salesforce.com

Along with my colleague Dan Farber, I sat down with Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff this week for a wide-ranging Q&A. You'll be able to read the entire interview Monday morning, but what with Bear Stearns' Friday meltdown and the ensuing panic in the stock market, it was apropos to get Benioff's take on how Wall Street's tribulations might impact the tech business and, more specifically, Salesforce.

It is interesting to note that the last time Wall Street and the economy headed south, market forces took the model for ASPs, or application service providers, with … Read more

Oracle on Tuesday announced new on-demand CRM software aimed squarely at Salesforce.com.

The new software, Oracle CRM on Demand 15, is a revised version of a product acquired via Oracle's purchase of Siebel Systems in 2005.

Oracle's on-demand software, designed to help companies manage customer resources, will include a browser-based interface and can be customized to run on mobile devices such as BlackBerrys, and included in personalized Google and Yahoo pages.

Another aspect of the release is the inclusion of what Oracle calls "Social … Read more

At Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Thursday, the company officially launched the iPhone software development kit, which lets other companies create applications for the device. Here are a few videos from the event, courtesy of ZDNet.

Steve Jobs unveils iPhone App Store, where third parties can sell their iPhoneware.

Electronic Arts demos its new 'Spore' game on the iPhone.

Salesforce.com brings analytics, business intelligence apps to the iPhone.

iPhone update integrates AOL instant messaging.

The SmoothSpan Blog has a very detailed article outlining the SaaS universe and the likelihood of dominant players taking on aggregation roles.

This is a segment ripe for consolidation--or maybe aggregation as users realize they are locked into individual SaaS apps.

OpSource acquired billing provider LeCayla earlier this month and odds are that won't be their last purchase. OpSource is in a unique position of having critical mass in the SaaS hosting space and there will be lots of companies that they see value in or can pick up if the company can't go it alone.

Taking the … Read more

Salesforce.com on Thursday introduced a cheaper way to access applications written with its Force.com platform and detailed an Eclipse-based development tool.

Right now, the fee to use applications written for Force--Salesforce's hosted development platform--is $50 per user per month for an unlimited amount of time.

The company added another option, in which applications cost $5 per log-in with a maximum of five log-ins per month. This option is meant for applications that are accessed only occasionally, like vacation request programs, said Adam Gross, vice president of developer marketing at the company.

Salesforce also announced enhancements to its … Read more

NetSuite's IPO debut launched like a rocket Thursday morning--soaring skyward, only to plunge back to earth.

Shares of the highly anticipated IPO, which priced at $26 a share Wednesday, shot as high as $30 a share in early morning trading, only to fall below sea level to $23.86 a share. The shares have since stabilized a bit, trading slightly above its IPO price.

NetSuite and its investment bankers, which conducted an IPO auction in setting the price, won't be accused of leaving money on the table in raising as much capital as possible for the company.

NetSuite, … Read more

NetSuite's IPO auction has apparently attracted strong interest from investors, as the company prepares to set the final IPO price after market close Wednesday.

The on-demand enterprise applications company, backed by Oracle's Larry Ellison, has raised its pricing range by 46 percent from its initial pricing range of $13 to $16 a share that was announced on December 5.

The range was raised Tuesday to $16 to $19 per share. And it was raised a second time Wednesday to $19 to $22 a share, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

NetSuite could begin trading as early … Read more

As much as I like open source, there is something to be said for not having to install or maintain applications. But that doesn't mean it's smart or realistic to move all the applications in your enterprise to on-demand delivery.

As Gary Rivlin writes in today's NY Times "few software companies make the move to platform status" let alone the ones that have no footprint on the desktop. This is something I noted back in September after the Dreamforce event which reinforced my belief that enterprise software isn't going anywhere--at least not infrastructure software.

In the case of infrastructure (like networking and integration), and desktop environments (like Windows) it's hard to get excited about doing everything through a browser. Not that it?s a bad idea, but as I learned on my trip to Japan last week it's not entirely feasible at this point to do everything via the internet. Rivlin writes:

And yet for Benioff, the company's chief executive, that is not enough. He wants to turn Salesforce into a platform like Microsoft's Windows operating system, a product so popular that it is the foundation for a veritable ecosystem of software developers.

If you at the on-demand subscription offerings from Microsoft and SAP, both mediocre by comparison to Salesforce.com or SugarCRM (also available open source) the main advantage they have is that the existing user base is tied to a set of desktop applications which reinforce the desktop computing paradigm. … Read more

Chromatic has a great post analyzing how the Free Software Foundation's "Four Freedoms" apply to Software as a Service (SaaS). The answer? Not very well.

Should you care? I think so. The benefits of SaaS also point to its greatest flaw: it's the ultimate lock-in scenario when it comes to your data, even though it "liberates" the user from software. In fact, it's this very liberation that creates the problem. If you don't have the software, you really don't have the data, no matter the vendor's data policy. My data qua data is only as useful as the software used to open it up and read it.

Chromatic writes:… Read more