A couple of weeks ago I had a web demo with Steve from salesforce.com presenting our force.com based standard solution for online advertising sales. While appreciating it a lot to discuss and exchange our experiences in the media industry he incidentally classified our solution as a “Fourth generation cloud solution”.

Being surprised for a while I thought: “Hey, is fourth generation good or bad? And what generations were there before? If it is something positive this might be wonderful marketing claim we could use.”

So I began to think and cluster the different stages of our own solution history. Since we accompanied this development almost from the start of salesforce.com, we walked with our clients through the different stages of cloud-based IT projects and solutions in ad sales successfully.

In a digital world where technology life cycles develop, grow and mature much faster than ever, structures and phases are often hard to define due to their complexity and diversity. Especially cloud computing is for many companies still a black box. Nevertheless, although this document is just an examination of a small but fast growing niche segment of the media industry based on a single cloud platform, the essence can hopefully be transferred to other industries as well. Continue reading →