As illustrated in the thumbnail sketch that leads into this post, Service Force is a cloud-base instantiation of all of Salesforce.com’s resources optimized to support a company’s customer service reps. Chatter acts as one of the points of ingress, but there are others that can be custom built as a customer portal, a vehicle for displaying dynamic customer profiles, a resource for carrying out business intelligence and analytic functions as the foundation of customer care activities. In the spirit of RC, Teletech clients will be able to retain and leverage elements of their existing customer care infrastructure while contracting with Teletech to make sure that they can integrate activity from mobile devices or via social networks.

Working with Salesforce.com is not unexplored territory for Teletech. In August 2010 the company hosted software that comprised the infrastructure for a service called the Customer Interaction Cloud, which was jointly offered by Cisco and Salesforce.com. The BPO specialist has experience with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Jigsaw, Force.com and Database.com and is prepared to integrate these capabilities into its clients customer care fabric.

Acknowledging that the vast majority of its business comes through indirect channel, Voxeo has beefed up its partner support resources in significant ways. It has committed real dollars to market development and joint marketing programs culminating in distributing sales leads, investing in training, and maintaining a pool of “Marketing Development Funds” (MDF) to underwrite co-marketing and demand generation efforts.

Likewise, its Developer Portal has been retooled to include marketing and sales support resources – collateral, case studies, sample proposals, demos, Webcasts and the like – to help shorten the sales cycle associated with increasingly complex multi-channel platform implementations. Just as important, its “Obsession Teams” of support technicians guarantee 20 minute response time to issues emanating from Certified and Global partners.

Voxeo is making a successful transition from a “geeky” techno-focussed company whose strict adherence to standards like VoiceXML and ccXML, as well as the layering on of development tools and multi-channel resources appealed to the adventurous appDev Nation. Now it has developed a compelling story around “The Triple Cloud” – a concept that leverages its long tenure cloud-based self-service resources, while amplifying the message that deployments can be on-premises, in-the-cloud or both.

Voxeo has confidence in its technology and recognizes that competing for enterprise dollars at this point is a marketing challenge. The competition includes old guard hosted service providers like West Interactive, Convergys and Microsoft/Tellme. But all contact infrastructure providers are adding cloud-based options. For example, Cisco today formally launched its Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Center. It has hooks into the Unified Customer Voice Portal (CVP), as well as social network monitoring and a modicum of multi-channel support. Genesys and Avaya have similar product lines and cloud-based roadmaps.

Cloud-based e-commerce and CRM specialists, an inchoate group that pits Salesforce.com and its partners against Amazon Web Services and its partners, as well every CRM platform provider that has a hosted flavor (think Pegasystems, Oracle/RightNow, Microsoft/Aspect, SAP….). To compete effectively in this environment, Voxeo is correct to put extra umph behind its partner support strategy. That makes Voxeo Connect the right initiative at the right time.

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Today, Cisco announced formal arrangements with a number service providers to offer Quad on a hosted or managed services basis. The chosen service providers include ACS (a Xerox company) in North America, Logicalis UK in Western Europe, and Alphawest (a wholly owned subsidiary of Optus) in Australia.

Its objective is to give companies of all sizes, around the globe, the opportunity to experience Quad for themselves. Unlike a lot of social media, Cisco employees see Quad as a real boon to productivity. If integrated with Cisco Pulse (which I wrote about in this post in November 2009), it can be used to “tag” elements (like audio tracks from teleconferences or the contents of messages) to make them more suitable for sharing.

Based on its own experience, Cisco realizes that the value Quad will differ on a company-by-company basis. It is a service that each company will have to experience in order to recognize its tangible value. That’s why Cisco has engaged CapGemini to act in both a consulting and system integration capacity as part of the roll-out. CG’s roles will span from “defining use cases and business goals for social collaboration to implementing and integrating Quad within the customer’s existing processes and environments, as well as driving governance and adoption to ensure the effective use of the platform.”

This move to cloud-based instantiation of Quad will make it more competitive with Microsoft Lync (which is offered on a hosted basis through Microsoft Office 365 and the Azure cloud) as well as IBM’s collaboration suite offered on a hosted basis as LotusLive. That said, Cisco Pulse stands to be a real differentiator.

The premises-based version of SocialMiner was launched in early December as part of a larger suite of contact center software that integrates data capture and analysis as well as a new agent desktop and back-end collaboration platform called Finesse. Spanlink has designed SocialWatch to run in its cloud, to eliminate the need for additional capital expenditures and to enable its engineers and technicians to manage start-up and scaling of the service. Because Spanlink is an integrator and channel partner for Cisco’s full line of Contact Center products, it has also designed the service so that enterprises can follow a “host-to-own” strategy, where the hosted application, data management and reporting resources can be migrated from the cloud to a premises based solution.

