Two Takes on the Recent Salesforce Takeover News
Although the Salesforce takeover has faded from view for now, it leaves in its aftermath some happy shareholders and plenty of continued conversation about what it could mean for the Salesforce partner and client ecosystems if such a takeover occurred.
Two of our team members recently weighed in with their thoughts on the news:
Michael Smith: Keep Salesforce Independent
Idealist Consulting developer Michael Smith used the very platform Salesforce created (the IdeaExchange) to drum up support for keeping Salesforce independent. Smith has been on the Salesforce platform for nearly 15 years now, and reflects:
“Today we take continuous and seamless upgrades to our business application for granted. Anyone who has worked with large footprint business systems such as Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, SAP or the myriad of others know that this was definitely not always the case.”
Smith also comments on the work of the Salesforce Foundation:
“Mark Benioff 's original 1-1-1 was unique at the time and has brought the power of Salesforce.com to thousands of Non-Profit organization that would have never been able to afford to purchase licenses for the system outright....Let's keep Salesforce.com from being gobbled up by a larger fish.”
Read Michael's full post here.
Rob Jordan: Will Oracle Kill Salesforce.com?
Idealist Consulting CEO and Founder Rob Jordan is not concerned. In his recent post on LinkedIn, Jordan speculated that “There is no better way to establish yourself as a true enterprise solution than to be courted for a buyout by a juggernaut of enterprise solutions.”
He went on to pose that it likely wouldn’t matter much for the private sector:
“On the nonprofit side, an Oracle takeover would likely only empower the depth and breadth of the Salesforce Foundation. Oracle Foundation with its bent on education and the Salesforce Foundation with its interest in higher ed would create a powerhouse foundation that would most likely have a very positive effect on the education sector as a whole. Only good things could come of such a union. And with the growth experienced from higher ed, the Salesforce Foundation would likely grow in revenue only strengthening their famous 1-1-1 model (giving product, equity and time) to the nonprofit sector.”
Read the rest of Rob's post here.
The Salesforce community is nothing if not collaborative and talkative. What do you think? Will we still be talking about this at Dreamforce or will we go back to using and tweaking Salesforce and forget this ever happened?
