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Dear Marc Benioff, My Salesforce.com Secret Wish

Every year at Dreamforce, the master of ceremonies asks the same question of a lighthouse customer from some huge multinational like Philips, Toyota or Burberry.  “If you could sneak into Marc Benioff’s office at night [he is the CEO of Salesforce.com] and leave him a note asking for one thing, what would it be?”  Even though the question is asked over and over at every Salesforce event, the reference customer never seems ready for it and fumbles around for a few seconds and then says something lame like “be more customer focused”.

If I ever get asked that question, I will actually have something to say.  I would ask Marc to embrace Big Data; give each user at least 1 GB of Data Storage to work with.  Data Storage is structured data in the Salesforce cloud that can be searched, analyzed and turned into reports and dashboards.

Embracing Big Data is a big topic because it points to both the biggest opportunity and the biggest challenge facing Salesforce.com.  Today, it could be argued that Salesforce is a Little Data company.  Salesforce only includes 20MB of Data Storage with an Enterprise subscription.  20MB of Data Storage is about what my MacIntosh LC had in the late 1980’s.  My smart phone has 64GB.

Salesforce can get away with only giving its users Little Data or 20MB of structured Data Storage because its product is really just a rolodex / contact file on steroids.  The amount of information in a rolodex / contact file is very small — even with workflow and related object links.

Salesforce also severely limits the number of database calls that a user can consume in a day.  Limiting API calls further shuts the door by curtailing access to Big Data files outside the Salesforce cloud.

So my secret wish to Marc Benioff would be embrace Big Data by increasing the Data Storage allocation to 1 GB per user – 50 times the current amount.  I believe that if Salesforce.com builds a Big Data friendly platform, “they will come”, meaning Big Data applications will emerge on the AppExchange that leveraged the increased information stored and structured in the Salesforce.com cloud.

Consider email; one of the most important sources of Big Data for a sales organization; others would be voice, images, videos and social networking links / preferences.  Emails contain a huge amount of information about customers, the intensity of their interactions, the key words they use to express themselves and who they network with through their TO:, FROM:, CC: AND BCC: behaviors.  But right now it is not practical to store and analyze mountains of raw email data in Salesforce.com.  The typical user runs out of storage before enough email data could be aggregated.  Currently, an Enterprise Edition user in a company with more than 50 SFDC users can only store 3,333 emails before running out of space.  The average business user receives and sends 25 relevant emails per day.  If these emails are sorted and stored in the right Salesforce records, the user will run out of Data Storage in 133 days – less than ½ a year.  That is not a practical scenario.  Once the Data Storage allocation is exhaust, the user has to pay an extra $300 per year to get an additional 50MB – enough space to store an additional 333 days of email.

With such a severe data limit, Salesforce users are denied the opportunity to analyze their email activity and its content for trends or insights that might make them more effective.  Sales managers are blocked from having the data at their fingertips that could be used to improve email response management and sales operations.

Perhaps these data limits are there to prompt enterprises with more than 50 users to upgrade to the Unlimited Edition.  With the Unlimited edition, the user gets 120MB of Data Storage or enough for 20,000 emails, but still only a 2 year email repository.

If every Salesforce.com user were to be given 1 GB of Data Storage, then each user could store up to 166,000 emails or enough to last a decade.  I am confident that small start-up companies on the AppExchange would finds ways to turn that Big Data into useful information that would increase sales productivity.  For that matter, imagine what AppExchange companies could do with social networking links and files if they had the space to filter, sort and store them in Salesforce.com.

Marc Benioff, if you build it they will come.  My secret wish is that Salesforce.com becomes the leading Big Data company in the cloud.

Anthony Greppler:
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