In the survey Opus Research conducted last quarter, we discovered that employees, whether they are in contact centers, cubicles or offices, bring their favorite tools to work. They have put Google docs in the same category as Microsoft Office and made Facebook as predominant as IM. It’s a cultural trend that cannot be reversed. At the same time it calls for management and forethought. Implementing SocialMiner as SocialWatch is a viable tactic for garnering the benefits of monitoring and responding to social media comments without having to bear upfront costs to acquire new servers or to train technical personnel to manage new applications. It could be the least disruptive way to implement new services that are highly disruptive by nature.

Calling it “our seventh cloud,” Benioff has made Heroku and its ability to support Ruby, a peer with the core Sales Cloud (the initial salesforce management and CRM offering), Service Cloud (back-end for customer service operations including contact centers), Chatter (collaboration), Jigsaw (business data), the Force.com (ISV development tools) and Database.com (pure DBMS-designed to compete with Oracle and Microsoft). When Heroku chief executive Byron Sebastian joined Benioff on the stage at Dreamforce, he showed how the platform could be used to build Facebook pages quickly and easily for major brands, retailers or product companies.

While the Heroku acquisition puts fast assembly of Web sites and services in the spotlight for the moment. Looking at the full-spectrum of “clouds” (of “platforms”) launched by Salesforce.com reveals a rich resource of genetic material for both customer-facing and intra-enterprise collaboration. This point was driven home on the first day for Dreamforce during which several sessions when the demonstration of Service Cloud 2 “Live” depicted an operating contact center with live agents responding to emails, tweets, instant messages and “live” questions from attendees.

Demonstrations by Interactive Intelligence and LiveOps give the real world feeling to the Recombinant Contact Center and new architectures for accommodating the demand for both self-service and assisted service over a multiplicity of channels. “We have the technology!” And the demand for a flexible approach that spans “the cloud,” agile programming platforms, widgets and gadgets on agent screens, apps or browsers on the client side will give companies a broad range of solutions providers to choose from.

Benioff explicitly takes on Microsoft and Oracle, but in the realm of customer care, self-service and assisted self-servcie, he’ll have to add Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent/Genesys, Voxeo and perhaps Amazon.com to the list of alternative solutions providers. The five new clouds that his company has introduced at Dreamforce 2010 provide ample proof that he’s preparing for battle.

The statement represents Mecker’s commitment to “leveraging the innovation and knowledge of the community” and helping to see that customers are not locked in “from the metal to the UI.” This is but one more set of evidence that “Big Code” (meaning the major enterprise software providers) are recognizing that it is going to be the sort of widget-driven, componentized and often cloud-based world where taking a “recombinant approach” that enables customers and partners to splice together their own custom solutions that combine (and leverage) selected elements in the old code base in ways that conform to and integrate new technologies, features and architectures.

Mecker’s comments reflect the fact that SAP “gets it”, but the proof will be in the execution and acceptance by developer partners. According to the article, the company has established a Code Exchange within its Developer Network to encourage the sharing or IP among partners, integrators and customers. As part of a three-pronged strategy to encourage innovation in the areas of “mobile, in-memory and cloud” domains, it will be creating special “micro-communities” sometime next year. Obviously, it has a long way to go.

It was founded in early 2006 to provide an application development environment (of “platform”) that made it easy to add telecom and messaging features to Web pages and Web services. They used a RESTful programming environment (with tools like Flex, Flash, Java, PHP, along with Microsoft’s .Net and Silverlight) to build “recombinant apps” that leverage APIs, including Skype Connect and XMPP (now embedded into GoogleTalk).

The first apps, which were made available right about the time of the acquisition, were Ribbit Mobile (which competed directly with Google Voice, but worked with existing numbers) and Ribbit for Salesforce (which provided a tight integration between Ribbit’s voicemail, text, and call handling capabilities and Salesforce’s cloud-based management of contacts and opportunities).

Word has it (this is where I may be overstating what’s really going on) that BT is taking Ribbit “internal”. That means it is less of an “exposure layer” to enable 3rd party developers or enterprise IT folks to build their own solutions and more of an application manufacturing resource for BT’s personnel to develop and deliver ready-made solutions. Ribbit Mobile, Ribbit for Salesforce and a more recently added “Bring Your Own Network” offering are the pre-fabricated service offerings that shorten the lead-time for BT and carrier partners to deliver features and services that employ Ribbit or BT’s IP-based network. After an encouraging start (purchasing Ribbit two years ago), BT remains pretty much a monolith.

Meanwhile, the move toward higher flexibility and open sourcing of application components and cloud-based resources appears to be accelerating. As I noted in previous posts on this site, Orange is very committed to its “Open Source Mobile Widget Program”, which is arguably more granular and more developer-friendly than the BT/Ribbit “bring-your-own-network” approach.

