Have you read Behind the Cloud yet? Well, it is probably an understatement to say that we can all learn a thing or two from the success that Salesforce.com has achieved.  Of course I was particularly eager to take in Benioff’s insights given our common roots in MVaaS and always good to learn from the best.  The book is set up as a collection of ‘plays’.  Each one is easily digested and I’d suggest many apply to all business models though obviously the focus is on cloud based companies. Overall it’s a good read, definitely worthy to bring along for your next plane ride.

While Salesforce is wildly successful, good business advice stands up when applied to others so I thought it might be fun to see how some of the play’s in Behind the Cloud apply and hold up to our experience in managed video at Envysion.

First up, #57 – Let Your Customer Drive Innovation. While part of the message here is obvious (listen to what your customers want) the real point is how the ‘as a service’ model lends itself uniquely to this mission. How you ask? Well a couple ways. First, because the intelligence resides in the cloud, and not on PC’s & servers, the ‘as a service’ model accelerates and simplifies the process of delivering improvements. Let’s be honest, traditional software upgrades can be a pain and when things are a pain you do less of them. How many of us are still using old versions of applications because we don’t feel like downloading or buying the new one? For traditional players it is a barrier to the roll-out, listen, and improve virtuous cycle. Second area that is unique in an ‘as a service’ environment is the ability to get visibility to what customers are doing with your application in real time and across all customers. What are they using? How? In an ‘as a service environment’ you can see real-time stats and respond. In Behind the cloud the salesforce.com example of how they watched customer usage to evolve thier ‘tabs’ is an example.

For me this play totally hit home. At Envysion we have an agile development model and literally release a new upgraded version of our application every few weeks. We have both formal and informal vehicles for customer feedback and are constantly using that to shape our development. Just this past Friday I sat down with Rob our CTO and we were talking through an upcoming feature improvement to our video search. In addition to the direct feedback/ask we had gotten from a customer we were able to consider usage stats from all searches (e.g. what time frames were customers pulling up) as we talked through a set of options. Of course we ended the conversation by agreeing that we would circle back again with power-users and vet our proposed approach. At Envysion we directly translate customer asks or new customer requirements into real time improvements in the application. We can see usage and build knowledge from that (e.g. exception reports that work well) we are also uniquely positioned to deliver these changes with no customer IT requirement. Customers can simply log on via a browser and boom they have what they asked for.

So while all companies benefit from listening and responsiveness to customers, there are some structural advantages that the ‘As a Service’ model provides. Behind the Cloud gives the Salesforce.com view and I can say firsthand that they are also in action here at Envysion!