The offer is aimed at a weak spot in SAP’s portfolio because although it has its Streamwork collaboration offering and a partnership with social networking vendor Jive Software it does not have its own social networking platform. 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.
However, the Salesforce.com offer is closer to the seed of an opportunistic idea than a fully-fledged service. It is offering SAP customers a free half-day evaluation to kick of the development of a project plan to identify how Chatter could be used. But 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. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Salesforce.com come out with a similar offer to Oracle customers given that Oracle’s social networking platform is not due out until next year (see Oracle finally gets the cloud).