Sharing & The Next Generation of Enterprise Software

Salesforce.com runs the CRM system (Customer Relationship Management) for a huge number of companies — at last check more than 150,000. It’s interesting to think of the number of duplicate records that must exist in Salesforce. As an example, there are probably hundreds of vendors that, as we speak, are trying to sell their product into Microsoft. Each of these vendors has a record (or opportunity) titled, “Microsoft” in their instance of Salesforce. In many situations, such as sales to a large software company like Microsoft, this redundancy makes sense. Most of the vendors selling to Microsoft are selling very different products to very different stakeholders within the company. So it's logical to have a different record in Salesforce for each sales opportunity.

But for narrow industries like real estate, this redundancy makes no sense at all. As we speak, there are at least ten brokers trying to rent space on the 11th floor of 600 Park Avenue in New York. If all of these brokers use Salesforce.com as their CRM that means there are ten records for only one sales opportunity. Ten brokers would be entering information on the same opportunity in ten different places. This is silly. But this is the way traditional, silo'ed CRM works.

Real estate brokers would benefit immensely from shared records in Salesforce where they all could view the same profile for the same sales opportunity. The opportunity would include the most up to date information on availability, square footage, price per square foot, etc. This would bring 10x more value to Salesforce's customers.

Now consider what's happening in healthcare. The average Medicare patient sees seven providers per year; if the patient has a chronic condition it can be many more than that. These seven providers don’t work together. They’re employed by different organizations, work in different locations and likely use different medical record software. This means that there are seven separate records in seven different places containing seven separate sets of information for only one patient. This isn't just wasteful, it makes it impossible for providers to work together to optimize patient care.

Real estate, healthcare and many other industries need software that doesn't simply get the same job done seven or ten times across disparate organizations but instead brings all of the stakeholders together to use a single, shared record.

Of course there are a number of challenges associated with building this type of networked software -- not the least of which is getting disparate stakeholders to agree to share important information with one another. But I'd guess that a big segment of the next generation of multi-billion enterprise startups will build software around sharing and networks as opposed to silos and features.