I think that Marc Benioff is part of a vast conspiracy that involves Neo and the Matrix and that guy with the sunglasses who fights Neo all the time and has multiple copies of himself for battle. Part of the hive. (Please no Matrix freaks commentary on the mixed movie metaphors)
He must be. Salesforce.com has had all their moves planned for several years and they are getting damned good at executing their ideas, piece by piece.
I've mentioned this before, but I was one of the first to identify salesforce.com's nefarious plan to become a platform in the 3rd edition of CRM at the Speed of Light, based on a conversation I had in smoky Shanghai with Tien Tzuo, Chief Strategy Officer a.k.a. The Master Planner. He articulated to me at a breakfast meeting when I was in the midst of writing that final edition (no mas. no mas.) and I was intrigued.
I've been tracking it ever since, and, unlike some of their earlier marketing hype, they are doing what they have to so that they can dominate what MB calls the "Business Web."
Two things to take note of in the latest phase of the conspiracy to take over mankind's business requirements:
- The release of Apex, a salesforce.com platform specific programming language
- The upcoming release of AppExchange 2.0 which will have the ability to host both data and logic - thus overcoming the one thing that the on demand world has yet to offer successfully - a database that has rich functionality - one with an intelligent logic such as Oracle might provide. This one is a biggie. Because it now can natively link the logic and data and still be hosted.
What does the confluence of these two pieces mean? It means that not only can you use Apex to create the logic for your specific needs using the salesforce.com-platform, but you can also tie that logic to a hosted data warehouse using a native database that can provide you with the power you need - regardless of scale, apparently.
But MB isn't stopping with these two things - the conspiracy is vast - he knows that he needs to coerce the open source community and the entrepreneurs and even change or at least redirect the concepts.
AppExchange is his ticket.
How?
According to Business 2.0 in their October 2006 article on "The Next Disrupters" Monsieur Benioff is leasing some former Siebel facility in San Mateo (I think its the office that's across the street from where my publisher used to be). He is going to turn it into an incubator for apps developers and small companies that buy into the salesforce universe. He'll charge $20K annually for the space so that startups can build their businesses on the salesforce platform. Marc will provide (again, this is according to the article and MAYBE what came out at Dreamforce. I wasn't there. They inconveniently schedule Dreamforces at times that I'm occupied. I will go as soon as there is one that I'm free for. I hear the parties are great.) onsite programmers to help the entrepreneurs code, help them market, and even help the startups develop business - not bad for $20K.
All in all the conspiracy is vast and the changes of success will actually depend on the good hard business sense of salesforce, not bombast. There is a part of the article that MB talks about destroying Oracle and SAP. I'd rather he leaves that stuff to the guy with sunglasses who can clone himself.
The conspiracy is working so well without it.
Don't worry about Salesforce.com. Worry about Microsoft Live.
What will stop Salesforce.com being acquired by Oracle - to save face before the inevitable bloody price war in 'Me Too On-demand' starts and Salesforce.com faces giveaway pricing from bigger players who don't depend on CRM on-demand revenues?
Posted by: Ian Smith | November 26, 2006 at 01:17 PM