The company explained its decision in a blog post on the site:

“We have some bittersweet news. We are extremely happy to announce that salesforce.com has signed an agreement to acquire Clipboard, allowing us to pursue our mission of saving and sharing the Web on a much larger scale. But at the same time we’re also sad to see this stage of our adventure come to an end, especially since it means that our relationship with you, our users, will irreversibly change. As a result of this news, the Clipboard service at clipboard.com will be discontinued on June 30, 2013.”

I wrote about Clipboard back in September 2012 when it launched its iPhone app and new desktop design. At the time, I noted the similarities between the service and Pinterest, in that they both allow you to save items from across the web and organize that content into “boards.” The Clipboard service allowed you to save links in a way that made them private and fairly useful because of the amount of content that came embedded in clipped material.

“Anyone who’s used Pinterest before will feel immediately familiar with Clipboard — the design is almost identical to the Pinterest layout, with the option of grabbing material from across the web, saving that material to “boards,” and liking other people’s posts.

But Clipboard doesn’t seem like a site for wedding daydreams or fashion photos in the way Pinterest does. Clipboard posts, or “clips,” default to private, and unlike Pinterest’s static photos, Clipboard clips retain almost all of their original web functionality, making them seem more like helpful notes-to-self in the vein of Instapaper or Evernote.”

In the company’s closing post, it reported that the service only gathered 140,000 users who created about 3 million clips. By comparison, last August Evernote had 40 million users, up from 25 milion in May 2012.

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The company has come under criticism for not having a European data center in the past, largely due to compliance issues – Salesforce is part of the EU-U.S. Safe Harbor framework, which means it’s allowed to handle European citizens’ personal data, but many customers would prefer the certainty that a locally sited data center allows. (We will be discussing such issues at our Structure:Europe conference in London on 18-19 September, by the way.)

Salesforce said last year that it hoped to open a data center in the UK in 2013, but this appears to have been pushed back a little now. According to a statement today, the new data center – the firm’s sixth — will be completed in 2014 in partnership with NTT Communications’ local arm, NTT Europe.

In a statement, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Europe had provided the greatest revenue growth – 38 percent — for the company in the 2013 fiscal year:

“We are doubling down on Europe with the announcement of our new data centre in the UK, which will support continued customer success in EMEA.”

Robin Balen, NTT Europe’s wholesale data center business chief, added that the new facility would be “powered 100 percent by renewable energy sources.”

Innovation Challenge

Meanwhile, Salesforce has also teamed up with a group of European venture capital firms – Notion capital, Octopus Investment and MMC Ventures – to launch a €5 million ($6.6 million) Innovation Challenge for startups.

Startups are invited to pitch their enterprise cloud apps that could run (surprise!) on Salesforce’s platform. There will be pitching events through Europe between September and November, and the winners will get seed funding. Apps will need to be at least in the beta stage, with demonstrable “traction, customer success and user adoption.”

“This is a unique opportunity for innovative start-ups in the enterprise app market here in Europe to receive commercial support to allow them to compete on a global stage,” Octopus principal Luke Hakes said in a statement.

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It is therefore very interesting to see a new Swedish company called Dexplora get involved in enterprise user interface design, starting with an app called GetSalesDone that aims to be a more attractive and functional front-end for CRM systems such as Salesforce than the apps put out by those vendors themselves. Why so interesting? Because these people have serious heritage.

Dexplora’s founders were after all behind The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), the firm that licensed user interface (UI) software to handset manufacturers from Nokia to Samsung – and shaped early iterations of the Android UI – before being bought by RIM a couple years ago. And, according to co-founder Hampus Jakobsson, it was during the TAT days that they spotted an opportunity in the enterprise sector.

“When we came to use CRM systems at TAT, we were shocked they were designed for management, not for the users,” Jakobsson said. “It struck us that it’s the same thing we felt in the mobile world, that software was designed for internal use, not for humans.”

Jakobsson maintains that salespeople hate using Salesforce’s front-end, even the whizz-bang HTML5-based Salesforce Touch apps that came out last September. The Dexplora founders considered developing their own CRM system, but blanched at the thought of competing with the hundreds that are already out there. Still, they saw an opportunity in the “abysmal” UIs of market leaders from Salesforce to SAP and SugarCRM, realizing that the problem here was more than cosmetic:

“If the salespeople don’t love it and don’t use it, their reports get worthless. Most people told us they put stuff into the CRM system just before the weekend or just before a meeting, and doing it last-minute means the quality is really low, so the forecasting is really bad. It’s dirty data, and we came to the conclusion that that needs to be fixed at the source.”

