You have to be able to say, the minute we know something, subject to appropriate security reviews, we can immediately surface that information on our website. That’s what we did the late last year with the Force.com Sites capability, where now you can have a public website: not something that requires log-ins and authorizations, but a publicly facing website that has a direct, genuinely seamless connection with data that used to be internal.

DMR: But you state an interesting – and difficult – problem: “Real time” obviously also means, how do I filter all the irrelevant information with the relevant information?

Peter: Yes, the world is awash in data and now we have to figure out how to how to turn that into actual information.

DMR: But it’s easy to say that you need to filter relevant from irrelevant data, connect the dots, and present information, than to actually do it.

Peter: Well, that’s where we made major investments in the last year. We made acquisitions in the areas of a data mining. We made enormous improvement to our organic analytics capabilities. We have very strong partner relationships with companies like Informatica and Pervasive and Cast Iron and Tibco whose whole expertise is in integrating data, repurposing data, and finding ways to get more business value out of existing data. 

Ultimately, it all comes down to your relationship with your accounts, with your contacts at your accounts, and with the decision makers in those accounts. Oddly enough it all seems as if everything is in some way rooted in what we used to call CRM because what it comes down to: what’s going to happen, what actions are going to result from this information. A person is going to make a decision.

DMR: Theodore Roosevelt once said that the most important, single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.

Peter: I believe that today, if you have an idea that you believe you can bring to market in the form of something that some people will find valuable, you need an email address, a bank account and a Force.com account: you are visible, discoverable, and you are able to make the financial transactions that turn you from hobby into a business, and you are able to package what you know in a form that other people could use and add value on top of that. And I believe that that’s how businesses today and tomorrow are going to be created and will succeed.