computing is real. 
 
Back in the day, customers used to call if they had questions. With the advent of the Internet and as search engines such as Google indexed the web, customers googled for the answers they sought. Now, customers turn to social networks to ask ‘similar others’ for help and get answers their questions and deal with problems. The social network works out the problems and as conversations hit a critical mass, the convergence of IT and knowledge base enables customer service operations to be aware of these conversations. Cloud Computing Mashups have enabled businesses to glean real world actionable knowledge and leverage the wisdom of the crowds.  
 Social networking came out of the dot com bust. These next 12 to 18 months we’ll see people searching for better ways of doing and not just doing. This means many innovative ideas and lots of innovation. As the economic grip tightens, people are thinking of new ways to do old things better, using technology. One of the big questions on everyone’s lips is how to find better, faster and cheaper ways of doing things we do everyday? Force.com is a tool that can be used to answer that question.  

Launched at Dreamforce 08, the annual salesforce.com user conference each November in San Francisco, DocuSign’s fully integrated Salesforce solution, available on the force.com AppExchange, is called DocuSign Connect for Salesforce: QuickStart.  These regional Cloudforce city tours gave DocuSign an opportunity to engage business communities that may not have had the opportunity to come to Dreamforce… and the reception was fantastic.  DocuSign is the leader in electronic signature and contract execution services and combined with the power of Salesforce offer significant value to companies that use both solutions.  With DocuSign, the electronic signature we collect confirms the data in contracts, HR documents, or anything people sign. The value of DocuSign is in the electronic signature and contract execution process, or the collection and management of data. If we can wrap our heads around the fact that we no longer need paper, we realize that we can collect and correct data throughout the process, shortening the round-trip of the data, driving shorter cycles, gaining greater visibility and achieving all the efficiencies of not producing, printing, shipping, receiving managing and storing of paper!  

How does taking paper out of the process affect YOU?  

DocuSign Connect for Salesforce is where No Paper meets No Software. For Enterprises, we take paper out of the sales and HR process, which means that an organization (your organization) no longer needs to produce, ship and store documents. Before DocuSign, data would be locked up in physical documents and once agreement was reached, would need to be rekeyed and entered into a database. With DocuSign’s Enterprise Class electronic signature and electronic contract execution process all transactions occur online with robust workflow processes and automatic real time updates… that means that the data captured in the electronic contract execution process is already online, secure, easy to find and easy to use!  
 
Because of Cloud Computing, we’ve seen a Facebook and Salesforce mashup create value resulting in customer delight. The mashup with Salesforce and DocuSign Connect for Salesforce provides:  
 

• End-to-end cloud-based contract execution built directly into the Salesforce workspace
• Real-time contract status updates – know where your deals are at any given moment
• Full DocuSign document sending capabilities embedded into Salesforce – so your salespeople can stay in a single workspace
• Direct data mapping which eliminates the need to re-key information driving massive efficiencies and speeding up your pipeline

 
The clear message from the Cloudforce Tour is that new and innovative ways of doing business in a fast paced world with a compressed economy are emerging every day. DocuSign Connect for Salesforce is a world class Mashup that speeds up the sales process, provides real time visibility into your pipeline of business and drives a wide array of efficiencies that organizations realize from day one.  Over and over again attendees who saw DocuSign in action at Cloudforce said “I gotta have that!” 
Ken’s favorite quote from the event was from a large Enterprise customer who said “Wow, with what we’re already doing in Salesforce your solution really will help my teams ‘Close it in the Cloud!’… with (DocuSign Connect for Salesforce) we can get rid of all of our filing cabinets and really build a paperless Enterprise!”