SFDC: Why Larry Allowed to SFDC to Grow bigger
than Siebel CRM
This is tricky question, but that is how the world in Digital and Cloud era. Disruption can be from any where irrespective of direct competitors. The competition from different industry vertical can overturn your business upside down in a matter of time.
For e.g, Think about traditional Music industry and Media, iPod just took away the business. Similarly think about the Camera giants like Kodak, Nikon etc. Mobile took 1/2 of the market share. Most of the patents has brought by Motorola, Samsung etc.
Coming back to Siebel and SFDC:
The following is my observation about why technically SFDC able to grow.
- Cloud presence, SFDC leveraged the cloud buzzword and modeled the technology focus around that.
- For Siebel, with the underlying data-model and the architecture which it is running may not be able to scale-up for a cloud based multi-tenant application. (Could have focused on the CRM onDemand which is the first cloud offering on CRM started somewhere in 2004). However Oracle seems to be focused on Fusion application and lost Cloud based initiatives esp on the CRM On-Demand space.
- If you want blame Oracle for some reason this is right place to do that. Larry is still fuming on the missed opportunity. As a rear guard action, Oracle did buy Bigmachine, a CPQ platform (on force.com platform).
- SFDC Model and Market place Applications is the ticking force behind force.com. So far, none of the Oracle product able to have this. (Key Differentiation factor and going to be only important differentials). To leverage the developers this going to be the key.
Finally, Larry knows
that the Oracle shares won't him 2-4 x returns in another 10 yrs. and SFDC easy
can give the return in 2 yrs or so. Smart in one way. :-)
PS:
On
the contrary the SFDC was direct competition to mighty CRM market of Siebel. On
the high Siebel enjoyed a whopping 73% of Market share in CRM applications.
But
with competition coming from Niche players and enterprise application product
vendors like SAP and new highly motivated Navision through Microsoft. The
picture and landscape changed for Oracle and its community in a short
period.
Nevertheless
change is inevitable and Oracle is going to turnaround table in coming years. A
lot of investment done on Innovative Pack based applications to support Mobile
platforms.
Needs
to change the DB landscape to make Siebel application more adaptable to the new
digital Era.
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