Many of you may or may not know but Foretuit is a brand new AppExchange partner, barely 5 months since our first security review and posting to the AppExchange, and less than 11 months since we were first introduced to Salesforce’s ISV team (kudos to Andres, Nicole, Leyla and Ron).  The old adage is never more true — you are the company you keep.  And, in the case of the Mobile AppExchange announcement, we were asked to participate first, and second, we welcomed the opportunity to be among a small subset (less than 5%) of the 750 appExchange partners currently in the ecosystem.

NEW YORK – CLOUDFORCE NEW YORK – Nov. 30, 2011 – Foretuit today announced it has launched its new Social Sales Analytic mobile application for iPad and Android tablets on salesforce.com’s AppExchange for Mobile, extending the goals of the social enterprise. The Foretuit solution provides a real-time snapshot of sales activities based on actual behavior, greatly improving sales efficiency and effectiveness by an order of magnitude unseen in today’s CRM offerings. The Foretuit application is now available on the AppExchange for Mobile.

By combining real world activity, such as emails, tasks, appointments as well as Chatter and other social feeds together with CRM information (such as salesforce.com opportunity history) a company can use Foretuit to identify patterns within unstructured activities– separating the proverbial wheat from the chaff within the sales pipeline.  Through the use of advanced analytics applied to a real-time snapshot of actual behavior (versus CRM data) companies can greatly improve both sales efficiency and effectiveness by an order of magnitude unseen in today’s sales management solutions.

“Foretuit maps social interactions to determine patterns that provide predictive outcomes for any front office scenario, particularly sales. The service analyzes the collaborative structures within the enterprise using unstructured data gathered from employee and buyer digital behavior – such as email and calendar data – then identifies patterns based on their roles, frequency of communication and output,” said Michael Liebow, Founder and CEO of Foretuit.  “The result is better deal lifecycle management, and improved business outcomes for enterprises at a lower cost. Now, the powerful cloud-based application is available on mobile platforms, tapping into the power of the Force.com platform, salesforce.com’s social enterprise platform for employee social apps.”

The Foretuit solution is unique in how it captures statistical details and continually refines and expands its models, ’learning’ behaviors within a first-of-its-kind, proprietary structure.  Since most sales teams are essentially mobile, the application provides the social, open, mobile and trusted capabilities of the AppExchange marketplace.  Foretuit helps keep Sales teams updated on activities without entering information, while it gives Management more transparency and visibility into sales processes without relying on a weekly interrogation or subjective reporting.

“Customers are continuing to look to our partners as they reinvent themselves as social enterprises and companies like Foretuit are helping them in that shift,” said Ron Huddleston, vice president, ISV Alliances, salesforce.com. “Foretuit, a top 8 finalist in our recent AppQuest challenge, shows it can integrate industry leading technologies like HTML5 with our Force.com platform to provide Salesforce customers with enhanced capabilities to drive real business outcomes.”

Foretuit’s new iPad application is available on the Foretuit website and now Salesforce.com’s Mobile Appexchange.  A video demonstration of the service is available here: Foretuit demo.

Cloudforce New York Welcomes Attendees to the Social Enterprise

The number of social networking users has surpassed e-mail users. People access the Internet more from mobile devices than from desktops. Salesforce.com is helping companies meet the challenge of this social revolution with the social enterprise. Today, companies must change the way they collaborate, communicate and share information with customers and employees to stay competitive. By leveraging salesforce.com’s social, mobile and open cloud technologies, companies can transform themselves into social enterprises by developing social profiles of customers, creating employee social networks and building customer and product social networks. Cloudforce New York attendees will be able to learn firsthand how to join this transformation.

About Foretuit

Foretuit takes an intelligent, predictive approach to business-to-business sales by determining patterns based on employees’ business behavior and analyzing that information in order to increase communication between colleagues, more closely link management to sales teams and to close deals faster and more efficiently.  Foretuit’s initial SaaS solution is available through the company’s website: http://www.foretuit.com and on the salesforce.com AppExchange http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.

