The Facts About Salesforce.com (part 2)
The Oracle of San Francisco has spoken. The Cloud is Passé. The Cloud is Dead. All hail to the Oracle.
Or maybe Marc Benioff is so eager to move away from the cloud and on to the next hot thing because he knows that Salesforce.com, as a first generation SaaS application, has become a “legacy application” in the new era of the cloud.” According to Mark Vizard, author of SaaS is Dead, Long Live the Cloud, we’re now in a new era “that is defined by an elasticity that gives IT organizations maximum flexibility in terms of choosing to deploy software on premise, in the cloud or both.”
According to Vizard, “one of the fundamental tenets of software-as-a-service (SaaS) is that the application is supposed to run as a single instance on top of a multi-tenant IT infrastructure. With Salesforce.com, for example, every customer has specific rights and privileges to a shared customer relationship management (CRM) application running on database servers managed by Salesforce.com. Given that model, there is no ‘software’ from the perspective of the end customer. The Salesforce.com business model, combined with the fact that the application was designed from the ground up to run on a specific multi-tenant architecture, means customers can’t run a version of the Salesforce application on their premise.”
In another article, Vizard makes the case that cloud computing “will stand in sharp contrast to the way Salesforce.com operates. In the case of Salesforce.com, there is only one source for the company’s software that runs on a couple of data centers managed by Salesforce.com.” He adds that “software-as-a-service (SaaS) as we think about it today is moribund in the age of the cloud.” Vizard makes the case that cloud-based CRM solutions like SugarCRM “are going to let customers run their software on premise or in any data center they choose, as opposed to requiring them to run their CRM software on a data center managed by a software vendor.”
I don’t believe that the cloud is dead. From where I sit, I see customers very eager to board the cloud train. Customers really believe in the promise that cloud computing is giving them choice – a choice to deploy their software applications where it makes sense for them: in their private cloud, in the vendor’s cloud, or in a public cloud. And knowing that they have the option to change their deployment based on their changing market requirements.