ZDNet Must Read:
HP vs. Dell: Showdown at the Windows 7 upgrade corral
Here's a tale of two PC titans: HP and Dell. One executes well every quarter. The other doesn't. Both see big PC upgrade cycles ahead. Both are looking to ride... Continued »
Category: Salesforce.com
November 18th, 2009
Salesforce kicks off Dreamforce, announces Chatter
These days, two of the biggest buzzwords in online business tools are collaboration and social.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has just taken the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center to kick off the Dreamforce conference and is expected to introduce Salesforce Chatter, a new tool that brings collaboration and social together. (Techmeme)
Other coverage: Michael Krigsman: Dreamforce: Quick first impressions
The company, in a statement, says Chatter will “revolutionize the workplace” by leveraging social networking models that have become popular among the mainstream, notably Facebook, and bringing them to a secure and private cloud where people, content and applications will have profiles feeds and groups.
As you can probably imagine, Chatter incorporates things like status updates (I’m on a conference call now or maybe in a meeting), groups (which helps a project team stay updated), sharing (which allows users to determine who sees what) and, of course, Twitter, with the most relevant tweets being filtered into Chatter.
The Salesforce announcement comes on the heels of Cisco’s own unveiling of collaboration tools earlier this month and builds on some of the buzz created by Google when it introduced a preview version of Wave, an online collaboration platform.
The Salesforce model goes beyond just collaboration tools. This is a platform and Salesforce is opening it to developers as a platform so they can build their own social enterprise applications of their own. Likewise, the 135,000 native apps on Force.com will also become social, the company said.
Increasingly, as workers are mobile, companies are global - or virtual - and meetings are conducted over a video conference just as often as they’re held in a conference room, employees no longer can rely on walking over to a colleague’s cubicle to discuss a presentation.
Chatter is scheduled for release in early 2010 - though Benioff wouldn’t offer any specific date, noting that delays can happen. It will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com but there will also be a new Chatter Edition for $50 per user per month and will include Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content and Force.com. (See YouTube video below)
The company also offered a peek at a new user interface, scheduled for release next year, that looks cleaner and simpler but has some familiarity to the old UI, easing in the users who tend to not like change.
Back at the Dreamforce keynote, Benioff - joined by San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom - spent some time talking about the work that the Salesforce Foundation is funding locally. He also spent time looking back at previous announcements made by the company.
Interestingly enough, Benioff and team spent the first half of his keynote looking backward, talking about previously-announced services that were relatively unknown to those in the audience, based on the number of hands that went up when Benioff asked who’d heard of them. (So, it seems it may have been a good idea to review them.)
Specifically, he talked about the four clouds: Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2, which were introduced earlier this year. (Video) He also mentioned Custom Cloud 2, which he said will be the focus of discussions at Dreamforce tomorrow. He also teased to an unknown cloud that would be revealed at the end of the keynote, which ended up being Chatter.
He called it “Our biggest breakthrough ever,” describing it as Facebook and Twitter in the enterprise. Unfortunately, he didn’t get big rounds of applause for Chatter - largely, I suspect, because it took him at least 15 minutes of talking about his own experiences with Twitter and Facebook to finally get to the announcement.
As a side note, Chatter is a cool announcement but a long-winded keynote seemed to be forcing the audience to remain engaged. The news itself was buried into the final minutes of the speech. And company executives - especially Benioff - seem to be trying to inject some excitement into this keynote, including some bizarre Bruce Springsteen-like introductions for anyone who steps on stage. (”Ladies and Gentleman, please welcome to the stage… JOE SMITH!!!!).
The audience is clearly engaged already. Some 19,000 people are attending Dreamforce and many of them are already fans of the technology, so why the need to splash some “Hollywood” into it and try to sell them on the idea of cloud computing? They’re already sold. At Oracle Open World this year, there were cameo appearances by The Who’s Roger Daltrey and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, but the biggest celebrity on stage at Dreamforce was San Francisco’s mayor.
