By Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal, Beagle Research Group
Summit must be the secular name our species came up with when we decided that certain business meetings had to have the same weight as religious conversions.
I’m not trying to be contentious by using this vaguely religious metaphor, so please consider me a radical centrist. But after a few months of vendor meetings for the analyst community in which each took us to the mountaintop to survey — via PowerPoint — a future vision for the valley below, I am almost all summitted out.
The religious reference struck me this week at the SAP Summit, the vendor’s very good analyst gathering in Boston, because, like some religious conversions, there seems to be a necessary pain component intended to make the conversion stick. (In most analyst meetings, the pain comes from sitting still for many hours of the aforementioned PowerPoint presentations.)
So, what did I learn? Well, lots — though I’m a CRM guy and much of what was proffered involved visions of a broader valley. The biggest impression I came away with was intramural since, having been to this year’s Oracle OpenWorld and Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce, I’m in a mood to compare, contrast, synthesize, and perhaps even prescribe.
"Will It Blend?" What do you get when you puree a season's worth of vendor events?
Put everything I saw at these and other conclaves into a food processor, run it on high until something resembling peanut butter forms, and the result, to me, looks like this:
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) computing has won the battle, maybe even the war, but the victory is not enough to secure a homogeneous peace.
Translation: SaaS is important and remains the future of software, but there are multiple reasons why it will not reign supreme — not for a while at least.
So here’s a new feature: We’re going to start aggregating each month’s posts, for easier reference.
We’ll start this off with a few groupings from the month of October — which, if you’ll permit a moment of horn-blowing, I have to say I’m really proud of. We covered a lot of ground in the month, literally and figuratively, with staffers filing on-the-scene dispatches from nearly a dozen events at various locations nationwide, and guest-blogposts from not only our regular contributors but several newcomers as well.
October also marks the introduction of these monthly archives (which, one hopes, will appear sooner after the end of each month), and compendiums of coverage from all the big events (which, one hopes, will appear sooner after the end of each event). In the Comments below, I hope you’ll let us know if we’re giving you the kind of material you want.
For starters, here’s a blog-only exclusive, one I hope you’ve been watching all along:
Eric Barkin’s “Eric Across America” series of blogposts, a firsthand look at JetBlue’s “All-You-Can-Jet” promotion from the perspective of a participant:
Eric Across America, Part I: The Story of One Man’s Journey into the Heart of JetBlue and JetBlue’s Entry into the Heart of That Man http://sn.im/dcrmblog100909b
Also keep an eye out for our compendium post of #OOW09 coverage from across the Web.
The rest of the month’s posts — including coverage from The Conference Board’s Social Media Summit, the DMA 2009 show, eMetrics ‘09, the RightNow Summit ‘09, and Forrester Research’s Forrester Consumer Forum — are after the jump.
[Editors' Note: According to SugarCRM representatives, 1,000 copies of a "book" were distributed at San Francisco's Moscone Center in advance of this morning's opening keynote by Salesforce.com Cofounder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff. The "book" is a send-up of Benioff's recent Behind the Cloud memoir, excerpts of which appear in CRM's November 2009 issue about Salesforce.com's 10-year history.
Lisa Holden, a spokesperson for SugarCRM from Schwartz Communications, told CRM magazine that, as of noon Pacific Time today, a Salesforce.com customer has already confirmed its switch to SugarCRM as a result of the company's offer for "a free data migration for Salesforce.com users through the end of the year."]
After the jump, you’ll find the email I received, in its entirety — along with my commentary on SugarCRM’s move.
At Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, CRM Associate Editor Jessica Tsai is live-twittering Marc Benioff’s opening keynote as we speak — find her tweetstream at @jesstsai, and the conference hashtag is #df09; her coverage will appear here on the blog and over at destinationCRM.com for the rest of the week.
Meanwhile, we thought we’d thrill you with the live-twittering from the company’s conference call with media and analysts last night to discuss its third-quarter financial results.
Benioff and CFO Graham Smith were on the call, and you can find my tweets after the jump.
But first, a teaser — and Comment bait:
Tu 11/17 Promising a major, MAJOR pair of surprise guests on Thursday at #df09. #Benioff
Tu 11/17 [Any guesses about #Benioff's teaser? @ciscosystems' John Chambers? @Google's Brin/Page? Leave them in the Comments, below...]