So they built GetSalesDone – not a CRM system in itself, but rather an easier way to use the existing market leaders. The first iteration is an iPhone app for using Salesforce’s CRM product. The app, which uses the same APIs that Salesforce does for its own mobile apps, isn’t just (arguably) prettier than Salesforce’s own effort; it also adds new features, such as the ability to generate tasks with full context.

There will also be future versions for the others, in each case trying to fill in the deficiencies of the existing platform – better overviews for users of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, for example. To get a flavor of what the Salesforce version is all about though, here’s a handy video:

How does Salesforce feel about this? “We have a dialog with Salesforce — we feel that they like us,” Jakobsson told me, pointing out that Salesforce has a platform strategy that might make them not so worried about users consciously interacting with the platform, as long that they’re using it.

Apple gave the go-ahead this morning to launch the app, and Dexplora will do so in around a week’s time. GetSalesDone will be free for salespeople to pick up and use, and the firm will make its money doing customizations for specific enterprises.

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Demand for this improved information flow had major players like SAP, Siebel and Oracle supplying a market with enterprise applications – which would need huge amounts of manpower and resources to be customized to suit the needs of a particular business. Applications grew to become suites of applications, with vendors aiming to provide a one-stop shop for every need. The original premise was that implementation of these application suites would typically occur over the course of years and run into the millions of dollars.

Then the cloud came along and changed everything. Now, the competitive advantage belongs to companies that find newer efficiencies through tightly integrated SaaS applications– and in the process uncover new opportunities. It’s this idea that inspired me to found MuleSoft, which is now the most widely used integration platform for connecting SaaS and enterprise applications in the cloud and on-premise.

SaaS disintegrated the application suite

Software as a Service (SaaS) has quickly blossomed and become the fastest-growing software market ever. Forrester estimates that by 2020 the SaaS market will hit $125 billion in global revenue, with 2012 projected to hit $20 billion. The appeal of SaaS is clear: With its attractive economics and frictionless deployment, its impact on the way enterprises now operate is immeasurable.

SaaS completely disrupts acquisition and maintenance models for enterprise applications. It offers fast implementation with little to no need for customization. SaaS applications are managed to a Service Level Agreement (SLA) by the vendor, which removes the costs of maintaining hardware and software in a data center, as well as the cyclical upgrade burden. Furthermore, SaaS applications tend to be more robust, since thousands of customers battle-test the platform every day.

SaaS offerings tend to be targeted at specific business problems. This disintegrates the traditional enterprise stack and means customers are no longer purchasing entire application suites. Instead, enterprise customers are able to pick and choose and then subscribe to best-of-breed point solutions for CRM, ERP, marketing automation, talent management, expense management and many more. Each of these point offerings look pretty much the same for every customer.

Traditionally, integration has been the pain point for getting siloed applications to work together. With SaaS, this pain can be amplified since there are potentially many more applications to integrate. Say a company needs its Salesforce CRM talking to its Workday ERP, and the SuccessFactors Talent Management system integrated with payroll and ERP, as well as Marketing automation and eCommerce applications talking to its CRM. Things get complex fast, and the number of integration points multiplies the more applications you need to connect.

APIs and the integration challenge

The advent of APIs for SaaS has revolutionized the way organizations can connect applications together and create new business models. With SaaS, you can pick and choose individual SaaS applications to run your business, connecting them together through their APIs. But even with APIs, each application is still different, which creates a challenge in finding a bridge to get the applications working together. (So, for instance, while SalesForce CRM and Workday ERP both have an API, they don’t know how to talk to each other.) Typically, integration needs to synchronize information between two or more applications, providing data transformation, security, reliability, visibility and error handling. Ideally this all happens in real-time so that your applications don’t get out of sync and users are always working with the most up-to-date information.

To further complicate matters, most organizations will have on-premise applications but want to adopt SaaS where it makes sense. To realize the benefits of SaaS without disrupting IT infrastructure calls for a new type of integration approach: one that enables connectivity on-premise, or cloud for SaaS and traditional on-premise applications.

