By Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal, Beagle Research Group

NetSuite's graphic to describe its offering for SRP — services resource planning.

NetSuite’s idea is an integrated solution blending three elements:

• enterprise resource planning;
• services-oriented planning; and
• sales modules.

The combination, in NetSuite’s parlance, goes by the name of “SRP” — services resource planning — and the idea has legs.

[More on why that is, after the jump...]

As you can imagine, there are some significant differences between selling things and selling services. Most important, services companies have bigger issues with fixed overhead because you have to have smart people on staff — continually — if you expect to sell their time even sporadically. Economists might say that supply is inelastic (or certainly less elastic) for the services guys than for the companies that merely have to throttle up or down a manufacturing process.

All this got me thinking. Not about two different types of selling but about two different styles of building a company — the two styles exhibited by NetSuite and Salesforce.com. The two vendors are roughly the same age (NetSuite was created, under the name NetLedger, a year before Salesforce.com’s 1999 founding), and each has made acquisitions when it made sense as a way to build out their offerings. Each company also has a multitenant architecture and a cloud platform, which makes it easy for third parties to build or modify applications.

Nonetheless, if I had to describe each company’s strategy I would say that, compared to Salesforce.com, NetSuite is more likely to buy than build — if you include its partners.

Salesforce.com appears to have decided on an approach that encourages a partner community to build native applications, while NetSuite seems to encourage partners to deploy and modify core solutions without necessarily having to build wholly new ones.

Now, this is a rough approximation and sounds far more black-and-white here than it is in practice — there’s a lot of grey area in all this. But it drives an interesting question that I believe can’t be answered, at least not now: Which approach is better?

Should the primary vendor be the only one centrally involved in new-product development? Or should the platform vendor simply be content to let a thousand flowers bloom in its well-tended garden? Certainly the existence of the platform makes the second option possible.

Part of the answer can be found in how each vendor views itself. Salesforce.com is obviously looking for a big new market to penetrate that’s bigger than CRM, and the company has its eye on application development tools for the enterprise and smaller organizations. NetSuite might have a serviceable platform, but for the time being it appears to be more interested in the quite-crowded market for integrated front- and back-office applications.

I don’t have any good answers here or prognostications, just these observations. Salesforce.com has always been in the business of inventing the future and despite its success has had its share of stumbles along the way, too. Other companies have been content to stick to their knitting, but the future rarely keeps to a script. There are many markets just opening up, at least in part because we now have reliable and low-cost software available to support them — and that says good things for both companies’ chances.

The big question to ponder is whether there is enough demand for in-house development to support Salesforce.com’s vision. Information technology groups are notoriously backlogged and it is unclear to me if the backlog is a result of too much demand or inefficient tools. For decades we’ve blamed the tools — and yet we’ve seen generation after generation of tools that promised, and subsequently failed, to fix the problem.

Tools are important. If, however, you read The Black Swan — which I recommend — you might get the notion that backlogs are inherent in what we do, in part because we do such a poor job of understanding and planning for future requirements.  If so, one of the next logical acquisitions for either Salesforce.com or NetSuite should be a company that focuses on improving forecasting and planning methods.

Does such an animal even exist?

Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal of CRM market research firm and consultancy Beagle Research Group, has been writing about CRM since January 2000, and was the first analyst to specialize in on-demand computing. His 2004 white paper, “The New Garage,” laid out the blueprint for cloud computing. A CRM magazine columnist, he often guest-blogs with us at destinationCRMblog.com, but his own blog can be found here. (His Reality Check column on Marc Benioff will appear in CRM‘s November 2009 special issue on Salesforce.com.) He can be reached at denis@beagleresearch.com, or on Twitter (@denispombriant).