Should SAP make a play for Salesforce.com?

An interesting tidbit today from SiliconValleyWatcher: according to an unnamed, “reliable” source, Salesforce.com has approached Oracle seeking to sell the company for $75 a share.

Tom Foremski lays out the reasons a buyout would make sense for Oracle and for Marc Benioff. I’m not sure I see the Salesforce.com side of it. Nevertheless, it’s certainly a fun thing to speculate and ponder. And as long as we’re doing that, we might as well speculate as to whether Salesforce.com wouldn’t be a better fit for SAP.

For now, we’ll leave aside whether SAP would be willing to pay that much, but an easy-to-use, established, on-demand application with a large base of customers would certainly help Walldorf get to its stated goal of 100,000 customers by 2010. Besides, SAP all but admitted when it rolled out Sales OnDemand that it was trying to keep customers from turning to Salesforce.com to get their CRM systems up and running quickly and easily.

And, while not really SAP’s style, buying a company founded by Marc Benioff, a Larry Ellison protégé, and partially funded by Larry Ellison, would certainly kick up the rivalry a notch.

Of course, this all could be a PR move to take the attention away from Microsoft-Yahoo as Dennis Howlett suggests. That’s certainly not something Salesforce.com is above.

Anyone remember the Wall Street Journal story from an unnamed source claiming Salesforce.com and Google were preparing a partnership? That gave Salesforce.com a nice bump in its stock price and a lot of press for a week. Until the “partnership” turned out to be an application that integrated Salesforce.com’s CRM system with Google AdWords.