Maybe it’s me but it all seemed like showboating overkill, especially given that the keynote started 30 minutes and then still went over the 90-minute time frame, There were plenty of places where the keynote could have been trimmed to put things back on schedule. And, given that people started to stream out of the auditorium as the Chatter demo continued (and went on and on and on) and tweets reflected that attendees were not as engaged as they could have been, the company really sort of botched this keynote.
November 17th, 2009
Salesforce delivers solid quarter; Wall Street wanted more
Salesforce.com reported strong third quarter earnings and raised its sales outlook for the fourth quarter, but investors weren’t impressed given the company merely met Wall Street expectations.
The company reported third quarter net income of $20.69 million, or 16 cents a share, on revenue of $330.5 million, up 20 percent from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 16 cents a share on revenue of $324.4 million, according to Thomson Reuters.
Overall, Salesforce had a nice quarter to kick off its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco (statement). The rub: Many analysts were expecting Salesforce.com to beat estimates and raise its earnings outlook.
For instance, Cowen analyst Peter Goldmacher expected Salesforce to beat estimates. In a research note he said:
We continue to believe that Salesforce is well positioned to continue to beat and raise for the next two quarters given last year’s significant investments in sales and marketing, solid execution, low balled numbers and easy comps which persist into next year.
Salesforce did raise the sales outlook for the current quarter, but its earnings projections were in line with expectations. The company projected fourth quarter sales to be $340 million to $342 million. Wall Street was expecting $334.5 million. Fourth quarter earnings were projected to be between 14 cents a share to 15 cents a share. Wall Street estimate: 15 cents a share.
The reaction:
For the year, Salesforce is projecting earnings of 62 cents a share to 63 cents a share on revenue of $1.29 billion. That outlook is better than the guidance given in August, but on par with Wall Street’s outlook.
Salesforce said it expects to grow 15 percent to 16 percent for fiscal 2011.
By the numbers:
- Salesforce had 67,900 net paying customers, up 31 percent from a year ago.
- The company ended the quarter with $1.07 billion in cash.
- Deferred revenue was $545 million, up 16 percent from a year ago.
- The company had 3,814 employees as of Oct. 31.
Despite a solid quarter, some analysts expect some tough sledding ahead for Salesforce. Goldmacher said:
We continue to believe that Salesforce doesn’t have the market dominance or a broad enough product lineup to compete in an intensifying pricing war against Oracle at the high end and Microsoft at the low end. Despite the occasional big deal win against Oracle, we believe enterprise buyers are more interested in a holistic approach to CRM that mandates a broader IT investment. We believe Microsoft’s developer dominance at the low end of the market will help make a bundled Dynamics and Azure offering very appealing on price. While Salesforce has hitched its wagon to the ‘cloud’, we believe that the cloud is about far more than CRM and a proprietary development language. We believe the cloud is all about capacity utilization at scale to drive price performance. While we salute Salesforce’s marketing prowess in creating awareness of the cloud, we don’t believe it will be one of the ultimate winners.
October 28th, 2009
The month ahead: Will Droid do damage to the iPhone's mojo?
ZDNet correspondent Sumi Das and senior editor Sam Diaz discuss the new Droid phone set to release in early November. Diaz also previews the upcoming Salesforce.com conference and weighs in on whether consumers will buy Windows 7 during the holiday season.
October 26th, 2009
Salesforce, Adobe bring Flash to Force.com
Businesses who have already taken the plunge into the Salesforce cloud will find something new this morning: Adobe Flash.
The two companies today announced an alliance that brings the power of the Adobe Flash platform to the Salesforce’s Force.com, where developers build - and many times share - business apps for the cloud. Through the partnership, the companies said they are are offering developers a way to build rich Internet applications in the cloud.
