David Bradshaw
Salesforce.com and bundled applications
According to a report in Computer Business Review, salesforce.com is considering bundling more applications together, providing a single point of customer relationships for those that use salesforce.com's and other vendor's applications from salesforce.com's AppExchange. Comment: At first sight this appears to be little more than some obvious tidying up, but there are lessons to learn for everyone about the way that the software market is transforming. Salesforce.com has been remarkably candid about the fact that it is making up some strategy over the AppExchange as it goes along.In a conversation last month, CEO Marc Benioff made it clear that CRM is not the final destination for salesforce.com's own offerings. Indeed, he has held the same ambition for many years: to make salesforce.com a 'business platform', not just a CRM vendor. However, we don't think it will be quite as simple as salesforce.com broadening the functionality to take in back-office functions. Why? Because it wouldn't be worth launching with anything less than a comprehensive set of functions, and this would be far too expensive and risky. More logical would be collaboration with an existing software vendor that had no hosted offering. There's no shortage of potential candidates, including Intuit, Lawson, Sage, SSA or Systems Union, though some may see salesforce.com as a competitive threat as well. But this almost certainly is not salesforce.com's direction.Instead, we see a future where software as a service becomes increasingly intermingled with business services. For example, in the CRM domain there is the possibility to include a wide range of marketing services, competitor information, sales training, customer intelligence and competitive product information. Salesforce.com has no intention of providing these services itself, indeed, some of these are already available via salesforce.com partners and the AppExchange. However, they increasingly push salesforce.com towards its goal of becoming a business platform, not merely a technology provider.Others can take a similar route, such as NetSuite, RightNow and Siebel/Oracle. However, entrants could come from other directions too. For example, we'd expect Experian to launch into this space, perhaps on its own or perhaps via collaboration with salesforce.com. However, some of Experian's smaller competitors are already on the AppExchance.This is part of an overall trend that is evolving software away from the expensive to install and customise 'legacy' software business into one that is delivered as a mass-customisable service over the Internet, and comes with an optional range of business services ready plugged in. All you have to do is pay the money and the service is turned on and works seamlessly with everything else you have - at least in theory!