Tu 11/17 One last guess (for now) abt the “major, MAJOR” guests #Benioff teased for #df09 on Th: #Apple’s Steve Jobs?[Benioff talks at length in his new book about his admiration for Jobs, dating back to Benioff's short stint at Apple in the ’80s.]
Benioff, you’ll recall, made a shocking appearance at Oracle OpenWorld last month — in fact, he referenced it in the conference call (see below). Earlier in the month, Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal at CRM consultancy Beagle Research Group, casually wondered if Larry Ellison might return the favor with an appearance at Dreamforce.
Last year it was Olympic Gold Medalist Michael Phelps. This year, Oracle Cofounder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison, is bringing The Terminator, Kindergarten Cop, and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on stage to discuss innovation.
Ellison is also said to be addressing Oracle’s Fusion Apps during the afternoon keynote. What exactly he will be announcing is unknown; however, in July, Oracle divulged that the applications will be delivered on demand — in addition to on premise. Attendees are eagerly awaiting news surrounding the apps. And knowing Ellison, a bit of competitor bashing is likely to accompany the Oracle announcements.
“I knew we were better,” Ellison said, laughing again, before promising that the performance claim will be benchmarked and re-run in another WSJ ad this week.
This morning’s keynote promises even more pizazz as Oracle’s Charles Phillips and HP’s Ann Livermore take the stage to address technology megatrends. Attendees are buzzing through Moscone wondering if any “surprise guests” will join Oracle executives on stage. Last year’s appearance by Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps caused quite the stir.
Word is that 37,000 people are registered for this year’s event. With Aerosmith performing on Wednesday night and myriad events taking place throughout downtown San Francisco, it’s sure to be a good week. Be sure to tune into destinationCRM.com for news stories on the keynotes and the @destinationCRM Twitter feed for up-to-the-minute coverage.
[UPDATE, Oct. 14, 2009, 5.30p ET: News stories are now available here (Day 2), and here (Day 3).]
By Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal, Beagle Research Group
Market analysis firm IDC figures the market for service and support software will reach $4.2 billion before the end of the first Obama administration. That’s reason enough for software vendors to want to be all over the market like a cheap suit, like white on rice, like a junkyard dog. But as the market moves from on-premises to on-demand you can expect the revenue potential to go way down. That’s the beauty of on-demand computing — score one for the customer.
But whether there are four billion of those dollars or just one billion, that’s still real money — and enough to motivate the behavior of lots of people — so it was no surprise that both Salesforce.com and Oracle shored up their service and support offerings this week. What was fascinating to me is that, despite all the secrecy surrounding each company’s announcement, which I witnessed first hand, the two CRM titans managed to make similar announcements within a day of each other.
I attribute the coincidence to the simple logic of the situation: Each company has built out very good offerings in sales and marketing, so it was time that each gave some extra attention to service and support.
Ahh, what to make of this? Good? Bad? Creative destruction? All of the above? Probably. Of course, it’s too early to offer more than a few prognostications but that’s what’s so much fun about this.
First, Sun’s shareholders got a dime more per share than the IBM offer — $9.50 versus $9.40 – Whoo-hoo! Seriously, a dime over millions of shares is a lot of money — think about a good weekend in Vegas.
More seriously, the deal complicates Oracle’s relationship with Dell and HP, which Oracle has courted aggressively recently. Last September Larry Ellison introduced the Exadata — part storage array part computer — built in cooperation with HP to provide orders of magnitude better support for terabyte and bigger databases. A good idea. But now where does the budding relationship with HP go?
On the other hand, I wish I had one of those extra dimes for every Oracle database that was sold on a Sun box over the last three decades. Sun’s customers are Oracle’s customers — but the same can be said of HP.
Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) and Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ:ORCL) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.
“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”
There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.
[I tried posting the iMeem player here, but I failed. Instead, you get the clickable link.] [UPDATE, 10/1/08, 10a: Now you've got the clickable link and the iMeem player. Yes, the phrase "live and learn" comes to mind.]
So not only did a week of Oracle OpenWorld pretty much max me out, but now we’re heading into production week on CRM’s November print issue. Another cycle goes by, and another opportunity to improve our offerings slides away with it. So I’m left to console myself with the knowledge that
(a) there’s always next month (these cycles are called cycles for a reason);
(2) we’re making strides (we’re better now than we were, and as long as that continues to be the case, I’ll count myself lucky if not satisfied); and
(iii) we’re working to offer the CRM community the very best content we can, delivered in the best and most sophisticated context possible.
And then I’m reminded that others often are there ahead of us. To get at what I’m getting at, check after the break…
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