The apps built using Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com can easily be deployed to users through the browser using the Adobe Flash® Player or directly to the desktop via Adobe AIR. In a joint statement, the companies further said:
This tight integration enables client-side data management and synchronization between cloud and client, simplifying the development of applications that seamlessly run online or offline across operating systems and devices, while taking full advantage of the proven scalability, security and reliability of the Force.com platform. Developers can use Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com to extend or enhance existing Salesforce CRM implementations and custom-built Force.com applications, or build entirely new applications to provide customized user experiences for any business need.
Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com is available today as a developer preview. The full release is expected to be released in the first half of 2010. The companies have also put together a brief (14 minutes) video demonstrating the building of an app on the new platform.
October 21st, 2009
SaaS: Shelfware as a service?
Software as a service is portrayed to be the future of information technology, but it isn’t quite the cure-all it’s cracked up to be. Shelfware and lock-in may not save you a lot of money.
That’s the message from Gartner analyst Rob DeSisto.
Here’s DeSisto’s talk at the Gartner IT Symposium in a nutshell:
October 12th, 2009
Salesforce.com, Dell target SMBs
Dell and Salesforce.com said Monday that they will team up to target small and mid-sized businesses.
The announcement, which coincides with Oracle’s OpenWorld, goes like this:
- The companies will launch certified Dell-Salesforce.com customer relationship management bundles via the cloud.
- Pricing will start at $9 per user per month.
- Dell will essentially resell Salesforce.com to SMBs and offer integration services.
- Dell’s Salesforce integration products include PowerEdge servers with integrated Salesforce.com CRM, a virtual integration appliance and a cloud integration service.
Dell and Salesforce.com have been tight partners. Salesforce.com’s data center is powered by Dell gear. And Dell is an integrator. Salesforce.com Marc Benioff and Dell CEO Michael Dell will present in a session at OpenWorld. Dell is also a keynoter.
September 29th, 2009
Jesubi streamlines, automates CRM software to wring more productivity from your sales team
Customer relations management upstart Jesubi on Tuesday announced its first product, an eponymous CRM solution that streamlines unwieldy Sales Force Automation programs through a sleek interface, templates and reports.
Designed as both an alternative or complement that piggybacks on existing solutions such as Salesforce.com or NetSuite, Jesubi’s whole goal is to reduce the time wasted inside CRM software so your team can spend more of it working on chasing clients.
I had Bill Johnson, founder and CEO of the company, come to ZDNet HQ in New York to demonstrate his offering in person. Though his company is three years old, Johnson has 25 years of tech solutions under his belt — and he stressed that Jesubi’s primary goal is to make CRM software much easier to work with for the end-user.
For Jesubi, that means far fewer clicks to get data into the system. Users can automatically record inbound responses, record voicemail, log an e-mail, see activity history and view status. Johnson showed me a marked increase of average touches per hour when he first implemented the solution on his own team, helping to increase appointment output and decrease his team’s cost per appointment.
September 15th, 2009
Feds launch Apps.gov; Cloud computing players salivate
Updated: The Federal government launched Apps.gov, a site designed to be a storefront for approved cloud computing applications. The move is designed to streamline application adoption at federal agencies.
U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra said in a briefing Tuesday that Apps.gov is designed to lower costs and push innovation into government agencies. The cloud-based software on Apps.gov are housed centrally and available via various devices. Kundra billed the effort as “a one-stop source for cloud services.” The site features business applications, cloud services, productivity apps and social media software.
September 9th, 2009
Salesforce rolling out a beefier Service Cloud
Salesforce on Wednesday will announce an upgrade to the Service Cloud offering it unveiled back in January, incorporating enhancements to its social networking tools and announcing plans for the rollout of a Knowledge-as-a-Service offering and crowd-sourcing Answers product.
The company boasts that it has been growing at a time when many other companies are downsizing and they attribute it to the demand for cloud services that allow business customers to do more with less.
The two main offerings on the social media front - integration with Twitter and Facebook - are piggybacking off what other companies are doing to connect with customers who are talking about their products or brand names in social networking circles. But building them into the salesforce tools is smart because it allows the companies to mash data to resolve problems faster.
