By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of… well, now, here in San Francisco for
Dreamforce '05 First Coffee's just going to post as needed, next week we'll be
back on the early-morning stuff:
One thing to realize: There is never, ever such a thing as a
sold-out sporting event. Went to SBC
Park here in San Fran yesterday with a great old friend from the Chicago
area, as the Chicago Cubs were in town to play the Giants. Bought, ah, secondhand tickets out in front
of the stadium during the second inning, $50 club seats for $25. Great game –
the Cubs won – great seats, great day, great stadium, great beer, great kickoff
to San Francisco.
...
Thanks to W. Sibusiso "Sibu" Tshabalala, President and CEO of Pro-SAAP Solutions,
LLC who First CoffeeSM mentioned in a piece a while back, who
wrote in to say “You are correct; I 'never' have to spell my name over the
phone (smiley face).”
Might as well change it to John Smith, right?
…
As one can imagine there was quite a bit of tittering over Oracle buying Siebel here at
salesforce.com’s Dreamforce. Referred to simply as “the news this morning,”
salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s
keynote address a couple hours ago led off with that. You might have seen this by now, but here’s
the full text of his internal memo on the subject:
Oracle put Siebel
investors out of their misery today. We have been doing that for Siebel
customers for years. Our announcement today at Dreamforce will accelerate
that. It’s the end of software. Client/Server software is being
consolidated by Oracle just as mainframe software was consolidated by Computer
Associates. Oracle’s strategy is simple, instead of innovating, buy as much
installed software as possible, call it all Oracle Fusion, and make sure it all
uses Oracle’s database.
Now, the same thing
that happened to Peoplesoft will happen to Siebel, it will die. Customers
will look for new solutions and new providers. Employees will look for
new employers. Siebel on Demand, a joint venture between Siebel and IBM, will
be the first to be buried. Siebel on Demand is written exclusively on DB2 and
Websphere and runs in IBM data centers. Oracle will kill it. Oracle
does not sell DB2.
Now, the opportunity
to be the global leader in the CRM market has opened for salesforce.com. Our dream is becoming a reality as the world will move to new on demand
solutions. Already the fastest growing public CRM company in the world, with
over 50% market share in On Demand CRM, salesforce.com is well poised to become
the world’s new global CRM leader.
It is auspicious that
this is the very day that we are announcing our new strategy at Dreamforce with
AppExchange and our Winter ’06 release.
Aloha, Marc
Certainly this doesn’t reflect the sheer glee and sense of
triumph that Benioff certainly feels at seeing Siebel go under. There was
business competition between the two, certainly, as there is between anyone in
the space, but with these two it was always personal. Tom Siebel mercilessly
blasted salesforce.com when they came out with the idea of on-demand CRM
software, saying things like that company won’t be around in a year, and of
course salesforce.com is known for their vicious jabs at Siebel over the years.
All to say the salesforce.com people have an extra spring in
their step this morning, sparkle in their eyes, and, in their estimation, one
whopping validation of the entire hosted model.
The keynote this morning focused on… drum roll please… AppExchange,
salesforce.com’s vision to be the eBay of enterprise software.
“Calling all developers,” Benioff said in the keynote. Their
idea is to let anybody and his brother write applications that run on the
salesforce.com platform, list ‘em all and anybody who wants to, can download
them and use them, paying whatever price the developer wants.
It’s so key to what salesforce.com wants to be when it grows
up that Benioff said the name of the salesforce.com platform going forward will
be AppForce.
Benioff said salesforce.com won’t even take a cut of everything
that gets posted. Not now, anyway, First CoffeeSM’ll be surprised if
this hands-off policy lasts.
There’s a certification process you can go through if you
want to, and whether your stuff is certified or not will be noted on the site,
but according to Benioff it’s not necessary to actually have the certification
to post your stuff. Caveat emptor,
baby.
You can test-drive the apps before buying, though.
When it went live this morning there were 35 apps provided
by salesforce.com to seed the directory, and 35 apps written by development
partners. Benioff said he wants it to be as easy to download apps as it is to
download iTunes to your iPod, in service of what he calls “breaking the
applications backlog.”
It is a great idea, First CoffeeSM agrees, to be
able to create and distribute applications with no software, no hardware, and
no IT complexity, as Benioff said. If you have a Web browser and you know how
to operate it, you’re good to go.
As Woody Driggs, Accenture’s Systems Integration for CRM
head, said during the keynote “This is the first time I got my head around an
open-source environment in business applications.” He went on to say that frankly
he was a skeptic that his biggest customers would take up the on-demand world,
but he was wrong – “They’re asking us to implement this,” he said.
So salesforce.com is hewing closely to the eBay model – eBay
doesn’t guarantee that the CDs you buy from their site won’t be scratched and
unplayable, but as that vendor sells crappy things her feedback’ll reflect
that, and basically Benioff sees the AppExchange environment as self-regulating
through such methods.
EBay, iTunes – there are worse business ideas to emulate in
delivering business apps.
Questions of liability – if you download an app through the system,
it destroys your entire server and wipes out all your company data, can you sue
salesforce.com? – weren’t addressed. First CoffeeSM imagines
Benioff’s had lawyers working on that question and others like it, however.
Smart guy, Marc Benioff.
Although, as an industry friend of First CoffeeSM’s
said at the press-investors-analysts luncheon afterwards, he kind of misses the
Hawaiian shirts Benioff used to sport, he kind of misses the irascible temper
and flaming darts he used to throw a lot more frequently. He wondered where were the kind of jokes about the Oracle-Siebel acquisition like "Whaddya get when one dinosaur mates with another dinosaur? Two dead dinosaurs," that Benioff'd crack out in the past.
As Benioff was
describing salesforce.com’s strategy for using CRM as an app to get into a
company, and once you’re in there cross-sell more stuff, he said to First
CoffeeSM that was “exactly Siebel’s strategy.”
There were flashes of the old Marc Benioff: Talking about
Microsoft’s threatened entry into the hosted CRM market Benioff dismissed it,
saying that while they “are a huge monopolistic factor in our industry,”
drawing a laugh from the audience, he’s not extremely concerned since “they’ve
somehow misplaced Version 2.0 of their CRM product,” moving straight into
Version 3.0, which’ll be released… sometime. “Microsoft still has that
early-90s idea of how computing was,” when everything was proprietary, that
Benioff sees as so passé.
Salesforce.com does practice “co-opetition” with Microsoft,
basically, Benioff said, whatever they do we have to acknowledge and find a way
to make that work for our customers. He’s realistic.
One just hopes he isn’t growing up.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