About the Force.com Platform and AppExchange

Force.com is the trusted social enterprise platform for building and running any employee app in the cloud. Force.com powers the Salesforce CRM apps, the more than 200,000 custom apps used by salesforce.com customers such as Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and Sprint Nextel and the more than 1,200 ISV apps built by partners such as BMC, FinancialForce.com and Fujitsu.

Enterprise apps built on the Force.com platform can be easily distributed and marketed through the salesforce.com AppExchange http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.

The salesforce.com social enterprise platform delivers the most trusted and comprehensive cloud technologies for social, mobile and open apps.  It includes Force.com, the cloud platform for employee apps, Heroku, the cloud platform for customer apps and Database.com, the cloud database to integrate the social enterprise.

Salesforce, Dreamforce, Force.com, Heroku, AppExchange, Database.com and others are trademarks of salesforce.com, inc.  iPad is a trademark of Apple, inc.  Android is a trademark of Google, Inc.

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Growing up, I was surrounded by women who were deeply enthralled by the soaps, particularly General Hospital and the whole saga of Luke (Tony Geary) and Laura (Genie Francis).  Luckily, I was left in blissful peace reading my comic books and looking at the ads for x-ray glasses … and sea monkeys.  Now, I didn’t believe that x-ray vision (or, for that matter, sea monkeys) were possible, but it didn’t stop any one from selling them or, I imagine, buying them.

Grown-ups in c-suites in most companies have much in common with my younger self.  They want foresight, that is, vision and transparency into objects that they desire.  Management would like to peer through functional walls and down corporate hierarchies.  They want to know where and when to focus and, or perhaps more importantly, where not to focus.  The benefits of x-ray vision are significant to any company. And more so, within an environment of capital constraints where management must create higher yield from the same or less investment in selling resource.

Great news!  We’ve done what many thought impossible.

A small bootstrapped startup, only a glimmer of an idea less than a year ago, is one step closer to the stage at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s premier event, and becoming the industry’s newest Cloud Idol.

Every Vote Counts!

You can send us to Dreamforce and present to 40,000 people!  Four of the eight remaining companies move on to the finals at month’s end based on popular vote via Facebook “likes.”

Let’s start off by stating the obvious.  I’m not 20-something.  I’ve been around the block a few times.  I’ve run many large consumer and high tech businesses, and can easily say, “been there, done that” in many kinds of situations.

Early in my career, I cut my teeth in the consumer packaged goods industry; great preparation for a business career.  It teaches you the discipline of listening to your customers, a skill many techies lack.  An advertising great, David Ogilvy once said, “The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife.”  David once borrowed spare change from me for a taxi.  I was just starting out.

I was recruited into IBM when it was envogue to hire what the lifers referred to as “Big M” marketing people.  Every business unit wanted their own pet marketer after Gerstner hired Abby Kohnstamm.  I was fortunate to land in the PC Server business, an oxymoron of a unit if there ever was one, and a bastion of early retirement.  I drove the strategy and execution to trash the existing brand and re-launch the business as IBM Netfinity in September ’97 with Sam Palmisano and Andy Grove on stage in NYC.  Grove called the announcement “an inflection point akin to when IBM launched the PC.”  That business went from sub $1 billion in revenue to $3 billion in revenue in three years.  Key to our success was helping the market to perceive value for differentiated higher-end server technologies in our roadmap.  I learned then how to package tech for broad consumption.  To that end, I created something called “X-architecture” and take pleasure in seeing the concept endure some 14 years later.

That was my first tour of duty at IBM, I left during the first Internet bubble to start a consumer venture with a top engineer from EMC.  It was a great learning experience.  I ended up back at IBM in late 2002 when by happenstance I ran into my old boss at a restaurant in Westport, CT.  Now in the IBM Services business, I was asked to look at something called “SOA” (Service-oriented Architecture) and Web Services — and whether or not it would impact the Services business (answer = yes).