Getting ahead of the competition

SaaS levels the playing field, theoretically giving all companies access to the same applications and tools. The atomization of enterprise applications means that companies can pick and choose the best applications for their needs rather than settling for ‘good enough’ application suites as before. Thus the enterprises that figure out how to make SaaS part of their application landscape will be best able to compete. The rest will be outpaced by the newcomers that understand how to integrate SaaS applications to build new business models, grabbing competitive advantage.

For this to be possible companies need an integration platform that provides connectivity for all their applications whether it be SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, or Workday; or on-premise such as SAP, Microsoft and Oracle. But its not just about connectivity, its about reliability and agility.  The connections between your applications need to be working silently in the background. You need analytical visibility to the information running through your applications to help tune your business and discover new insights. And you need to be able to respond quickly to changes in your business model, processes and applications.

In short, your company’s competitive advantage is no longer in the applications you use, it’s in the platform you choose to connect them with.

Ross Mason is the founder and CTO of MuleSoft.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock/Andrea Michele Piacquadio.

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This has led to the emergence of “listening platforms” such as Radian6 which allow companies to plug into a wealth of social media analytics to spot trends and monitor their brands. The services offer insights but also relieve companies of the burden of having to monitor dozens of topics in dozens of places.

Now, the early success of one firm, Manzama, suggests that the market may  be ready for niche listening platforms that are calibrated for specific industries.

Manzama is tailored for law firms, charging them $20,000-$90,000 per year for a “business intelligence platform” catered to their specializations.

“It scours through thousands of social news sources to uncover info that lawyers care about,” said Manzama CEO Peter Ozolin.

Law firms that use the service configure it by flagging client names and legal or business issues. The service then uses that data to scrape news and social media sites, and present all that information on a single screen.

The data can also provide business development opportunities, says Ozolin. He gives the example of a law firm that discovered personal injury lawyers were trolling social media sites to find “victims” to sue a certain company. The law firm was able to give that company a head’s up — and gain its business.

As social media continues to grow and splinter, the market for “listening platforms” is likely to grow as well. Salesforce bought Radian6 last year in order to bolster its social analytics capacity. Going forward, it remains to be seen how a big a role there will be for niche “listeners.” So far, Manzama is the only specialty site for professionals, raising the question of whether doctors, accountants or architects will come to desire custom-built listening platforms too.

(Image by Annette Sheff via Shutterstock)

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InfoArmy is coming out of stealth Tuesday and showing how his team of researchers can create comprehensive reports on companies that are updated regularly and are designed for the iPad. The reports cover a wide range of topics, including top competitors, executive bios, product descriptions, customer data, press releases and other stats. The idea is to arm business people with interactive reports right on their iPads as they head into meetings, giving them relevant information at their fingertips.

InfoArmy will charge $99 for a company report, which gives customers access to three successive quarterly updates. The money will be split 50-50 beween InfoArmy and two researchers — a primary and senior researcher — for each report. The researchers will be motivated to keep updating their reports or they will lose out on future revenue from the reports they author. And there’s no cap to what a researcher can make. InfoArmy currently has about 100 researchers spread around the world but the plan is to eventually recruit thousands of them, to create reports in all kinds of languages.

“We collect all the different information that you as a reader need. It’s about drilling down and getting progressive disclosure,” Fowler told me in an interview. “It’s very difficult to crawl all this information and get the accuracy needed for enterprise customers. Everything we do is hand collected by a primary and senior researcher.”

Fowler eventually wants to offer an unlimited seat license to companies, so they can get access to all the reports InfoArmy will offer. Researchers can sign up for reports they want to write up at InfoArmy.com, and it takes seven reports and an approval from InfoArmy to become a senior researcher. There are already several hundred reports on companies available now on InfoArmy.

InfoArmy will face competition from the likes of CapitalIQ, Thompson Reuters and CB Insights and others who are generating data on companies. But Fowler believes InfoArmy can stand out because of its crowd-sourced approach to the problem, which allows for massive scale when the system gets up and running. Also, the iPad focus is also unique and plays on the power of tablets for information consumption, Fowler said.

Fowler funded the San Mateo, Calif.-based company with $1 million of his own money along with another $1 million from John Peterson, who previously invested in Jigsaw. If Fowler can make InfoArmy into a go-to resource for business people and sales teams, he could have another hit on his hands and who knows, perhaps Salesforce might come calling again.

This story was corrected after publishing with the correct first name for John Peterson.