The Knowledge-as-a-service offering is interesting because it allows users to take the customer and support data - whether it be information from a service call or a quick fix tweeted by a customer - and incorporate it into the company’s knowledge base. From there, customers can upload the info into the public domain so other customers who might have the same issues with a product can find the answers from a trusted source, the company.
A final offering, Salesforce Answers, will allow customers to tap into the crowd of the Internet, posing questions over the Web or within Facebook to solicit the “knowledge of the crowd” for use to solve problems faster and more efficiently.
Salesforce’s social offerings will be available immediately while Knowledge-as-a-Service will be available later this year. Salesforce Answers will release early next year.
Previous coverage: Salesforce announces Twitter app; further validates power of cloud
Salesforce partners with Facebook, Amazon to spark more app development
August 26th, 2009
Salesforce opens cloud to resellers, expanding AppExchange
Salesforce is taking cloud computing on the road, opening its force.com platform to third-party channel re-sellers - everyone from the local one-man IT shop to the big systems integrators. 
Today, the company will announce its new Value Added Reseller (VAR) program as a way of helping outside vendors who often help local, small-to-medium sized businesses manage their hardware, software and infrastructure needs.
By launching this reseller program, Salesforce is providing some answers to the questions that economy-bruised small businesses are probably asking about how to save money in the cloud. Many small business owners, salesforce executives said, are still leery of the cloud but do trust the local support technicians and technology consultants who advise them on how to operate efficiently and save money. In an interview, Mark Trang, senior director for Global Partner Marketing at Salesforce. said:
Some people have counted the channel out when it comes to the cloud. I think this it’s a vital piece of the channel chain. They have years of relationships with clients over the years, have trained their own teams, made educational investments and built out their domains. How do they translate all of this to the cloud? Should they move to the cloud? What should their strategy be?
The VAR program, Trang said, is designed to give consulting partners a way to make money in the cloud and maintain an on-going revenue stream by adding additional apps and features to the force.com platform that can sold to their customers - and renewed, with the channel partner - not salesforce - owning the customer relationship and contract renewal.
Pricing for the VAR program is $7.50/per month, per user.
In addition, the company said it plans to add services listings to the company’s AppExchange, an online marketplace where developers and companies buy and sell applications for the salesforce platform. Not only does it provide the VARs with a forum for finding new apps to offer their customers but also gives developers an opportunity to interact with them - possibly building relationships that could generate custom apps or extra business down the road.
The VAR program launches Wednesday. The changes to the AppExchange will occur next month.
August 21st, 2009
Salesforce.com fires back at Oracle in SaaS war
In recent quarters Oracle has been taking aim at Salesforce.com, noting that its Siebel On Demand was poaching customers. On Thursday it was Salesforce’s turn to return fire.
Following Salesforce’s fiscal second quarter earnings, CEO Marc Benioff, as chatty as ever, took aim at his trash talking nemesis, Oracle chief Larry Ellison.
August 20th, 2009
Salesforce delivers strong second quarter, ups outlook
Salesforce.com delivered strong second quarter results and upped its financial targets for fiscal 2010.
The company on Thursday reported net income of $21.2 million, or 17 cents a share, on revenue of $316 million, up 20 percent from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 15 cents a share on revenue of $312.7 million.
In a statement, Salesforce said that it added 3,900 net paying customers to hit a total of 63,200. Net paying customers are up 32 percent from a year ago.
In addition, Salesforce’s financial targets were in line with estimates or better than expected. To wit:
- Salesforce is projecting third quarter earnings to be 15 cents a share to 16 cents a share on revenue of $323 million to $324 million. Wall Street was looking for earnings of 15 cents a share on revenue of $319 million.
- For the fiscal 2010, Salesforce sees revenue between $1.27 billion to $1.28 billion. Earnings will be 60 cents a share to 61 cents a share. Wall Street is expecting earnings of 60 cents a share on revenue of $1.265 billion.