I fathered the SOA initiative into a $4 billion a year services business within 4 years and crafted the beginnings of an asset-based approach to the services lifecycle of design, build, manage.

I got the startup bug again in 2008 when asked to take the helm of a struggling enterprise mobility venture funded by the likes of NEA, Canaan, Sigma, Motorola and Intel.  I was looking for a vehicle to expand upon my work at IBM.  One where I could test out the assumptions of dynamic business over composite applications and a cloud infrastructure.  Integrated workflow on a hand-held device seemed like a natural fit.  Unfortunately, Dexterra was not to be that vehicle. With the recession and a fatigued syndicate, the best outcome was a quick sale which once I had the go-ahead was completed in a record 90 days without the assistance of a banker.

From there, Scott Sandell asked me to be an EIR for NEA.  This was a real treat for me.  I got to see the venture business from the inside, out, warts and all.  NEA asked me to join the board of a portCo that I repositioned firmly in the private cloud space.  While I think I would have enjoyed running the company as the investors wanted, I advised the investors that the company needed to be sold and quickly — having nothing to do with the product, installed base or team, quite the contrary, the asset was that strategic to a broad range of large vendors, but that the window for a sale was miserably short.  The point being that any of the buyers we would want to target could decide to make rather than buy and if that happened, there would be no opportunity for an exit.   Engineering teams are stubbornly proprietary once they get going, so its key to understand where in the product dev cycle they are if you ever hope for a reasonable outcome.  I predicted correctly.   We secured a major strategic in less than a year, and sold the company to Cisco in March.

While at NEA, I sat through many a pipeline pitch and reviewed many a portCo.  Given NEA’s size, there was a lot to look at.  What I didn’t see was the vehicle I was looking for — a dynamic set of business services over a composable application layer with a robust cloud infrastructure.   After one particular pitch last April, one of NEA’s fast-rising stars said to me, “you ought to do it yourself.”  Ever attentive, I said “do what?”

So I fleshed out the concept and an NEA GP encouraged me to go run it by Marc Benioff.  Never the shy one, I found out he was speaking at a Cloudforce event in San Jose last June.  I went straight up to Marc after the event (something most VCs advise never to do), introduced myself as an NEA EIR and asked him what he thought of a behavioral analytics play on top of Salesforce.  He paused for a moment and said, “no one’s doing that, we’re not doing that, you should do that.”  Well, that’s all I needed.

So I formed a team, built a demo and went back to Marc in September.  Marc had me show the demo to his product lead at One Market.  His product guy said he thought what we wanted to do was hard but that we had a clear lane as they weren’t doing it nor was any existing partner.  The product lead educated me on the short-comings of crm apps.

We then got our alpha program started, built a prototype, refined our gtm and financial model, created a brand (with vowels and a dotcom address that actually means something: foresight + intuition) and then went back to Marc on the eve of Dreamforce in December.

Marc got back to me within hours and asked for a demo video which we produced and sent him on Christmas Eve.  Amazingly, he got right back to us again and assigned his ISV lead as a sponsor.  We promised to launch on the AppExchange in the Spring — and have kept our promise.  I marvel at the progress we’ve made in a relatively short time.

We live in a remarkable time.  I’ve been able to boot-strap Foretuit into existence and I gotta tell you, while nerve-racking at times, there is nothing more exhilarating.  Assembling a team from scratch, vetting an idea with investors, prospects and partners, and then getting a new business launched, all on your own — well, it’s more professionally satisfying than anything you can ever imagine.

I’m real fortunate to have had the experiences I have had, met the people I have met, and do the things I have done.

I’m excited about the potential in front of us and hope you’ll join us on this journey, either as investor, customer, employee or partner.  We believe we have the vision and where-with-all to create a real disruptive game-changer while at the same time, enjoying ourselves and the challenge before us.  Oh, and sorry to be cliché but “you know what’s cool” — fully leveraged, this is a $1+ billion opportunity.

Watch this space!  And please, follow us on twitter, @foretuit.