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.
Benioff said on a conference call:
I am excited to welcome back Success Factors to the Salesforce.com family. Success Factors dropped Oracle On Demand after the application failed to deliver and sales reps pleaded to return to Salesforce. When sales teams are demanding your application to support their own success, you know that you’ve got a superior service and certainly that was a factor.
Success Factor joins a long list of customers who failed with Oracle On Demand and then signed with Salesforce.com, including Motorola, Axion, Sun Power, GTSI, Xerox, and Barclays. And really, that’s just to name a few that have switched off of Oracle service.
Overall, our win rate against Oracle, both in service and in software continues to be very strong. In addition to the Marsh and Success Factor deals I just mentioned, we won large deployments in the second quarter against Oracle at Comcast, Thompson Reuters, NCR, AT&T, Abbot, Waste Management, Capital One Services, BBVA, Bancomar, the Frank Russell Company, and Developers Diversified Real Estate.
We think we can be very competitive against Salesforce.com in sales on demand. We think with virtually every time we compete with them on large deals with large customers, we win and in some cases we even replace them. So we think we can be the number one supplier of on demand software in that particular space.
Our on demand application business is much smaller than our on premise application but it’s growing faster. Keep in mind that the largest on demand software company in the world is Salesforce.com and they’re only a billion dollars.
Oracle will report its fiscal first quarter earnings next month. Your serve, Larry.
More: Handicapping the CRM field: Oracle leads the pack (but the race is tight)
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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