By the numbers:
- Deferred revenue in the second quarter was $549 million, up 14 percent from a year ago.
- The company had $1.03 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities as of July 31.
- Salesforce ended the second quarter with 3,653 employees, up from 3,607 in the prior quarter.
July 13th, 2009
Handicapping the CRM field: Oracle leads the pack (but the race is tight)
ZDNet Australia has handicapped the field of customer relationship management software and it appears that Oracle’s on-demand and on-premise suite comes out on top with a score for 4.5 on a scale of 5. SAP and Salesforce scored a 4 rating overall on the same scale.
Our sister site appears to be swayed by Oracle’s various CRM tools for businesses of all sizes and its efforts to make its application social with Web 2.0 gadgets.
The money quotes and the conclusion:
Traditionally, a company with half a dozen employees would not have considered vendors like Oracle, but now Oracle is serving customers in that space. So for small business there are plenty of compelling options to choose from, and none of them need to be on-premise.
And.
For large national and global enterprises, it’s hard to look past Oracle’s CRM product suite. Of course, all major players in this space offer custom vertical solutions, data analytics and business intelligence, but Oracle’s innovation in sales force empowerment through Social CRM is very compelling and marks the company as a stand-out in this space.
You can find the entire breakdown of CRM apps on ZDNet AU as follows:
June 30th, 2009
Too many social networks? GizaPage puts them all into one social home page
In case you hadn’t heard, all the cool kids are going “vanity” these days - vanity Facebook URLs, vanity phone numbers on Google Voice and now vanity social networking pages where all of your profiles, from Facebook and Twitter to Flickr and YouTube, can be viewed and managed from one easy-to navigate browser window.
This morning, a startup called GizaPage announced some upgrades to a pretty bare-bones but nicely organized social networking home page. Think of GizaPage as a browser window with tabs open for each of your social networking home or profile pages. But it’s actually a Web page with a single URL - yup, you guessed it - a vanity URL that the guys over at GizaPage are hoping you’ll use to replace all those pesky user names at the bottom of your e-mail signature.
The upgrades are interesting because they seem to go right at a sweet spot in social networking these days - companies who are using tools like Twitter, Facebook and You Tube to extend their online presence and market their brands. As part of the upgrades that are being rolled out today, users can now add skins to give the page a colorful look (or plaster with a brand logo) - as opposed to that dreary default color - and can redirect the page to a domain name or subdomain, something like social.mycompany.com.
June 14th, 2009
Salesforce opens Sites; offers free version to help push cloud adoption
Remember when the corporate Web site consisted of mostly static Web pages: a home page, a handful of pages about the company’s products or services and a place to learn more about the management team, contact sales or even find hours and directions?
Times definitely have changed. For companies large and small, today’s Web sites consist of interactive pages that allow customers to shop for products, query inventory databases, conduct live chats with company reps, read the company’s blogs or even become a follower on Twitter.
Also see: Salesforce announces Twitter app; further validates power of cloud
Now, salesforce.com - with its general release of Force.com Sites today - wants to be the company that not only hosts your company’s presence on the cloud but wants to give you the tools to build it, manage it and integrate it with the other salesforce tools that will turn it into a next-generation Web site. That means tasks such as tapping into an inventory database to keep an e-commerce tool up to date become more seamless.
The company first announced Force.com Sites at its Dreamforce conference in November and later opened it to 85 customers, including large enterprise names such as Starbucks, NJ Transit and Dell (see image), to give it a test-run. In that time, the service delivered more than 38 million page views, 350 million site hits and served more than 5 terabytes of data.
What’s new and interesting about the salesforce announcement today is that the company has included a free version that includes up to 250,000 page views per month. The idea, the company said, is to accelerate the adoption of cloud services by companies of all sizes (read: small- and medium-sized businesses) by allowing them to try it for free. And when the upgrade time comes along, there’s no disruption to the site or service itself - just the account upgrade.
