With SAP’s (NYSE: SAP) announced acquisition of Success Factors (NYSE: SFSF), it is now clear that the “old guard” established software companies are not going to sit by and let the cloud upstarts take over the business software market. This follows Oracle’s (Nasdaq: ORCL) recent announcement to purchase RightNow.
This article paints a good picture about the role of upstarts and disruptive technologies and what the establishment must do to maintain market share. The story also speculates about other potential cloud application providers that could be targeted as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and IBM continue to maneuver.
As I have said many times before in this blog, it will be interesting to see how these big software companies handle these new assets. One of the key benefits of cloud applications is the notion of a shared, multitenant delivery model that gets deployed across the entire customer base. Once these companies and their solution become part of an organization and culture of one-off, highly customized sales and deployments that would seem to be completely opposite of the pay as you go, rapid deploy, less customization approach of the cloud model.
Oracle has gone on record stating their new cloud vision is very much NOT multitenant, which makes me believe that they see opportunity more as series of private, dedicated cloud deployments, on a customer by customer basis. Or, as Salesforce.com CEO (NYSE: CRM), Marc Benioff likes to say…”false cloud.”
It should be interesting to watch over the coming months, or years.
