Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Benioff's loss of interest is hurting SMB's

The latest Salesforce.com news is all about the speculated proposal of their shares to Oracle, this combined with the fact that Marc Benioff is selling his Salesforce.com shares daily makes one wonder, how interested is he? Apparently Oracle was approached and offered Salesforce at a price of $75 per share, this was roughly 50% higher then the closing $50.87 of that day. Whether this move makes sense or not for either of the companies involved is not what I am concerned about. If this transaction were to take place all the small to medium sized businesses currently with Salesforce are going to suffer.

Right now Salesforce.com is the largest Web Based CRM Software vendor on the market, their prices are already the highest and their focus has been moving away from SMB's in attempts to attract large corporation's. If Salesforce was under the direction of Oracle, SMB's would only suffer more since their focus also overlooks SMB's.

What this means for the other Web Based CRM Software vendors like Salesboom.com or Entellium for example, is that there could be a lot more of what is already happening to come in the future. Salesboom has noted that a large number of their clients were former Salesforce.com customers who were fed up with high prices and lack of support for smaller companies. The possibility of Salesforce changing hands could mean a lot more SMB's will be looking else where for their CRM solutions.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree. Salesforce.com customers will suffer from such acquisition because Oracle is not very friendly towards SMEs and even their ceo Larry said that no one in his books including Oracle have figured away to make money from SMEs which means these guys will be in the cheap seat at oracle!

Unknown said...

Agreed. There are emerging providers for SME's.

Simple Sales Tracking is one.
http://www.simplesalestracking.com

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