Also see: SMBs to Salesforce: We want more SaaS
Yes, the cloud is still a scary place for a lot of companies - but there doesn’t seem to be a ton of risk involved with this route for salesforce customers who would like to be able to incorporate their salesforce data into public - or private - Web pages.
After all, the Web site is the original cloud.
May 21st, 2009
Salesforce.com delivers mixed fiscal year outlook: Earnings up, revenue light
Updated: Salesforce.com delivered a strong fiscal first quarter, but delivered a mixed outlook where it raised its earnings projections based on cost cutting yet pared its revenue forecast. Meanwhile, Salesforce.com’s deferred revenue tally was lower than expected.
Salesforce.com on Thursday reported fiscal first quarter earnings of $18.4 million, or 15 cents a share, on revenue of $304.9 million, up 23 percent from a year ago. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 11 cents a share on revenue of $304.7 million.
The company (statement) said it added 3,900 new customers in the quarter to bring its total to 59,000. Meanwhile, the company raised its outlook for the second quarter and fiscal 2010. Analysts had expected a rocky first quarter. For instance, Piper Jaffray analyst Mark Murphy wrote:
We suspect business activity improved in April, offset by overall sluggish demand in February and March, and occasionally lower pricing for contract renewals.
Indeed, Salesforce.com’s outlook portends some choppiness ahead. For the second quarter, Salesforce.com projected earnings of 14 cents a share to 15 cents a share with revenue of $312 million to $313 million. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 13 cents a share on revenue of $319 million.
However, Salesforce.com cut its full year revenue forecast from February. It projected revenue of $1.25 billion to $1.27 billion. Earnings will be 59 cents a share to 60 cents a share. Wall Street was expecting earnings of 55 cents a share on revenue of $1.3 billion.
May 15th, 2009
Salesforce stacks the cloud to ease operations [video]
ZDNet Senior Editor Sam Diaz shares his views on Saleforce.com’s cloud strategy. He says its new upgrade, Summer ‘09, is helping customers be more flexible by adding real-time features.
May 11th, 2009
Salesforce upgrades with case-sharing, new charts and more
Salesforce.com on Tuesday will announce a major upgrade to its cloud offerings for the enterprise, expected to launch next month. Among them is a feature that’s meant to expand sharing between salesforce.com users, the ability to share “cases” so that customers in need of support no longer have to be handed off to third-party vendors to solve their problems.
The features, being announced today, are part of Summer ’09, the company’s 29th generation release of its offerings. The lineup includes other features, as well – such as a workflow visualizer, enhanced charts and new automated e-mail alerts. But the feature that executives are highlighting is case-sharing.
Consider the example of an end-user having trouble with a cell phone headset. To solve the problem, they may turn to their wireless provider when, in fact, the problem is with the headset manufacturer. Instead of replying with a “not our problem” response and sending the user to the headset manufacturer the wireless company can maintain control of the support ticket but will share the case information with the handset company - simply by sharing it via salesforce - so the two companies can work to solve the problem.
This stems, in part, from apps that salesforce previously added - included those that businesses to track what’s being said about their brand and their products on social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook and also allows them to monitor search terms in Google to track potential problems.
Other features being announced Tuesday include:
- Visual charting analytics tools that allows customers to access an sift through data in real-time in order to make quick and smart business decisions.
- The ability to grant access to information to colleagues who might be involved in the closing of the deal.
- A workflow visualizer that attempts to simply the procedural process of transactions, such as company approvals or rejections, to making the transaction visual and interactive.
One of the key themes within salesforce these days is “real time,” such as the the ability to track information in real time or update the applications in real time. When the company releases the upgrades of Summer ‘09, they’ll just happen. Users will come in on a Monday morning and the new apps will just be there.
That’s the power of real time business in the cloud, executives said.
Also see: Salesforce.com: Pondering the next 10 years
Salesforce.com: High maintenance costs are pushing customers to us
May 1st, 2009
Oracle about to step up its SaaS efforts?
