14 September, 2005 - 7:19am

The day started off with an excellent interview being broadcast of saleforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff on CNBC and his take on the Oracle/Siebel merger, which he humorously quipped "Oracle put Siebel investors out of their misery. We have been doing that for Siebel customers for years." The interview was followed by a number of speakers, the most interesting of which was the keynote by Google's Adam Bosworth on "Intelligent Reaction".

Bosworth's view on the progression of software development was insightful. He likened the old model of development to that of "state socialism", whereby engineers would retreat to their "campus" and take forever to come up with "five year plans" of monolithic APIs. The new development model is responsive to customer interests, whereby we try something out, watch and learn from it, and then iterate based on customer feedback. He described this as not being "intelligent design" but rather "intelligent reaction".

This process is accomplished claims Bosworth, by issuing a lot of releases, learning from them, and then providing what customers request -- not through obsessing over a "grand plan". He noted that salesforce.com has been highly successful with this, and the new AppExchange that provides for rating, testing and "peering under the hood" of Salesforce applications, is indicative of their responsiveness.

We totally agree with this user-centric approach to development. One of our customers, Irwin Home Equity, validated this and recently commented on Sxip Access' new rich client support, "Sxip was incredibly responsive to our needs -- by adding these features so quickly, we are able to roll out the enhanced Salesforce clients, without sacrificing security.” Read more in the press release.