Oracle and Saleforce.com CEOs, Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff, hosted a briefing call on June 27th to announce a partnership between these two highly successful companies. What does this partnership cover and what does it mean?
Salesforce.com is built on Oracle technology and so Salesforce is very dependent upon Oracle. Marc Benioff confirmed that Salesforce has confidence in the latest releases from Oracle including Oracle 12C database, Oracle Linux and Oracle Exadata. Larry Ellison announced that this partnership will ensure that there will be out of the box integration of Salesforce.com CRM with Oracle HCM and Oracle financial applications. However there will be no cross selling of each other’s products – each company’s sales force will continue to sell only its own products.
So what are the benefits for customers? It is very difficult to quantify the benefits but qualitatively the integrations will be more reliable, more secure and have better performance than ad hoc ones. At the moment organizations have to build their own integration and this is costly to create and costly to maintain. This partnership should remove these costs and hence is good for the large number of organizations that are using or will decide to use Salesforce.com CRM together with the other Oracle applications.
It looks like Oracle has conceded that organizations which have adopted Saleforce.com CRM will not be persuaded to migrate to Oracle CRM. At the same time Oracle is assured of a significant continuing revenue stream for its products from Salesforce.com.
Salesforce.com has stated that is aim is to help organizations to get closer to their customers, partners and associates and is transforming itself from a CRM provider to a platform provider. So it would appear that it is not interested in competing with the other Oracle applications.
This is where it becomes interesting – on the call it was made clear that the partnership does not cover the platform. Both CEOs described the importance of a platform that will support the explosion of data from networked devices. However both companies have their own evolving platform to provide a solution for that problem. So here the competition continues.