Okay, I gotta admit it. I am drinking the Kool-Aid here at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference, and it is good. Very good. What flavor, you ask? Innovation. Mmmm. Tasty. Refreshing. And (being cloud-based) less filling.
I have spent the last 18 years in the CRM / IT consulting biz, and have watched the rise — and fall — of numerous companies and products. Some were great ideas, but ahead of their time. Others just adequate, but pushed by companies with a lot of cash and marketing savvy. And then there was Siebel, who fought its way to the top and stayed there for a long while by offering the “best available” combination of functionality, enterprise-class performance and interoperability, and configurability — not to mention vendor stability, and a very aggressive sales force and partner program. Back in the good old days, Siebel was an innovator, and it showed. Innovation was what set Siebel apart from its competitors; corporate drive was what funded the innovation.
But then Oracle bought Siebel. Now, some would regard Oracle as a company that innovates by acquisition. I’m sure Oracle would like its customers to think so. Others would say it seems more like Oracle is where innovation goes to die. At least for acquired companies. I’m not knocking Oracle — they’re a solid company that offers a very compelling “one-stop-shopping” technology footprint for the enterprise, and they still continue to do database better than anyone else on the planet, and OBIEE is the promise of Siebel Analytics made manifest. But in trying to be all things to all people, Oracle has often sucked the lifeblood out of innovative acquired companies like Siebel. And so it is that opportunity has not only knocked, but damn near kicked the door down for Salesforce.com.
Salesforce.com, in just 10 short years, has gone from completely unknown, to the unquestionable 800-pound gorilla of the CRM space. Yes, there are various ways to define market leadership, and I’m sure Oracle can still find ways to call Siebel a market leader, but let’s face it: Salesforce.com has people EXCITED. SFDC alleged on the Dreamforce website that 12,000 would be in attendance, and insiders have told me the internal stretch goal was 15,000. Well, guess what? 19,000 people attended the show this week — in this economy. The Day 1 keynote start was delayed 40 minutes just to allow the overwhelming crowds to process through check-in and get to the keynote.
SFDC is also beating Oracle left and right at the deal level. We have seen a steady stream of clients this year — large enterprise clients — jumping ship from Siebel to Oracle. Faced with the pain, time, and cost of upgrading from Siebel 7.x to Siebel 8, they are just throwing in the towel on Siebel altogether, and moving to Salesforce.com.
Why? Upgrade time, pain, and cost are certainly the drivers that make them do the due diligence of looking at non-Siebel alternative. But on its own merits, SFDC is beating Siebel on-premise, Oracle CRM On-Demand, and other CRM applications. So SFDC has achieved not just competitive parity at the enterprise level, but actual competitive superiority.
And then — and this is the entire point of this blog — on top of all that, SFDC has heaped a metric ton of INNOVATION. Application-level stuff like Sales Genius, Cloud Scheduler (like Evite for business meetings), Content Library (think Apple’s Cover Flow meets YouTube for presentations and other business docs), and Chatter (the “big” announcement of the DF09 Day 1 Keynote) that securely brings a very nice hybrid of Facebook-like and Twitter-like functionality to the enterprise, and consolidates internal human-generated, application generated, and externally-generated FB & Twitter updates into a “newsfeed” embedded in every standard SFDC object. But not just app-level stuff, also platform-level innovation, like 5-minute upgrades, a new bulk-load API, one-click deployment, Salesforce-to-Salesforce integration, and Force.com sites.
There’s more, of course, too much to list here. But the point is, Salesforce has the three key ingredients of potentially huge success, not just in the CRM market, but in the enterprise applications space overall: real functional capabilities, corporate drive, and continuous, leapfrog-style innovation. Kudos to Marc Benioff and everyone at Salesforce.com for SFDC becoming a $1.3B run-rate company, especially in this economy. But mark my words, they won’t stay small like that for long.
Do you like apples? More thoughts about SFDC’s future tomorrow. . .
As usual, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Please leave a comment here or on our Facebook page.
Thanks!
Eric Heine
Vice President
Integra Technology Consulting
781-890-0070
eheine at integratc dot com
Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/IntegraTC
