SAP

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 »

Antenna’s Dexterra acquisition and the CRM impact

I saw yesterday that Antenna Software and Dexterra software are joining forces.

Jersey City, N.J.-based Antenna is acquiring Bothell, Wash.-based Dexterra for an undisclosed sum. It follows Antenna’s earlier acquisition of Vettro in November.

While the companies are really mobile middleware players, this is an important development for the CRM market. I talked with Sheryl Kingstone, an analyst over at Yankee Group about the deal.

“We’ve been waiting for consolidation of this middleware market for a while,” she said. “It was Antenna, Dexterra, Sybase and a bunch of smaller players. Now it’s coming down to Antenna and Sybase.”

When it comes to mobile CRM, enterprises really need to pay heed to the mobile middleware vendors, Kingstone said. In fact, SearchSAP.com just had a story on how SAP is relying more on partners for its mobile strategy — with NetWeaver mobile taking a back seat. As Kingstone pointed out, Oracle’s mobile strategy has primarily centered around the apps themselves.

“To really make mobile CRM effective, you need to look at it outside the box and at the process,” Kingstone said. “Don’t just take an SFA app and throw it on a mobile phone and expect people to use it. You need to look at what [the] sales person needs — sales data, pricing data — things that are outside of different applications.”

That’s where the mobile middleware providers come in. They can bridge the applications, operating systems and mobile devices. The proliferation of smartphones is adding another level of complexity as well and has a few companies abandoning laptops for their mobile sales force and moving exclusively to smartphones.

Ultimately, the Antenna/Dexterra deal should be good for end customers, Kingstone said.

“I think it’s better to have fewer, stronger players,” she said. “From an enterprise standpoint they should take a look at these vendors before they implement a project.”

SAP adds to the SaaS multi-tenancy debate

SAP’s John Wookey broke his silence this week on the company’s latest SaaS plans.

As he told SearchSAP.com, SAP will release SaaS-based business applications to augment customers’ existing Business One deployments. Additionally, the new SaaS apps (no word on when they’ll be released) will be multi-tenant, abandoning SAP’s earlier commitment to “isolated tenancy.”

The multi tenancy and SaaS debate has been ongoing for years, lead primarily by Salesforce.com, which contends that a SaaS application that is not multi-tenant is not truly SaaS. 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 »

NetSuite takes a swing at SAP with integration offering

You can’t accuse NetSuite of backing down from a fight.

A week after targeting Salesforce.com customers with its Suite Cloud Connect for Salesforce.com, NetSuite has turned its attention to SAP.

Continued »