SAP's Business ByDesign has always been a potential threat to the likes of Sage and NetSuite at the low end of the ERP market, but now the German firm has parked its tanks on Salesforce.com's lawn with Sales OnDemand.
The new offering is intended to help sales professionals better connect with their colleagues and manage customer information. It will generally be available by the second quarter, the company says. Sales OnDemand will not initially have all the capabilities of the company's CRM suite, but execs claim that it will focus on the 20% of the functionalities that are used the most – and working on the assumption that this 20% is used 80% of the time.
As well as moving into the Salesforce.com's comfort zone of sales force automation, SAP is also making a social collaboration pitch which seems to place it on some kind of collision course with the US firm's Chatter collaboration Cloud. SAP co-chairman Jim Hagemann Snabe says:
Sales OnDemand, due for release in the second quarter, is the first in a new category of "people-centric" solutions and the first to be built on Business ByDesign, positioning that as a platform that can be integrated with its Business Suite software, as well as with non-SAP software. Other on-demand products will follow that manage travel expenses or human resources by early next year.
John Wookey, executive VP of SAP's On Demand line of business, commented:
SAP claims that a major differentiator of Sales OnDemand is that it is designed from the perspective of the salesperson on up, as opposed to be designed from the perspective of the CEO on down to the sales level. I can't see that one going down terribly well at Salesforce.com HQ.
Baiting Benioff is a nice example of the increasingly bullish rhetoric that's starting to come out of SAP - and given Salesforce.com made a lot of its initial mileage out of baiting Tom Siebel, it could be argued that SAP is simply playing by the same rules - but I can't help but feel there are some frightful collisions ahead waiting to happen as the marketing war hots up.
The most notable time that SAP went head to head with Salesforce.com was when Marc Benioff took on SAP's patrician Hasso Plattner in a Churchill Club debate, a public scuffle that can hardly be said to have ended well for SAP (but is well worth catching if you haven't seen it before!).
That was two years ago now. Would the outcome be the same today? Perhaps – but maybe with fewer jokes. More pertinently, would it be the same in two years time? That's a much more interesting question.
