I'm Dan Farber, editor-in-chief at ZDNet and I'm here todayto talk about CRM and in particular what I'm calling the CRM - CustomerRelationship Management mash-up. And by mash-up, I don't mean some kind of Webtrick. More like mashed potatoes in that, in the CRM industry, even in the application,so much consolidation of companies in IT spending, that there is a big seachange going on and it's mostly driven by one company: Oracle.
Oracle has been very busy lately buying JD Edwards andbuying PeopleSoft and recently buying Siebel and what does it all mean? Well,it means that if you're a customer of any of those companies, you have to bequestioning like, "Well, which CRM do I get from Oracle, which one isgoing to live, which one is going to die, I don't know." Which makes iteasy for a competitor to Oracle, SAP, which is also a major company showing CRMand other applications to come in and you know, say, "Well, hey, if youdon't know what Oracle's up to, we've just one product cycle and that's mostlyserving the high-end large enterprises" and they pretty much have thatmarket showing up with all the consolidation going on.
Now, there's one other player and I think we'll talk aboutmoving more into the mid-market because Oracle is in there, and SAP is inthere. Well, now Microsoft wants to play a big role here and they justintroduced a new kind of upgrade of their CRM product and the new platform forbusiness applications called dynamics. But, you know, they were quite a bitlate to the game and, you know, really don't play much in the high-end. But themid-market is much more wide open to find as maybe 500 or less computers, maybea 1000 or less people.
But there's one more to mention to the mash-up and that ison demand. Now on demand means rather than on-premises, where you buy softwarelicense where you have to buy the hardware, you have to integrate it, and doall that hard work-- on demand means that you get it simply over a Webinterface and someone else does all the dirty work. Now typically, it's beenaimed more at the smaller-size businesses and that's where the company that'sthe leading light in the space, Salesforce.com started and now they're tryingto move up the stack, move up into this space, get into the higher end andthey're doing that with a very interesting proposition. One is, they're builtfrom the ground up for the Web for on demand, whereas, these guys, you know,have a little bit of trouble. They have to buy a company, which is what Siebeldid and which now Oracle did or they've got to figure out how to retrofit theirown applications for on demand, which is not easy.
So, Salesforce is out there kind of pitching its wares andit has a platform where it takes care of all the hosting. It takes care of thedata, all the security and now they're opening up their architecture, so thatthey can develop micro verticals which means that they have a generalizedproduct. They're not in manufacturing for aerospace, but someone else could dothat using their tools and then focusing on their engine. Now I call that theMicrosoft model because it's a proprietary engine that developers built on andMicrosoft always gets paid. Salesforce would always get paid, but in this case,a subscription rather than a software license.
So as you can see, ranging from small, from large, from theenterprise to the mid-size to the small, on demand and on-premises andconsolidation going on, it's indeed a mash-up.