Update: Oracle is reportedly getting more aggressive about software as a service with plans to expand its on-demand lineup.
The Wall Street Journal and Reuters report that Oracle has been briefing analysts about its SaaS strategy. And apparently these plans go beyond simply buying NetSuite, which is majority owned by Ellison, or gobbling up Salesforce.com.
The Journal’s Ben Worthen writes:
The software giant is working on seven new online products, including offerings to help business run sales campaigns, keep track of employees and job applicants, according to people briefed on the plans and a company document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Oracle is developing online software to handle marketing and product management as well as a product targeted at the insurance industry, the document shows.
Update: There are a few questions about the Journal report. Sources indicate that Oracle isn’t planning any big strategy shift and it’s even questionable whether there are 7 new SaaS products planned.
Also see Dennis Howlett: Oracle’s cloudy announcements
To date, Oracle’s on-demand software efforts have mostly revolved around Siebel. But in recent quarters Oracle appears to have become more serious about SaaS and has continually added features to Siebel CRM On Demand (below). Indeed, the Salesforce.com mentions on Oracle conference calls have skyrocketed. Oracle execs now pan Salesforce.com as much as they do SAP these days.
The move runs counter to Ellison’s previous contention that there’s no money in SaaS. That’s largely true relative to Oracle’s overall business but the database giant is clearly dabbling in SaaS.
Also see: Enterprise vendors: in pursuit of reality
However, the SaaS deployments are getting larger by the day. Once SaaS players are starting to land big deployments Oracle has to start paying attention. For instance, SuccessFactors landed a 300,000 user deployment at a large retailer that is most likely Wal-Mart, according to two sources familiar with the matter. If SaaS is good enough for a massive retailer it’s probably good enough for Oracle too.
Why does Oracle need to make its SaaS move now?
For starters, there’s a big move by CFOs to cut IT costs and that means turning capital expenditures (large ERP implementations) into operating expenses (SaaS). Meanwhile, customers are pushing back on maintenance hikes (see SAP’s retreat). Then there’s good old fashioned competition—Workday, which landed a big wad of VC funding, Salesforce.com, NetSuite and a bevy of others are all threats to Oracle, which has to be getting bored buying struggling companies like Sun and BEA. And the final kicker for Oracle: SAP is still dawdling with its BusinessByDesign SaaS effort and to date is basically still a pilot. Oracle could leapfrog SAP as engineers overthink BusinessByDesign features.
More reading:
April 14th, 2009
Seven big tech acquisitions to watch for in 2009
In this economy, cash is king. Since in the end of 2008, big tech companies have been stuffing cash under their mattresses in case the current recession goes longer and deeper than expected. Even companies with strong balance sheets have been cutting costs, laying off workers, and scaling back projects in order to build up their war chests.
As a result, you have companies racking up huge cash reserves, including Cisco ($26.7 billion), Apple ($24.5 billion), Microsoft ($19.7 billion), and Google ($14.4 billion).
Meanwhile, with the stock market shedding half of its value between July 2007 and January 2009, the market price of a lot of public technology companies has essentially been put on a “50% off sale.”
Jason Hiner is the Editor in Chief of TechRepublic, ZDNet's sister site. Read his blog Tech Sanity Check at hiner.techrepublic.com. You can also find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, and JasonHiner.com.
SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
- Three Steps You Need to Know to Stop Data Loss Varonis Sensitive data exposed to misuse or loss... it is the stuff of nightmares ... Download Now
- Email Security and Archiving - Clearer in the Cloud Google The time is NOW for businesses and organizations of all sizes to implement ... Download Now
Essential Topics 
Recent Entries
- DreamHost customers hit with nightmare
- The Big Question podcast: Will News Corp. really pull its content from Google?
