Firm squares up to heavyweights Microsoft and SAP, writes Ian Campbellin San Francisco
SALESFORCE.COM chairman Marc Benioff was typically confrontational at the company’s annual customer event in San Francisco this week.
He launched a scathing attack on SAP and announced a new collaboration product that goes up against Microsoft and brings Facebook-style networking to business.
Despite posting record revenues of $331 million (€223 million) and leading the software-as-a-service model with its cloud-based sales automation solution, Salesforce still likes to play the underdog in a David and Goliath struggle against traditional onsite software vendors. Benioff seemed to relish the chance to criticise SAP in particular for its failure to join the cloud revolution.
“SAP is religious and fanatical and zealous in its denial of the cloud and it may destroy the company,” he said. “They are an innovationless company and I don’t know what they add to the industry.”
The irony is that the innovation surrounding the new Salesforce product is largely lifted from Facebook and Twitter. Just as Benioff was inspired by the user-friendliness of Amazon to start his own company more than a decade ago, he has now taken inspiration from social networking sites to launch Salesforce Chatter, a corporate collaboration and relationship management tool.
“Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than I do about my own employees and what they are working on?” he asked rhetorically in the lead-up to the major announcement at the Dreamforce event.
“We have seen the revolution about how to collaborate and it’s called Facebook and Twitter.”
From January, new versions of Salesforce’s web-based software will have a Chatter link on its home page. This will let users click into a collaboration page for real-time integration with applications, people and content from the corporate knowledge pool.
Defined-user groups can be set up to collaborate and share integrated content, including Twitter and Facebook feeds, as well as files and documents normally exchanged over e-mail.
“Applications will be talking to me, not just the people, and it will all come through Chatter,” said Benioff. “You can see everything going on in your enterprise.”
He described the product as a Trojan horse that will expand Salesforce’s user base.
Not just aimed at the company’s traditional market of sales and marketing people, the software will be sold as a standalone solution at $50 a month per user. Benioff claimed this would create a collaboration network that would be more user-friendly and intuitive than the intranets and software pushed by other vendors.
As one analyst observed, the company has drawn a “giant bullseye” on Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint. Indeed, it is seeking a piece of the growing market for corporate collaboration tools with what it hopes will be its first enterprise-wide product.
“It will take our competitors several years to add this kind of functionality,” said Benioff, unable to resist another potshot at exponents of file-based products tied to onsite servers.
