Archives For salesforce.com

The Facts About Salesforce.com (part 3)

Jan Sysmans —  October 13, 2011 — 1 Comment

For those of you who follow the CRM space, last week provided for some real drama. Here’s a quick recap courtesy of TechCrunch

Oct 4: Larry Ellison Cancels Marc Benioff’s Keynote at Oracle’s OpenWorld
Oct 5: After A Cancelled Keynote, Benioff Strikes Back; Talks Future Of The Cloud
Oct 6: Ellison Reveals Oracle’s Public Cloud; Calls Salesforce The ‘Roach Motel’ Of Cloud Services

I don’t want to dwell on this cloud spat, but the one thing I do want to talk about is one of the points that Larry Ellison raises.  He warned customers: “Beware of false clouds“, and further goes on to state that salesforce.com “is a proprietary cloud, the ultimate vendor lock-in”.  It really delights me to see that Larry Ellison is now saying what we’ve been saying all along.  Salesforce.com is not cloud computing.  Salesforce.com is a 10 year old multi-tenant hosting technology.

True cloud computing allows customers to freely move their data between different clouds;
True cloud computing gives customers the choice where they want to deploy their CRM instance;
True cloud computing is open;
SugarCRM is the only CRM solution in the market today that is truly build for the cloud.

On Oct 12, we announced added support for IBM SmartCloud Enterprise to the set of public clouds that customers can deploy Sugar on.  In addition to the IBM SmartCloud, Sugar runs on Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud and Windows Azure.  Customers can also choose to deploy Sugar in the Sugar Cloud, in one of our partner clouds or in their own private cloud.  To learn more about the benefits of REAL cloud computing, take a look at the following:

Deploying SugarCRM on Public Clouds http://static.slidesharecdn.com/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=deployingsugaronpublicclouds-111013021614-phpapp01&stripped_title=deploying-sugarcrm-on-public-clouds&userName=jsysmans

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In Amazon EC2, Cloud Computing, CRM, CRM Success, IBM SmartCloud, Oracle, salesforce.com, SugarCRM , , , , , , ,
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Salesforce’s DimDim Buy – A Typical Proprietary Move

Jan Sysmans —  January 7, 2011 — Leave a comment

Many have probably seen that Salesforce.com has acquired web conferencing tools provider DimDim for $31m. (The rumors of this deal had been percolating since before Dreamforce so for many this was no surprise at all.)

The deal pits Salesforce.com in many ways against some big companies and very popular products – Citrix’s GoToMeeting and Cisco’s Webex, in addition to IBM’s Lotus Live set of offerings. With its recent platform buy in Heroku, and this new move, it is funny to see Salesforce continue to add competitive concerns and look to enter in large markets where it has no clout, rather than look to live above the competition in one market where it already does well. Confident move?  Yes. Smart move?  Well, we’ll just have to wait…

And while the DimDim acquisition clearly places SFDC in competition with the likes of WebEx and GoToMeeting, Salesforce would like to look at this differently. Salesforce instead sees this as a pocket acquisition to bolster its Chatter functionality – a tool it is already basically just giving away to gain some stickiness for its actual paid apps. So, if SFDC does not really see much future for DimDim save for part of what is now a free add-on, then the $31m price was not a huge price to pay to make a cool new collaboration feature a little more robust.

But again, if Chatter is basically free at this point, why buy DimDim? The product was open source under the GPL. Couldn’t SFDC simply create an integration to the free tool and offer up that integration along with a simple installer to add video and screen sharing tools to Chatter?

I think the answer here is two-fold. One, I have not yet seen SFDC do anything that resembles open source. Yes, they have opened up their toolkits and platforms for developers, but everyone does that. There is just not that type of culture alive at SFDC in my opinion. This is a company steeped in the grand history of proprietary software.

The second reason (which is definitely intertwined with the first) is that due to SFDC’s multi-tenant model, adding DimDim-like resources without wholly owning the code would be problematic. As we know, in order for SFDC to really have a tight handle on anything its users touch, it has to run on its monolithic platform. This makes upgrades and other things easy, but does set limitations on how SFDC can go to market with technology it doesn’t own.

It will be interesting to see if the nature of a GPL licensed piece of software sitting inside a huge multi-tenant database has any effect on the way in which Chatter users are empowered to make, own and redistribute changes.

All in all, this is chump change for SFDC, and while it plots them theoretically against big names like Webex, I can’t see Salesforce actually making any huge headway into standalone video conferencing with the DimDim technology – most likely Salesforce.com will only relegate the functionality as a nice add-on to Chatter.

In Cloud Computing, CRM, Open Source, salesforce.com, Social Business, SugarCRM , , , , ,
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SugarCRM Carolers at Dreamforce – A Huge Hit!

Jan Sysmans —  December 8, 2010 — Leave a comment

Many of the Outsiders readers might remember that last year we spoofed Marc Benioff’s book Behind the Cloud last year at Dreamforce. That stunt caused quite a stir, and this year we decided to make things a little less personal and a little more jovial, as it is the holiday season after all.

So, the marketing team got together and penned some “holiday carols” that tell our side of the CRM story, as well as throw some light-hearted barbs towards salesforce. All in fun, right? You can check out the complete carol book and lyrics here.

The main thrust of the campaign was to guarantee salesforce.com users at least 50% off their CRM subscription fees by switching to SugarCRM – and to make the switch seamless, we will waive the data migration fee.

To top it all off, we hired some professional “carolers” to sing selections from the song book outside the Moscone center as the attendees of Dreamforce piled in for the kickoff keynote. The crowd loved the carols, many chimed in, and tons of people snapped photos and videos and took home souvenir carol books for themselves.

Here are a few clips of the singers singing:

All in all, it was a fun event and we had a great time with all the singers and all the people who stopped by and chatted with us about SugarCRM.  Thanks to everyone who helped make the caroling such a fun and successful event!

In CRM, Social CRM, SugarCRM , , , ,
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