Dreamforce: yes the force is powerful, and yes there are alternatives


Here’s a belated short post on Dreamforce (12/6-9). I guess I’m not the only one slacking off as first-time followups from booths that I had stopped by are still coming in.

My immediate reaction walking into the conference expo was that force.com has evolved to become such a powerful platform: just about anything can be “plugged” into the force platform. If there are things customers might want to do with the information that may already exist in SFDC, there is likely a company that offers such vertical integration so the customers can do what they want to do, on a platform they are familiar with.

While force.com is considered to be PaaS, Salesforce.com is well positioned in all three new segments of the cloud space totaling $113B (as BofA’s paper: 2011, it’s the year of the cloud, points out). Salesforce.com has been positioning itself well on collaboration, database and more (again more integration).

The companies integrating well with force.com (often selling as “native”) aren’t forgoing other potential markets, either. Most (if not all) offerings connect with an open API, and about half of the people asked if I use SFDC as CRM before talking about their product/service. This was prudent as potential clients are using or looking at alternatives for cost, integration, or other reasons. A recent question on a SaaS LinkedIn group asking for alternatives to Salesforce.com drew 80+ responses offering more than a dozen suggestions (many appear to have come from genuinely happy users).

If all the predictions about strong balance sheets fueling M&A become reality, how will the landscape of CRM look like in 12 months? How will this play out for the companies that built up their businesses on a platform such as force.com? Will this model look similar to that of apps on mobile platforms?