When you’re the CIO of Facebook, moving quickly is par of the course. Tim Campos, who took the stage for the second day of keynotes at Dreamforce 2011, said massive IT implementations take place in a matter of just weeks to months.
Facebook’s inventory product for its data centre which went live in March, for example, took just a single quarter from conception to implementation.
“Facebook is still a very young company but we have accomplished an incredible amount,” Campos told the audience. “We have done this because we move really fast. The tools we use have to drive this and make us more innovative and successful. Our development tools really need to fit this culture.”
The problem for many enterprises, Campos said, is that the way businesses are organised is not how business is done.
“We have cross functional teams, so when you’re doing a performance review, why would you just want to get the people who are in your direct teams?”
The benefit of social applications, Campos said, is it allows people to find relevant information which therefore produces more benefit — something that has become increasingly difficult through conventional technologies such as search as information continuously moves in and out of the Web.
“We have to graph relationships between information and people and leverage that for the next generation.”
Some 70 per cent of Facebook’s back office infrastructure runs on software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology.
“And the majority of those are running on Force.com,” Campos said.
“Even in finance, we have fully adopted the Cloud.”
Saleforce.com used the second day of Dreamforce keynotes to announce a range of new products and services, such as Database.com.
“Social information needs a social database,” Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, told delegates. “Databases need to be reborn social. We’ve taken our multitenant cloud database and redesigned it.”
Database.com is designed to capture social profiles and integrates all applications in one place.
“In the first 12 hours, we have already had more than 1000 databases provisioned,” Benioff said.
Salesforce.com provides 100,000 records, with 50,000 transactions a month and three enterprise users for free. Enterprise pricing starts at $10 a month, which gets you:
An additional 100,000 records