Salesforce.com’s social business play has taken another turn with an incursion into the heartland of arch-enemy SAP which it claims is limiting users ability to access useful data.
Salesforce.com says it will allow customers to integrate its Force.com Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering on top of their core SAP systems, allowing them to use data now "trapped" there in "custom social and mobile cloud apps”.
In a blog posting last week, Salesforce.com stated:
“IT departments have invested millions in standardizing on SAP ERP over the last twenty years. Integrating Force.com on top of an SAP core immediately increases the business value of existing SAP investments by building a layer of agility around a company’s core data and processes. Force.com unlocks and extends data trapped in those systems to every department and employee through custom social and mobile cloud apps. As a result, businesses will develop new and innovative best practices, employee collaboration and productivity will rise and information can move at the speed of the business with fewer resources and half the cost of traditional on-premise platforms. ”
Angela Eager of research firm TechMarketView states that such moves are common from traditional enterprise software vendors such as SAP and Oracle, but says this takes Salesforce.com into the SAP heartland with an offer aimed at “a weak spot” in SAP’s portfolio:
“The Salesforce.com offer could prise open previously sealed SAP accounts and once inside, the Cloud pure play would obviously look to expand. Salesforce.com has developed its business on the basis on gaining a toehold and using internal champions to drive widespread adoption so SAP has something to be worried about. Obviously Salesforce.com would not replace mission critical SAP applications but it could steal away ‘edge’ applications e.g. Streamwork and SAP’s cloud-based applications, which is one of the areas SAP is looking to for fresh revenue streams and to reaffirm customer retention. Once in, Salesforce.com could open the way to its many AppExchange partners too. ”
Salesforce.com will provide interested companies with a half-day evaluation of their environments at no charge, and develop a project plan that determines the proper use cases for Force.com. This, cautions Eager, could seem to SAP users to be more opportunistic than a fully fledged service to consider:
“Organisations will not achieve much during a half day session. It is also aiming to bring in outside parties like IBM and Informatica to work on data integration aspects, so partners could be the real beneficiaries. On its own, this is just one more assault on SAP, but combined with its CRM and Force.com services, it is inflicting ongoing damage to SAP that the ERP traditionalist is struggling to defend against. ”
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