Browse > Home / Salesforce.com News / Blog article: I don’t know if you know, but Harrahs is kind of a big deal.

I don’t know if you know, but Harrahs is kind of a big deal.

November 27, 2008

So we’re fresh off the megadeal that is the Force.com/Harrah’s situation (See! I said Force.com, I’m adapting Marc!) and someone’s already talking about the Force’s next move!  The Industry Standard just ran an article about Salesforce deployment to India, a place I feel “the model” will go over extremely well.

This touches on something I think a lot of people are missing about the way Salesforce.com has set itself up as something to buy.  One of my biggest hobbies is gaming, and there are a lot of parallels with the way Xbox Live or SecondLife are set up with the way Salesforce offers it’s services.

With Xbox Live I pay a nominal flat fee per month to access a variety of extremely useful enjoyment-enhancing features (like playing online with friends, the ability to connect to my msn chat, etc.)  If I chose to, I can spend extra money buying additional components for my games, picking up things to streamline or just personalize my themes and characters, expand on game content, and all of that stuff is optional.  This means if I want my Xbox Live to cost $10 this month, I just don’t buy anything extra.

Say I’m strapped for cash, say the economy is down, let’s say my fun (advertising/sales) budget is thinning out and I just need want to play online (get my CRM platform) then I can unsubscribe or peel off excess things that aren’t essential to my business and get them later because it’s not like my data is going to vanish (watch the paragraph blur together), it will just be a bit of a hassle to update the database a few months down the road when everything is running smoothly again.  Salesforce is a flexible platform that can change as your business needs it to, even if that means getting smaller for a while.

That’s why this is the best system around at the moment.  Instead of dropping $5,000 on an Xbox (and another $650 on a warranty and service agreement) and a license to acquire up to (50) additional games and download up to X patches or Y gb of content over the next 3-5 years before the whole things goes out of date, I just buy the system and get the games, features, upgrades and optional components I want as I need them.  I don’t have to drop an oversized and expensive sum on something that might not be what I need 12 months let alone 5 years.

Sorry for editorializing, but it seems like there are a lot of old guard out there in the software industry (and software media) who just don’t get the new model, they still see things like Google and Salesforce as some kind of a big scary risk that could ruin your company if the wind changes too quickly or if it happens to rain on tuesday.

If I’m right and Force does well in India it’s because a ton of people running small businesses with small overheads are going to look at an affordable product using their existing infrastructure (a PC), a product they can upgrade over time as their company grows and think: “Wow, that’s a good idea.”

Written by admin · Filed Under Salesforce.com News 

Comments

Got something to say?