[April 15, 2005]

Siebel, Salesforce.com Spotlight Diverging Forces in CRM Space

BY ROBERT LIU

As a sharp contrast to the tone established earlier this week by CRM software pioneer Siebel Systems, Salesforce.com, the provider of CRM software that has revolutionized the enterprise market with its on-demand subscription model, made its best effort to date to mobilize its core audiences of users, strategic partners and developers and extend its reach further throughout the enterprise.

At its first annual "Integrationforce Day” earlier this week, Salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff previewed upcoming product offerings that consisted of a new integrated portal, developer tools and even an on-demand OS platform. In doing so, Benioff is clearly borrowing a page from Microsoft’s playbook trying to build out its own developer community and using its proverbial foot into the door of the enterprise to branch out into other business functions – e.g. accounting & finance, human resources, etc.

“We're calling today Integrationforce Day cause we’re really starting to demonstrate much deeper integration capabilities between the power of Web services and even the traditional desktop or tools and enterprise software environments,” Benioff said in his opening remarks on Tuesday to kick off the event at a San Francisco hotel.

The event came just one day prior to Siebel Systems’ announcement that it ousted its CEO J. Michael Lawrie. Siebel’s legacy CRM licensing revenue still makes up a lion’s portion ($300 million) of the company’s business but its own OnDemand contract revenue is growing and expected to climb to $11 million this quarter. Salesforce.com, by comparison, pocketed about $50 million in quarterly revenue from its on-demand business. So, is Salesforce.com about 10 times smaller than Siebel or 5 times bigger – you tell me?

To build on that, Salesforce.com’s CEO Benioff on Tuesday unveiled Sforce 6.0 – the latest version of its platform designed to replace traditional client-server applications like Siebel’s. Salesforce.com argues that its solution built on modern Web services standards will ease application integration. Sforce 6.0 will be available at no extra charge to Salesforce Enterprise Edition customers.

Perhaps of greater significance though is Salesforce.com’s upcoming operating system named Multiforce and new software developer toolkit for Sforce designed for Perl, PHP and Python developers, allowing them to integration the on-demand platform into a variety of environments like TIBCO, Globix, DoubleClick and JBoss. The company claims it has more than 8,000 registered developers, 150 ISV solutions and more than 1,000 enterprise partners.

The Multiforce operating system, the new Sforce Toolkit and Sforce 6.0 will all be introduced in June.

Whether Salesforce.com can beat Siebel is one thing, but whether it can take down Microsoft is another.

Robert Liu is executive editor at TMCnet.  Previously, he was executive editor at Jupitermedia and has also written for CNN, A&E, Dow Jones and Bloomberg.  He can be reached at [email protected].