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The deal hasn’t been finalized, but it would be biggest purchase to date in the social media marketing space. Salesforce bought Radian6 last year for $326 million while Oracle bought Vitrue for $300 million last week. Adobe also bought Efficient Frontier earlier this year. Buddy Media, which helps manage marketing campaigns for companies on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, reportedly chose Salesforce over Google, said AllThingsD.

The deal comes down to the fact that CRM is changing beyond its traditional roots of managing the sales process. Now, it’s about handling branding, social media interactions and marketing for customers. That’s where Radian6 and Buddy Media come into play. With these two pick-ups, Salesforce will be in a position to help companies extend their presence on social media and help them find more leads via social data, giving Salesforce more of the services customers are coming to expect these days.

It’s actually a smart play for Salesforce and shows that it’s rolling with the changes in CRM. Customers are spending more time on social media and they are also able to gather more social intelligence that they can use to make business decisions. Buddy Media said earlier this month it managed 128 billion impressions in the first quarter of this year, up from 3 billion this time last year.

It’s also in keeping with the Salesforce’s deepening focus on social networking tools. The company has been betting big on social with its own enterprise social network Chatter and in December it bought Rypple, a social performance software platform. Salesforce’s new executive vice president John Wookey, who is leading Rypple, told GigaOM that social networking tools are helping companies become more agile and transparent.

While Salesforce continues to chase social, it’s still not clear how the Heroku purchase fits into the larger vision of the company. And the company could stand to make a bigger effort in mobile, which is proving to be an achilles heel for many big companies.

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In 2008 the company I work for, Precise (a developer of application performance management systems), was spun out of its parent company Symantec and into a private company. Suddenly, we had 1,000 customers to support, and a limited IT department. Symantec offered to sell us licenses for SAP and other enterprise software packages that we had been using. But in our new structure, we needed applications that were scaled down and easier to support. We ditched the world of licensed software and annual commitments to large capital expenses on equipment — the traditional way of doing IT — in favor of cloud, SaaS and virtualization.

As a midsize company with more than 200 employees, it was a tectonic shift. But after a year-long migration of our IT infrastructure and applications to the cloud, we shaved more than $2 million, or 70 percent, from our annual IT budget. Here’s how we did it.

Our first priority was to find a solution to support our customers, so we chose Salesforce and NetSuite for the front and back-office solutions. It took a single data analyst a mere five hours to migrate all of our data from SAP to the new systems. For customer support, we chose Drupal and for marketing we chose Marketo — both of which were seamlessly integrated using WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration.

Next up, we had to deal with the Microsoft Exchange servers that we’d inherited from Symantec. Microsoft Exchange can be a bear to support with a slim staff, so we opted for Google Mail instead. The e-mail migration took about five days, and later we also moved from Microsoft SharePoint to Google Sites for collaboration. The cool thing is, employees don’t have to do everything on Google. They can still access their favorite Microsoft Office applications, such as Excel, or use Outlook front-end if they wish.

We also went through a major server virtualization project in engineering — chopping off about 60 percent of our server expenses — and switched to AT&T fiber for networking and adopted VoIP for telephony.

None of the technologies that I’ve mentioned are new or even groundbreaking. But the fact that we could adopt all of them in a short period of time, integrate them using a single data analyst and realize such financial benefits is astounding. Even five years ago, small and midsize companies couldn’t afford state-of-the-art technologies to run their businesses. That’s all changed — and the playing field for IT sophistication has leveled out.

Not only is using newer, Web technologies more affordable, but they’re also more reliable. That’s been the case at Precise, at least. We haven’t had any issues from moving to a SaaS environment. We didn’t spend a bunch of money on hordes of consultants to get everything in place. It really was that simple. I give credit to our former IT director, Sharon Cohen, for choosing the right strategy and the right partners — that’s key.

Our transition to the cloud means that today we spend less time managing all the plumbing and more time working on our own products. We’re even looking at deploying cloud-based systems for R & D. And let’s not forget, we are saving more than $2 million per year. That’s the kind of money companies of our size, which comprise the bulk of the U.S. economy, can really put to good use. We can use those savings to hire strategic new employees or bring new features and services to our customers. For midsize companies, there’s no doubt:  rip out your on-premise software apps, go SaaS and adopt the cloud across the board.

Zohar Gilad is the executive vice president at Precise, a developer of application performance management systems. Before joining Precise, Zohar held senior executive positions at Mercury Interactive, which was acquired by HP in 2006.  

Image courtesy of Flickr user AndyFitz.

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