CRM and the everchanging state of change

Implications: Salesforce.com is the next Siebel, the next CRM has-been, the next low-priced software buyout opportunity, unless somehow the company gets sold before its stock begins to tank or it engineers a remarkable turnaround from its current moribund strategy SF.com doesn’t have a critical mass of customers doing deep integration, and competitors like SAP and Oracle, and now Microsoft too, are all offering deep integration to their respective software stacks in addition to coming out with on-demand CRM offerings.  Deep integration can happen in the context of an on demand model for SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle customers, and therefore all of SF.com’s strategic differentiation has been lost.

Analysis: With every change in the business climate, winners and losers are defined (and the battle lines are clear).  The article seems to suggest something that I myself have noticed.

Salesforce.com is the next Siebel, the next CRM has-been, the next low-priced software buyout opportunity, unless somehow the company gets sold before its stock begins to tank or it engineers a remarkable
turnaround from its current moribund strategy.

1)Siebel’s claims to deep integration with the rest of the ERP stack were exaggerated. This lack of integration made it much easier to rip and replace Siebel, and therefore left it vulnerable to…
2) An increasingly robust set of offerings from SAP and Oracle: while not necessarily as robust as Siebel, the value of out-of-the-box integration greatly exceeded the Siebel’s best-of-breed value-add.
3) The lower-cost Salesforce.com model was looking like a much better deal than high-priced Siebel, particularly considering points 1 and 2.

You could almost do a search and replace with Salesforce.com and say exactly the same three things. SF.com doesn’t have a critical mass of customers doing deep integration, and competitors like SAP and Oracle, and now Microsoft too, are all offering deep integration to their respective software stacks in addition to coming out with on-demand CRM offerings. Point 3 above holds true, with the following difference: now deep integration can happen in the context of an on demand model for SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle customers, and therefore all of SF.com’s strategic differentiation has been lost.

SF.com probably has a couple of good quarters left in it however as the business demand changes, SF.com will not be as popular.  As the author of this article suggests the company needs to take positive steps/strategic realignment so that Salesforce.com can be relevant.

In my current environment, SF.com did not meet our expectations and we did notice some shortcoming which were solved by a speciality CRM provider.