By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Frank Sinatra’s album of “suicide songs,” as he called them, Only The Lonely:
First CoffeeSM’s off to salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2005 in San Francisco tomorrow
morning – leave Antalya at 5:00 a.m., fly through Istanbul and Chicago,
landing in the Queen of Cities that same day at eight in the evening. You can
do things like that, travel for twenty hours and arrive a few hours after you
leave when you lose ten hours in a day. Wonderful things, time zones. So
efficient.
Tip Your Waitress: Every organization has their press
relations people, whatever they’re called their job includes the grim task of
having to interact with, pacify and inform the human subspecies known as
journalists, a job only slightly less difficult and thankless than coordinating
Baptist missionaries in Saudi Arabia.
But when it’s done well it can be done quite well indeed – Angela Lipscomb at SAS is one of the
better ones First CoffeeSM’s encountered – and Mentha Benek has done an outstanding job making First CoffeeSM’s
trip a) possible, and b) smooth, arranging interviews, the hotel, all the
details necessary. Many thanks, Mentha,
look forward to meeting you.
Among other things to look forward to next week in this
column are interviews Mentha’s arranged for First CoffeeSM with Jim Steele, president of salesforce.com
and Bonnie Crater, VP and GM of
Supportforce. The interviews published occasionally here have become a popular
feature, so Jim and Bonnie will fit right in. First CoffeeSM will
also try to catch up with former comrade-in-arms Bob Thompson, who’ll be at Dreamforce and who runs the highly
successful CRMGuru.com and pick his brain over what’s coming up in the
industry, hopefully over a lunch Bob’s paying for.
One thing of import will be salesforce.com’s rumored
morphing from a midmarket hosted CRM player to enterprise hosted CRM player.
They’re getting a few enterprise contracts here and there, treading on SAP, Siebel
and Oracle’s toes, is that where they really see their future, or is that just
a nice sideline for them? Are they really changing their identity or just
taking opportunities where they see them?
After all, analysts expect them to improve on their
currently-stated 300,000 subsrcribers by having 400,000 or so by January, where
do they see most of those customers coming from? Whose lunch are they eating?
We’ll also look at their Asynchronous
Java and Extensible Markup Language toolkit (a.k.a. AJAX), “aimed at helping
customers easily integrate salesforce.com's sales software with outside
applications like Google,” according to industry observer Stacy
Cowley.
There will be a different
First CoffeeSM schedule during Dreamforce, it won’t be up before
six in the morning as it is now, but will be published with more exclusive,
breaking content at later times in the day to reflect the importance of what’s
happening at Dreamforce. What with dozens of product announcements from
salesforce.com partners set to be released, executive interviews, a hundred
vendors exhibiting and over three thousand attendees there won’t be a lack of
content, don’t worry.
So maybe First CoffeeSM can change to Last Anchor
SteamSM during the conference, or First SourdoughSM, or
Fifth DoughnutSM. Dunkin’ Donuts outlets around the Moscone Center
in San Fran had better stock up, as it’s one of the things First CoffeeSM
misses living overseas.
There are lots of other tech conferences and company confabs
throughout the year, some more and some less important, but Dreamforce is truly
one of the more important ones of the year and First CoffeeSM will
try to give it the coverage it deserves, such as finding out what salesforcers
think of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s
painting a big red target on their butts, by dropping subtle hints the way
the Enola Gay dropped a subtle hint on Hiroshima that Microsoft’s got this
great new idea for something called “on-demand software” you sell by
subscription, and specifically that they’ll be aiming the firepower of the huge
U.S.S. Microsoft battleship on that
pesky little salesforce.com boat zipping around in the water.
(Mike
Ricciuti’s blog has Marc Benioff, salesforce.com's CEO firing back with his
typical understated restraint: “Microsoft's failed enterprise software strategy
has let the industry down. We have competed against them in the CRM market
since 2002, and they have failed to deliver a competitive product. Customers
are tired of waiting for Microsoft to innovate.” If Microsoft’s looking for a dust-up
they’ve found one.)
Can Microsoft do it? There are three serious firms in the
midmarket hosted CRM space, RightNow, NetSuite and salesforce.com, although
Microsoft calls out only salesforce.com, their real stumbling block would be the
salesforce.com-NetSuite-RightNow triumvirate.
In the past couple months First CoffeeSM’s spoken
with the CEOs of both RightNow and NetSuite – hoping to get a few moments with
Marc Benioff at Dreamforce – about exactly this issue, what’s their disaster
recovery plan for when a Category 5 company such as SAP or Microsoft slams into
their markets?
Both Greg Gianforte
of RightNow and Zach Nelson of
NetSuite pooh-poohed the danger huricanes like Microsoft and SAP present to
hosted midmarket CRM. They have to, of course, they can’t say “We’ll get rolled like a drunk in a blind tiger and I’ve always wanted to sell used cars instead anyway.” But First
CoffeeSM doesn’t think they’re merely whistling past the
above-ground graveyard, as both had substantive reasons for why Microsoft can’t
swamp their levees.
“SAP, for example, would have to completely re-write all of
its applications from scratch in order to build a multi-tenancy architecture to
match ours,” Gianforte says. “And, from a business perspective, they would have
to replace this huge services ecosystem they’ve developed over the years that
thrives on complexity and difficulty.”
“They will be too late to the party when they jump in,”
Nelson says. “We have a seven-year head start in building the functionality and
the systems to deliver software as a service. I don’t care how much money
or how many developers they throw at the problem, it will take them seven years
to get to where we are today.”
Gianforte points out that enterprise applications of the
sort Microsoft and SAP sell are “something you have to sell direct, which they
don’t do.” Indeed, one of the more delicate aspects of Microsoft elbowing into
the midmarket space is competing directly against their partners, who might
decide they’re done with being Microsoft partners at that point.
And as Gianforte says, Microsoft’s customers are in IT –
“not the business unit, which is where the on-demand buyer is.”
“I hope they do announce on demand products in the CRM and
ERP space,” Nelson says, as “it will be the ultimate validation of what we are
doing, and will force customer to look at our solutions as well as theirs.”
Salesforce.com’s identity as an on-demand vendor is a
coroporate cultural advantage Microsoft can’t hope to match, either. “These big
software companies like to take the money and run,” Gianforte says. “They have
no idea what it’s like to depend on a subscription model where you must satisfy
your customer to get a renewal.”
The “dinosaurs of the software industry” can make all the
noise they want to, as Gianforte sees it retooling to compete in the midmarket
hosted space is a poison pill: “To really come after us, they’d have to
completely cannibalize their existing business. They can’t afford to do that,
and Wall Street won’t let them.”
Should be a great event, First CoffeeSM’ll be
there, soaking up the cool, foggy weather instead of this monotonous warm
sunshine here on the Mediterranean coast (First CoffeeSM’s wife:
“He’s serious, he’d really rather live in jeans and sweaters than shorts and t-shirts.
Opposites do attract.”)
And if you’d like to actually meet First CoffeeSM
in the flesh, sit down over a doughnut or Anchor Steam send an e-mail or leave a message at the Marriott across the street from the
Moscone West.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
