Some Randomness...Platform Wars; RIM Takes Virtual (Rim) Shot; Oracle Takes Public Cheap Shot; VOD Official Statement

I'm sitting here at 1:55am Dallas time, post-night-of-tornado-warnings-and-bad-weather-that-mostly-bypassed us. Also another night of a pitching-induced Yankees loss and I'm feeling a little....gloomy...tired...but I can't sleep.

Figgered that (I KNOW its figured - figgered is a figger of speech) I would wrap up a bunch of things, throw out some not-so-random thoughts amidst the noir.

VOD Rumor Turns Out To Be...A Rumor

.....First, if you remember an entry of a few day ago, I wrote about Verticals On Demand, a company that I think merits a REAL close look. I speculated on Marc Benioff's rumored investment in the company. Last night I received this email from Matt Wallach, their very smart VP of Marketing and Sales:

Hey Paul,

Loved your coverage of Verticals onDemand. Thanks for your kind words.

I am writing to officially deny the rumor that Marc Benioff is an investor in Verticals onDemand. Salesforce.com has lots of partners and Marc cannot show favoritism.

Hope to speak to you again sometime,

Matt,

So, consider the rumored investment put to bed (unlike me, dammit). I have no reason not to believe Matt, who seems to be a standup guy.

Oracle Cheap Shot...Repeat After Them 10 Gazillion Times

An add appeared in the Wall St. Journal on Monday that was entitled "Siebel CRM on Demand: CRM On Demand."

It was a simple chart that compared what they called Oracle/Siebel to Salesforce.com. What it was set up like was something like this:

	Oracle/Siebel	Salesforce.com
Pre-built industry specific solutions	√
Pre-built integration to ERP	√
Built in Email Marketing	√
Expand to a Complete Application Suite	√
Hosted on or Off Site	√
Secure Multi-tenant	√

What made this typical Oracle trash was the last entry in particular - which implied that salesforce.com didn't have secure multi-tenant hosting. That's just a straighforward lie. While you could make the case some of the entries might be true (salesforce.com is not hosted onsite for example), some twisted (pre-built industry solutions - not integrated into the out of the box offering (nor is Oracle for that matter) but VOD is building verticals on the salesforce.com platform (see below), but I happened to write a part of CRM at the Speed of Light in 2004 that detailed the physical, internet, server level, data, etc. security depth that salesforce.com had and it was powerful - and that was 3 years ago and its improved since.

Oracle knows that. This is just a lie.

Period.

Let Oracle prove all of their checkmarked claims. I'll print them here and give salesforce.com equal time for the bakeoff.

Monday Morning...Bruce Richardson is Like Good Coffee and More Cowbell

Every Monday morning, I get this free, I don't know what to call it...newsletter...bulletin...at 2:30am CST insomniac hours, I don't really care...from AMR Research written by Bruce Richardson (that's Bruce Richardson, not Bruce Dickinson who puts his pants on one leg at a time and then produces gold records - who knows what I'm talking about here?), AMR's enterprise applications thought driver. What fascinates me about this analyst is that his stuff is solid as a rock and insightful. He's not a big Enterprise 2.0 guy. Can't think of any time he addressed the social media issues at all. But he KNOWS the market space and covers it with intelligence and a thoughtful set of insights.

Last week, in his discussion on the successful earnings report of SAP, he noted one number that stood WAY out to me - 30% of NetWeaver sales were for standalone deals, with no other SAP applications involved. In a separate segment, he noted that salesforce.com was unbundling their platform from the applications.

As you well know, I've been a longstanding trend-watcher when it came to the platform play of the CRM vendor leaders like SAP and salesforce.com. I think its smart and a great way to position oneself against the owners of the desktop and to be the leader of the new desktop - the webtop. SAP is using NetWeaver to do the agnostic thing here and clearly is being successful. Salesforce.com did it with AppExchange first and now this official unbundling of the platform. Rearden Commerce does it with an SOA that attaches 135,000 concierge services. The battle for the hearts, minds, and walletshare of the business world/consumers has moved another step forward.

Read Bruce Richardson and someday you'll be wearing gold diapers - oh wait, that's Bruce Dickinson again. But DO read Bruce Richardson.

I'm Tired and I Want to Sleep

I'm tired and I want to sleep.

But I can't.

RIM Shots

I'm using the Blackberry 8800 and I have to say that I love it. It does almost everything I want and unlike the Pearl which had a camera that was pretty shabby, this one eliminated the camera and add TelNav GPS which has been genuinely useful though it costs an extra $10 a month. I'd get it or wait for the rumored 8820 which is the 8800 with WiFi. How cool is that?

I want one.

But that's not why I'm writing this entry actually. If you noticed, day before yesterday, RIM announced that they were unbundling a version of their software/OS from their now very slick prosumer devices and providing true Blackberry services (with the Blackberry rather spartan interface) on Windows Mobile 6.0 devices. In other words, providing a mobile devicetop (lots of tops floating around at this hour) service set that isn't device-dependent. That is a great strategy and I applaud them for it. Crackberry loyalists should recognize this as a move to spread the RIMjoy that can improve their market position - whatever device you own. So style trumps utility because you can get Blackberry utility now for real or virtually.

Very good move.

Zzzzzz...Soon

I'm gonna try and get some sleep. I could use a coupla hours. Wish me luck.

Oh BTW, SAP said, CRM is its fastest growing horizontal applications. From the mouth of President SAP USA Bill McDermott, no less. Cool.

G'nite, IhopeIhopeIhopeIhope.

Technorati : Blackberry Pearl, CRM, CRM 2.0, Google, On Demand, Oracle, Rearden Commerce, SAP, SaaS, Salesforce.com, Siebel, on demand, ondemand, platform, rearden commerce, salesforce.com

Comments

[john chang]

Holiday Travel Of America, Travel Incentive Products - All Inclusive Holidays, Resort Accommodation, Cruise Vacation Packages Caribbean, Thailand & Mexico check out http://www.Holiday-Travel-of-America.com

[jose gonzales]

We are one of the biggest distributor of medical uniforms and we are selling our scrubs for only $9.99 per set. Just go to http://www.cheapscrubset.com