Another Historic Moment?
Cats and dogs are friends today as Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff sign a “nine year” alliance to align their clouds at the infrastructure, platform and application levels. With this announcement, Oracle appears to be atoning for sins of the past and embracing its role as a cloud infrastructure player.
Oracle is working hard to appear relevant in a fast-changing cloud world, as the company published announcements this week promoting new partnerships with both Salesforce and Microsoft.
The announcement in a nutshell:
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Salesforce will run it’s $4B SaaS CRM application and Force.com platform on Oracle’s hardware, OS and databases. Salesforce will also be implementing “Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Financial cloud applications” internally.
The quick analysis:
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Customers want interoperability between clouds, so having pre-built integration between Oracle’s back office products and Salesforce will be great when it’s delivered. (Of course remember that Oracle’s track record in delivering these sorts of large engineering projects is decidedly mixed.)
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There is hardware in the cloud after all. Oracle gets a big boost for its struggling Exadata systems, at the expense of Dell.
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This is further proof that Oracle’s CRM business clearly takes a backseat to their other product lines. By adopting Oracle’s infrastructure, Salesforce is demonstrating it has no fear of Oracle CRM Fusion. Expect a slightly accelerated pace of Siebel customers moving to Salesforce.
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I’m not convinced that Salesforce reselling Oracle’s software is going to pose any threat to Workday, NetSuite or any of the other establish players in the HR or Financial software markets. Salesforce is truly a CRM-focused company.
How much of this announcement is real and how much is “cloudwashing“? Hard to tell. Perhaps the big San Francisco technology conferences will be interesting for a different reason this year – expect to see demonstrations based on these lofty announcements.
Meanwhile, the CRM landscape of the day hasn’t changed yet: driving business benefit from CRM, cajoling end users to adopt their CRM systems and integrating between cloud and on-premise systems goes on.