More reently, IBM, with its “Cloud Service Provider Platform”, is doing its best to help incumbent carriers transform themselves into reliable IP- or cloud-based, service delivery platforms. This represents an opportunity to move ever-closer to role of offering a highly-reliable, capacious and feature-rich “services grid”, which is a construct we strongly urge carriers, system integrators, application developers and enterprise customers to take a long, hard look at.

Ultimately, everyone is getting poised for competition “on the glass.” In the enterprise setting it’s a “battle for the desktop”, where applications and features are presented in portals that include feeds, softphones and most-favored applications. Because “the glass” extends to mobile devices, BT and Ribbit were being far-sighted when they made Ribbit Mobile one of their first commercial offerings.

The latest cohort of RC app developers is dealing with a riddle that has plagued the IVR (interactive voice response) and ASR (automated speech recognition) community dating back to the late 1990s. Enterprise customers say that they want flexible tools and application development environments (ADEs) in order to generate custom solutions that bring competitive advantage. Yet, what they often want is a trusted vendor (or resource) that provides an inventory of pre-fabricated solutions that help them bring new products or services to their customers quickly and reliably.

In the world of speech applications, it’s a lesson that the likes of Apptera, TuVox or Voxify have learned as they morphed into providers of specific applications rather than mere tools providers. I think the enterprise demand for reliable solutions to specific problems is driving demand for custom applications, built from well-understood components and running on rock-solid lower layer network resources. That means BT’s approach (bringing Ribbit in-house) may accomplish both near-term and long-term goals.

At base, IBM is taking a pragmatic, “feet-on-the-ground; head-in-the-clouds” approach that has its roots in the idea of “the Service Grid” which I first saw described in depth by John Hagel (then at McKinsey) in his 2002 book, “Out of The Box: Strategies for Achieving Profits Today and Growth Tomorrow Through Web Services.” While this idea may be orthogonal to the idea of “cloud computing,” Hagel uses the beginning of the book to describe a layer of functionality that’s required to solve key problems surrounding security, reliability, transaction integrity, billing and orchestration of functions. These are the proven strengths of global telecom carriers.

In this era when phone companies are most fearful of becoming “fat, dumb pipes”, IBM proposes to provide them with ready-made resources to make their living through the care and feeding of a highly-reliable service grid in support of better Web services (which, in many cases is left up to third-parties who will take advantage of maturing standards, API’s and “ontologies” to create better mechanisms for intra- and inter-enterprise communications and commerce). This approach is very consistent with IBM’s own efforts to support instantiations of its products and services as hardware, software or “hybrid” offerings. IBM is careful not to obsolete, commoditize or cannibalize its current product and service mix. Yet it will continue to make its living by creating bigger opportunities for its customers, partners and technology providers to bring their own solutions to market.

Big Blue is taking the calculated risk that those solutions will incorporate a sufficient share of IBM branded SKUs. In the true spirit of RC (Recombinant Communications) IBM will provide the genetic material that comprise forward-looking solutions and let the specialists splice them into made-to-order solutions. The product lines span hardware (from appliances to super-mainframes), software (which has been moving steadily away from “brands” like Lotus, Tivoli or Rational and toward WebSphere branded middleware that supports the services oriented architectures (SOAs) that make cloud-computing and Web services possible and professional services, from the likes of IBM Global Services.

The largest telephone companies are the target customers for IBM’s platform, but this marketing initiative creates a whole new “ecosystem” of entrepreneurial firms poised to play their wares as part of a broader service grid. Mentioned in the product launch are the likes of Broadsoft, Corent Technology, deCarta, Jamcracker, Juniper Networks, NetApp, Openet, RightScale and Wavemaker. IBM has been a major investor in many of these platform providers. Big Blue also expects a broader range of application, technology and infrastructure providers to join the ecosystem as the demand for new features and functions are made manifest.

Pilot projects have already been launched by Orange Business Systems in Western Europe, as well as Shanghai Telecom and SK Telecom along the Pacific Rim.

Four different services, in two different categories are offered. Two services, “Private Cloud” and “Backup services” fall into the “Infrastructure-as-a-Service” (IaaS) category. “Security Services” and “Unified Communications” are considered part of the “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS) offering. According to promotional material, this pre-packaging is designed to provide a simple, pay-per-use means to adopt a cloud-based approach to enterprise computing and communications.

Orange Business calls “Flexible 4″ an end-to-end service that offers the services of best-of-breed technology providers in pre-tested configurations. We’ll see how that plays out in the marketplace, where such out-of-the-box or standard solution sets still must be tweaked to interact and interoperate with existing technologies and multi-vendor solutions. Support of “private clouds” is an important development and the Flexible 4 approach will minimize capital spending over time, the question is whether it has the potential to eliminate the need for professional services to integrate with existing technologies.

All told, it just doesn’t feel that flexible.