Salesforce.com aims for Oracle, SAP and Enterprise IT
“We will destroy Oracle and SAP because they won’t be able to respond to the innovation we are about to unleash.”
That’s a quote from Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com in a recent article from Business 2.0.
What’s really amazing about this isn’t Benioff’s bravado, but instead the pieces of his plan that could possibly open up a market for a whole range of additional enterprise class applications.
Sales Forces is basically treating their application, with it’s billing capabilities as not just an application, but instead a whole platform. The kind of platform that 3rd party companies can use to deliver new and interesting services over the Internet and into the enterprise.
Thinking about this has encouraged me to change my Long Tail in the Enterprise diagram. It now seems obvious to me that Enterprise 2.0 will bring two types of technical solutions for long tail system needs within the enterprise. The first will be serviced by vendors like Sales Force. The second will be built internally by enterprise Super Users. These User Developed Applications will be built using Read / Write Intranet tools, such as enterprise blogs and wikis.
A break down of current enterprise IT requirements
The current buy, build, or hack with spreadsheets situation
How SaaS and Enterprise 2.0 will change that picture
Rod, this is a terrific analysis - but please label your axes!
-Dennis
I agree with your thesis that the meta solutions (built on top of existing core SaaS solutions) will provide a lot of value, and in the process generate revenue for these vendors. At the same time, I am yet to see successful examples of this. And then there is the alternate theory that the meta solutions will come from the big vendors too. NetSuite + Quickbase, Salesforce + Ariba… It may be early but in the end you may again end up with top 5 vendors (in SaaS) garnering 80% of profits (not revenue). A certain CEO who recently consolidated the on-premise vendors may have something to say about that.
Dennis,
I labeled the axes on the first graph… got lazy with the lower ones.
Anshu,
That’s an excellent point. I do not know of a smash hit on top of the Sales Force platform. There are plenty of companies that are trying.
It’ll be interesting to see if one arrives.
Maybe a kind reader will point us to some of the most successful App Exchange solutions.
- Rod
Hi,
This is David from EditGrid. I just stumble upon your blog and find your charts very inspiring and encouraging to us.
Many of our users (super users?) has developed rather sophisiticated online spreadsheet for their organisation’s internal uses. And with online spreadsheets, they have both Excel’s flexibility and collaboration capabilities.
May be we can position EditGrid to capture the long tail you labeled as Enterprise 2.0.
Any advice?
David