15 September, 2005 - 11:30am

The Dreamforce conference closed with a bang during the Salesforce.com Partner Summit in a no-holds-barred panel of VCs discussing "How to Succeed in the On-Demand World". Moderated by AMR Research Chief Research Officer, Bruce Richardson, the discussion was frequently akin to that of the McLaughlin Group, and proved to be entertaining and informative. Perhaps the most incendiary comment was that of Ray Lane (formerly an Oracle Executive) and now General Partner with Kleiner Perkins, who compared packaged software vendors to that of drug pushers. Ouch! Glad we deliver our solutions via an appliance and hosted form factors.

On the panel were: Gordon Ritter of Emergence Capital; John Hummer of Hummer Winblad; Jeffrey Beir of North Bridge Venture Partners, Ray Lane of Kleiner Perkins, and Clarence So of salesforce.com.

The panelists were all in accordance on the value of on-demand and its "intelligent reactiveness" nature, whereby you listen to what your customers want and then build it. Lane noted the unique ability of on-demand vendors to have real-time visibility into their customers, which makes companies like salesforce.com highly attune to customer desires.

The panelists also commented on some of the challenges on-demand vendors have faced in successfully selling into the Fortune 500. An example given, was that CIOs often have concerns regarding the movement of corporate data outside their enterprise's firewall.

Sxip Access, our secure identity management solution for on-demand applications, helps address this issue by residing within the corporate network. When authentication to salesforce.com is attempted, it's done through encrypted tokens containing the user's authentication and authorization status, which is generated by Sxip -- no corporate passwords are sent over the Internet. More information on how Sxip Access works is available here.