Between the Lines

Larry Dignan, Andrew Nusca and Rachel King

Salesforce.com fires back at Oracle in SaaS war

By | August 21, 2009, 5:28am PDT

In recent quarters Oracle has been taking aim at Salesforce.com, noting that its Siebel On Demand was poaching customers. On Thursday it was Salesforce’s turn to return fire.

Following Salesforce’s fiscal second quarter earnings, CEO Marc Benioff, as chatty as ever, took aim at his trash talking nemesis, Oracle chief Larry Ellison.

Benioff said on a conference call:

I am excited to welcome back Success Factors to the Salesforce.com family. Success Factors dropped Oracle On Demand after the application failed to deliver and sales reps pleaded to return to Salesforce. When sales teams are demanding your application to support their own success, you know that you’ve got a superior service and certainly that was a factor.

Success Factor joins a long list of customers who failed with Oracle On Demand and then signed with Salesforce.com, including Motorola, Axion, Sun Power, GTSI, Xerox, and Barclays. And really, that’s just to name a few that have switched off of Oracle service.

Overall, our win rate against Oracle, both in service and in software continues to be very strong. In addition to the Marsh and Success Factor deals I just mentioned, we won large deployments in the second quarter against Oracle at Comcast, Thompson Reuters, NCR, AT&T, Abbot, Waste Management, Capital One Services, BBVA, Bancomar, the Frank Russell Company, and Developers Diversified Real Estate.

In June, Ellison said:

We think we can be very competitive against Salesforce.com in sales on demand. We think with virtually every time we compete with them on large deals with large customers, we win and in some cases we even replace them. So we think we can be the number one supplier of on demand software in that particular space.

Our on demand application business is much smaller than our on premise application but it’s growing faster. Keep in mind that the largest on demand software company in the world is Salesforce.com and they’re only a billion dollars.

Oracle will report its fiscal first quarter earnings next month. Your serve, Larry.

More: Handicapping the CRM field: Oracle leads the pack (but the race is tight)

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Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.

Disclosure

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan has nothing to disclose. He doesn’t hold investments in the technology companies he covers.

Biography

Larry Dignan

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CNET News.com. Larry has covered the technology and financial services industry since 1995, publishing articles in WallStreetWeek.com, Inter@ctive Week, The New York Times, and Financial Planning magazine. He's a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and the University of Delaware.

For daily updates, follow Larry on Twitter.

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RE: Salesforce.com fires back at Oracle in SaaS war
dfwekrdfe63-24353627165909230341806269401020 6th Nov
rxutrl,good post!
0 Votes
+ -
Diversity rules
Exactsince 21st Aug 2009
It's good to see choice in the market place, some companies ourselves included elected to cancel the subscriptions in favour of managing our own hosted CRM from WiredContact in the UK. The control we had was the significant deciding factor not the cost. Having said that we spent less on the entire solution that we did on our first quarter with these guys.

Peter
The last person to dismiss Larry Ellison was Dave Duffield.

How'd that work out?

Onuora
http://www.peoplesoft-planet.com

It's funny to watch these BIG,MONOLITHIC companies like the big "O" see that the future of software is on demand and NOT purchasing some obsolete, non-functioning sw package that takes tons of developers, analysts, and project managers to make work. I have been there, got the t-shirt, and sandpaper. Salesforce just makes a better product, hands down...I should know...I have been contracted to develop apps for both SFDC and Oracle OD, plus Sugar as well.
0 Votes
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RE: Salesforce.com fires back at Oracle in SaaS war
dfwekrdfe63-24353627165909230341806269401020 6th Nov
rxutrl,good post!

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