- SaaS and cloud computing: A look at the due diligence
- News to know: Thanksgiving tech support; Apple; Silverlight; Facebook; Black Friday
- Microsoft CFO Liddell to leave; Klein named new finance chief
Blogs From Our Sponsors
Most Popular Posts
- Verizon to AT&T: "Our ads are true and the truth hurts"
- My scareware night and how McAfee lost a customer
- Netbooks dead? Not when sales are up 264 percent
- Intel to pay AMD $1.25 billion as companies end litigation war; Is it a new chip era?
- Live from Googleplex: Chrome OS details revealed
- Memo to AT&T: When you're in a hole, stop digging
Top Rated
- Verizon to AT&T: "Our ads are true and the truth hurts"+44 votes
- Yes, Ubuntu can absolutely be the default Windows alternative+42 votes
- L.A. votes to "Go Google"; pressure shifts to Google and the cloud+31 votes
- Intel to pay AMD $1.25 billion as companies end litigation war; Is it a new chip era?+27 votes
- My scareware night and how McAfee lost a customer+25 votes
- New York AG files antitrust charges against Intel; alleges bribery, coercion+24 votes
- Netbooks dead? Not when sales are up 264 percent+21 votes
- AT&T launches Verizon counter-punch ad, keeps digging that hole+14 votes
Premier Vendor Content Whitepapers, webcasts & resources from our Power Center Sponsors
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online - Free Six-Month Trial for Eligible Organizations
-
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online provides fast online access, simple contact management and better sales performance for a low monthly cost - the best value on the market today.
- Learn more about the free, six-month trial offer>>
- Keep Up With The Latest In Document Management with The DocuMentor.
-
Doc delivers the scoop on today's enterprise content management, printer maintenance, and all other issues related to document management. It's the DocuMentor Blog.
- Learn more >>
- New Online Dashboard for IT Leaders
-
Read about top issues IT decision-makers face every day, plus get cost-effective solutions to real-life IT problems.
- Learn more >>
Archives
Favorite Links
Favorite Sites
- Ars Technica
- Deal Journal
- Engadget
- Enterprise Irregulars
- GigaOm
- Google Blogoscoped
- Horses for Sources
- Mac Rumors
- Mashable
- Official Google Blog
- Read/WriteWeb
- Scobleizer
- Seeking Alpha
- TechCrunch
- Techdirt
- Techmeme
- The Ponderings of Woodrow
- The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
- Valleywag
- ZDNet: Latest blogs and news
ZDNet Blogs
- All About Microsoft
- The Apple Core
- Between the Lines
- BriefingsDirect
- Collaboration 2.0
- Dev Connection
- Digital Cameras & Camcorders
- Ed Bott's Microsoft Report
- Emerging Tech
- Enterprise Web 2.0
- Forrester Research
- Googling Google
- GreenTech Pastures
- Hardware 2.0
- Home Theater
- iGeneration
- Irregular Enterprise
- IT Project Failures
- Laptops & Desktops
- Lawgarithms
- Linux and Open Source
- Managing L'unix
- The Mobile Gadgeteer
- On Sustainability
- Rational Rants
- The Semantic Web
- Service Oriented
- Smartphones and Cell Phones
- Social Business
- Social CRM: The Conversation
- Software & Services Safari
- Software as Services
- Storage Bits
- Team Think
- Tech Broiler
- Technology and the Global Supply Chain
- Tom Foremski: IMHO
- The ToyBox
- Virtually Speaking
- The Web Life
- ZDNet Education
- ZDNet Government
- ZDNet Healthcare
- Zero Day
White Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads
- Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now
- The Impact of Virtualization Software on Operating Environments VMware Today's use of virtualization technology allows IT professionals to ... Download Now
- Virtualization: Architectural Considerations And Other Evaluation Criteria VMware Of the many approaches to x86 systems virtualization available in the ... Download Now
Enterprise Applications
- Check out some of the easiest and most powerful ways to boost productivity while saving money on your application infrastructure. See ZDNet's comprehensive Enterprise Application resource center, now!
- New Online Dashboard
-
- Read about top issues IT decision-makers face every day, plus get cost effective solutions to real life IT problems. Oracle Topline
-
