Salesforce Trumps Oracle and SAP

Today Mashable highlighted an announcement by Salesforce of its new (?) web based CRM product – Service Cloud 2.

Apparently this will eventually include a Twitter client, a Knowledgebase (aka Wiki) and Salesforce Answers.

This shouldn’t be surprising to anybody since the web is already awash in software tools like these.  It wouldn’t take any company a couple of hours to source and deploy this stuff without help from Salesforce.

So why is it worthy of an announcement by the mighty Mashable?

My take ? This is a very smart move by Salesforce to get a very vocal group of people talking about it, and even promoting its products.

Back in the days of the Millenium Bug SAP grew from “also ran” mainframe ledgers vendor to enterprise software giant in a few short years.  Cleverly, it engaged the support of those now defunct consulting businesses in promoting SAP software.  They went along so they could get all the implementation work, of course.

Today’s version of the Millenium Bug (and every bit as real a threat) is Social Media.  Who will help the big companies understand and exploit Social Media like Twitter and Facebook – the Social Media consultants of course.

And who will persuade these big companies they need to exploit Social Media?  The Social Media consultants, of course.

So I predict we’re going to see endless, and mindless comment by the gurus over the coming months as they build themselves a business, helping big companies to buy and use Salesforce.

Where are Oracle and SAP in the story. Out to lunch of course.

Very smart move by Salesforce. And they’ll have all those extra Xforce for Dummies books to sell

Footnote
I’ve never met Christina Warren and I’m sure she’s a very able commentator but with this quote she’s just being plain stupid, and looking it.

“With Service Cloud 2, it’s clear that Salesforce.com is serious about being a robust, evolving and agile player in the ever-growing SAAS space. The social media features Salesforce.com is integrating into its solutions look top-notch. The fact that these solutions can be integrated into existing systems just makes it that much more attractive.

How do you see customer service and social media continuing to evolve? Let us know in the comments.”
Of course Salesforce is serious about SAAS – Salesforce STARTED IT.

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Tagged as: Business, ERP, Facebook, Oracle Corporation, Salesforce.com, SAP AG, Social media, Twitter