Oracle

Oracle CRM veterans offer a few innovative deployment tips

I’m out in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld and found a few items of interest aside from the news that Marc Benioff is crashing the party.

I plan to be there tomorrow at Benioff’s session to see if he plays the polite guest (my guess is he will), but in the meantime, there were a few interesting tidbits from some successful CRM deployments at a customer panel.

These are not necessarily Oracle-specific but some practices I hadn’t seen before and worth noting here.

Continued »

Gartner releases CRM market share report and SAP leads, but how much does it matter?

Gartner put out its estimates for the CRM market last week and SAP has the largest market share, according to the Stamford, Conn.-based research firm.

So what?

My general experience in covering the CRM market over the last several years the “leading” vendor in the market matters far more to financial analysts and the vendors themselves and than anyone buying or using the software. What matters to CRM buyers and users is that their vendor is viable, innovating the product Continued »

Where’s SAP’s CRM message?

For a company that proclaims itself the leader in CRM, it sure didn’t have much to say about the subject at its recent Sapphire conference in Orlando.

SAP released its Business Suite 7, which includes a new CRM update, in February. But you wouldn’t have known it listening to the keynotes this week. While last year’s conference featured some significant news with SAP’s partnership with RIM to run SAP CRM natively on the BlackBerry, this year featured nary a word about CRM.

Continued »

Is Salesforce.com simply shifting its maintenance to partners?

Denis Pombriant has an interesting note on his blog today.

He says that effective today, Salesforce.com will start charging its partners for support.

Denis writes:

Effective May 1, 2009 and with a 60 day grace period, Salesforce.com will begin charging its developer partners for support.  I have not seen a press release but I have a data sheet on the offering.

And

The grace period starts today and the fees start July 1, 2009.  There will be three levels of service - Partner Premier, Partner Basic, Single Cases and Community.  Fees range from free to $24,000.

Given Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s pronouncement earlier this week of “The End of Maintenance” it would certainly appear that instead of turning to customers to boost its margins, Salesforce.com is instead turning to its partners. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and many an SAP executive have long maintained that the SaaS business model can be very difficult to turn a profit with. One would imagine it’s especially difficult if you can’t charge those maintenance fees of 22% of net licensing as Oracle has always done and as SAP will eventually do once it clears up these KPIs with SUGEN. Dennis Howlett over at ZDNet posted a blog entry yesterday citing research being conducted by Jason Carter noting that companies are no longer getting their money’s worth out of maintenance. He posts a chart showing a radical decline of research and design spend as a percentage of maintenance revenue.

Is Salesforce.com just shifting the costs?

Benioff joins the software maintenance fray

There’s been a bit of a brouhaha in the blogosphere over software maintenance fees this week.

The Salesforce.com CEO got things started when an internal corporate memo was “leaked” to members of the press and analysts, notably Vinnie Merchandani and Chris Kanaracus at NetworkWorld.

Here’s an excerpt from Benioff’s email:

Let me tell you about a customer that I met on our Cloudforce tour. This customer currently uses Siebel software to run her call center.  She pays more than $15 million a year for the privilege of having to implement the updates that Siebel sends her.  That does not include backup. Or disaster recovery. And of course, it does not guarantee that she will be using the latest technology.  The maintenance agreement only assures her that her outdated software will continue to work.  She is paying tolls on a road to nowhere.

Continued »