Cloud Computing: When It Rains, It Pours

Salesforce.com proudly displays a graphical image of the word "software" behind a red circle and slash on its Web site. The image represents the company's mantra of "No Software." Indeed, this CRM giant has made good with the offering of cloud-based CRM. Nothing needs to be installed.

Salesforce.com offers several hosted products. The most widely used is Salesforce CRM Sales. Another product is Salesforce CRM Service, tailored for customer-service-based industries, and a third is the Force.com platform. Force.com can run ERP and other modules from human resources to asset tracking. Developers can use the platform for running their custom applications, or customers can opt to install or test the more than 800 applications readily available from Force.com's online marketplace.

There are also products designed for marketing and partners. Salesforce.com offers a 30-day trial with all of the features and functionality. Signing up for the trial is a snap; you can also add more users to get them involved in the testing.

We opted to test-drive the CRM Sales product. Logging on as an administrator, the site opens up to a dashboard displaying information about the users logged in, the number of completed activities in the past 30 days and any information added, such as new records or accounts. All of this information pertains to the organization.

The dashboard page is customizable. For instance, it can be set to display company information, such as closed sales to date or marketing leads. Some may find handy the Google AdWord view, which displays leads generated from Google AdWords as well as Top 10 AdWord keywords.

From this home page are links to quickly create new objects. For testing, we created a new contact. The page opens up to a form; a user can populate fields on the form with data pertaining to the contact. The workflow between fields and forms is set up well. We were able to create a new account to associate with the new contact—all from the same area of the interface. This efficient workflow saves on typing and clicking through multiple pages.

Contacts must be associated with accounts to be shared among Salesforce.com users within an organization. Of course, no privileges are set in stone. Salesforce.com has very granular mechanisms to grant permissions and roles throughout an organization. Users designated as system administrators can establish a role hierarchy. This determines how an organization reports on and accesses data. There are sample role hierarchies, including territory-based, which places executive-level staff at the topmost role level and then breaks down sales staff according to the region for which each staff member is responsible.

We created our own role hierarchy. Users can be given rights to view or edit all opportunities associated with accounts they own, regardless of who owns the opportunity. Opportunities are the sales and pending deals that you want to track. Once a role hierarchy is established, users can be assigned to those roles.

Reporting, document creation and tools for companies to do forecasting are all included. CRM, as a hosted solution, saves on the sheer amount of infrastructure and internal resources that would otherwise be needed to add a complete CRM system to an existing network. Salesforce.com employs SSL encryption to aid in keeping your access and communications between its network and yours secure.

Trend Micro's Worry-Free Business Security Advanced 6.0

Security is another market to embrace cloud computing. It seems almost contradictory: Why would anyone trust the security of their data to an off-premise network that they may really have not much control over?

Trend Micro offers a cloud-based security solution that still places the customer in control. Trend Micro's Worry-Free Business Security Advanced (WFBS-A) 6.0 with InterScan Messaging Hosted Security (IMHS) Standard is a cloud client/server security solution that offers Web, e-mail and malware protection for laptops, desktops, servers and SMTP/Exchange servers.

WFBS-A combines the power of Trend Micro's hosted Security Server with agents that are deployed locally in an organization. The power of this product, however, lies in the cloud. Trend Micro's in-the-cloud Reputation Services stops Web threats before they reach an organization's network. The File Reputation Services is another Trend Micro cloud-based technology and is a cloud-client antimalware solution.

The Security Server installs and hosts the centralized WFBS Web Console, the interface from which the solution is managed. The Security Server also installs the security agents to the client computers on an organization's network. These agents establish the client/server relationship. The Security Server provides a centralized location to view security status information, downloading and updating components and for storing log files.

IMHS is a component that redirects a client's e-mail to Trend Micro's network. Spam is stripped away from e-mail messages and then sent back to the client's SMTP or Exchange server. Trend Micro claims a 99 percent detection rate of spam using IMHS. WFBS-A is a straightforward install. The install wizard automatically detects the domain name and IP address of the target server.

The Web Console is crisp-looking and easy to navigate. It was simple to add machines to be protected and to remotely install the required agent to each of them.

The management interface has several key menus: Live Status, which displays the current security health of an organization; Security Settings, the area in which actions and responses to security threats are configured; Outbreak Defense, where users can set up a Vulnerability Assessment; Scans, where manual or scheduled scans are initiated; and Updates, where users can configure the update schedule as well as roll back Security Server agents and components to previous versions.

WFBS-A is an innovative way of harnessing the power of the cloud with on-premise software. Although the heart of the technology is cloud-based, a solution provider or network security administrator is still given the reins of control to ensure safety.

The Bottom Line

Between basic server and storage infrastructure (Amazon.com), business application (Salesforce.com) and security (Trend Micro), these three vendors provide cloud-based services and solutions we can recommend. Add to that the services that Keynote provides, and we believe solution providers are set up to begin talking to customers about moving IT to the hosted model in areas where it can bring measurable ROI with acceptable levels of risk.

As with managed services, it's important to build in realistic expectations on both the savings side as well as the performance side for those running an enterprise that moves to hosted technology.

If a company's sales team finds itself routinely frustrated with how long it takes to call up a customer's data (remember the old days of the Windows hourglass?) that will have implications for that company's overall performance. On the flip side, a smooth, well-performing cloud-based application can save a business money and aggravation, while providing nice performance and a competitive advantage.

The difference maker, we believe, will be well-informed and well-trained solution providers that follow best practices with an eye toward the reality that even pretty clouds can turn gray and threatening in the right conditions.

COMMUNITY : You can connect with the Test Center at Community.CRN.com --Channelweb Connect. E-mail the managing editor at emoltzen@everythingchannel.com.