Google vs. Salesforce.com?

  It's an understatement to say that Salesforce.com Inc. has changed the nature of enterprise software forever. The software as a service model that the San Francisco-based company pioneered upended the notion that business software needed to run on premise and under the direct management of IT. Salesforce.com today has over one million users at more than 38,000 companies working with its applications. And, says, Clarence So, chief marketing officer, it is on track to do $1 billion in this fiscal year. But that might just be the tip of a potential iceberg of change in the way IT is done in the future.

So says the next "big bet" is to position Salesforce.com as a "platform as a service" company, much like Google is trying to do with its Google Apps strategy. "There's a similar vision," he acknowledges. That is, savvy CIOs are rapidly seeing that managing IT infrastructure is seldom core to a company's business. As such, So argues, CIOs no longer want to be seen as "chief infrastructure officers," but would rather be considered "chief innovation officers," plotting new business processes that leverage external SaaS infrastructures. Both Salesforce.com and Google want to be the external "infrastructure platform" CIOs adopt.

Although Google currently has the bigger brand and bank account, Salesforce.com might be the better bet. Its AppExchange already offers a breadth of applications from partners-everything from groupware to project management. Plus, it already has users who view Salesforce.com as a "platform" and not a single-app SaaS provider. So points to the Japan Post, which recently signed a 30,000 seat deal, not for salesforce automation software, but merely for the right to customize the service in the SaaS cloud for its own purposes. So contends that's what Microsoft was able to do in the mid-1980s. That is, convince IT that Windows was a solid enough platform to build applications and business processes on. And, So observes, look what happened there.