The partnership between salesforce.com and Oracle is a win-win for all customers who use either company’s services.
How will Oracle benefit?
Oracle will continue offering FusionCRM to its customers and will also support the selection of salesforce.com as a CRM alternative.
Oracle clearly stands to benefit by gaining access to the ecosystem around salesforce.com, by providing applications such as Taleo (HR application) and Eloqua (Marketing Automation application) and continue to acquire other applications within the ecosystem.
How will Salesforce benefit?
According to Gartner, salesforce.com is the leading CRM provider with the highest market share. Salesforce wants to attract more developers to their platform and build out their AppExchange. Since Salesforce is a subscription-based provider, it needs to have its customers grow with the platform especially in areas such as Social and Mobile applications. They also want to have developers using Force.com as a platform to build all and any applications as it relates to the customers business needs.
Force.com – the platform for Java developers
To achieve this, Salesforce is seeking to attract the large Java developer base that Oracle enjoys and to increase interest in migrating applications to the Force.com platform.
Salesforce.com has a long-standing relationship with Oracle since the Oracle database is the underlying technology for their solution. This new announcement moves their relationship further in the right direction now that Oracle has recognized the need for salesforce.com as a partner because it is the strongest player in the CRM space.
Reduced cost from switching apps
In the past, when Oracle acquired a new customer, chances were they were running Salesforce CRM, and they were strongly encouraged to switch to Oracle CRM. Now Oracle customers can continue to run Salesforce as an option, and the company can choose the CRM solution that works best for them.
From a marketing automation perspective, this partnership is a win-win all around. Customers can now select products from either company and still benefit from the integrated solutions and platforms without having to replace or switch applications.
In the past, customers would be forced to switch from Eloqua to ExactTarget to stay on the Salesforce platform. With strategic partnerships and open platforms, customers can continue to use products of their choice rather than dictated by the vendor.
Here’s what you need to do as a customer:
- Develop on the Force.com platform and extend the reach of your CRM
- Make vendor-independent decisions going forward
- Investigate new options if you are currently a customer of only one of them – the other may have some solutions that will work for you.
