My iPod is useless.

Every time I go to use it, I find that the songs are outdated and boring.  I even have children’s songs on it, the product of my three kids buying songs on my laptop.  Worse yet, my iPod is often out of battery, which renders it completely useless, even if I had the desire to listen to my boring, childish songs.

Therefore, Apple’s iPod is an inferior consumer device.  Perhaps.

A core piece of my company, Bluewolf, focuses on helping enterprise organizations deploy, adopt, and improve their use of Cloud applications.  Put succinctly, we have helped 3,000 companies in the past decade to adopt the usage of salesforce.com and other 3rd party cloud applications.  More broadly, Bluewolf’s professional services and Salesforce implementation best practices help companies to transform their businesses.  We call this Agile Business Transformation(tm).  Neat stuff.

While we may brag that we are the best, we are certainly not the only consultancy that provides services in these areas.  There are others.  And there is a growing group of “cottage” independents that are trying their hand at building the type of business that Bluewolf has become:  $50 million + in annual revenue, all privately owned, deep customer relationships, and, most importantly, the antithesis to what the “Big 4” typically provides.

So why the reference to my iPod?

Here’s why.  Just like an iPod, Cloud applications, and salesforce.com in particular, are wonderfully innovative technologies.  They put to shame the era of client server, mainframe, the lot.  Cloud applications can spin on a dime, automate tasks rapidly, and allow organizations to to scale quickly in the same manner that my iPod can go and grab all of my favorite songs and entertain me across multiple dimensions with much less effort than a vinyl record, or an 8-track, or a tape, or even a CD.

But, like my iPod, Cloud applications still require a significant amount of care and feeding.  They need to be melded to fit a businesses requirements.  They need to be constantly enhanced, to capture the “change” that is happening in a business, and to make certain that measurements are in place to objectively assess the success of the “change.”

A Salesforce implementation is only a part of making salesforce.com work for an enterprise organization.  Equally important is the on-going resource that is dedicated to the constant innovation that can happen once the Salesforce implementation is complete.  Just like my iPod will only deliver results if I am constantly adding music, and building playlists, and using Genius, and deleting the Barney songs which rudely interrupt my workouts.

Unless I forget to charge it.