Software analyst Josh Greenbaum's opinions on enterprise software have annoyed enough vendors that he now checks under the hood of his PC every morning before he boots up.
Once upon a time, when Bill Gates still flew commercial and I was a budding journalist in need of a haircut, I had a number of opportunities to interview and otherwise interact with Bill Gates. It was often contentious, always intriguing, and more often than not frustrating as well.
As the resident Salesforce.com basher at ZDNet, it is with some smugness that I am watching the birth of a fellow naysayer on the future of Salesforce.
Having just read that Google is taking up residence at Moffett Field, a storied air base in Mountain View that is home to NASA's Ames Research Center, among others, I realized there's a great opportunity for Google to learn a little about high end security, at least the kind that secures a perimeter, fends off unwarranted access, and punishes miscreants with true Old Testament fervor.
It’s common knowledge that, when trying to find a true market leader in mid-market enterprise software, the “other” category is by far the largest, despite the efforts of Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Lawson, Infor, and pretty much any vendor with dreams of high volume sales to capture true market dominance.But a dominant position has already been established by the one vendor no one mentions in the surveys, mostly because that vendor’s products are so ubiquitous.
A year ago I predicted that, right about this time, Salesforce.com would start to look a little shabby, a whole lot shabbier than it indeed looks at this time.
Amidst the PR blitz and the blizzard of 1:1 meetings that constitute the foreground experience of SAP's Sapphire user conference this week (see Larry's coverage here, and Dennis' coverage here), there's an interesting back story emerging.
In the wake of the brouhaha surrounding the delayed rollout of Business ByDesign and the allegations of technical difficulties (the thread in the Enterprise Irregulars discussion was called BBD=DOA?), I spoke to Hans-Peter Klaey and Jeff Stiles, the two men at SAP responsible for bringing BBD, and the rest of the company’s SMB portfolio, to market.
The news that SAP is delaying the roll-out of Business ByDesign – and that its last quarter, while decent, failed to meet analyst estimates – is the perfect preamble to this post: With Leo Apotheker slated to assume to mantle of SAP by the end of the year, his mandate – and challenges – couldn’t be made more clear than the juxtaposition of this news.
The official GA release of Microsoft's CRM Online offering is next week, and with it comes a new chapter in the life of Salesforce.com.
Like the inner tube with the pinhole leak that suddenly explodes, the hissing of rumors coming out of the much-hyped April 14 "important announcement" by Salesforce.com has finally blasted out something of substance: a purported deal to resell or otherwise feature Google's Apps as part of the Salesforce.