With the Salesforce.com-Google collaboration, Microsoft will face yet another competitor in the online enterprise software applications market, analysts say.
But make that enterprise with a little "e."
Google's online applications will be integrated with Salesforce's customer relationship management (CRM) applications, giving it an entry point into Salesforce's customer base of mainly small to midsize customers and department-level groups of large corporations, said Kevin Buttigieg, an analyst at the Stanford Group.
"It expands the distribution of Google Apps," Buttigieg said, noting that the search giant likely views it as a starting point to later drill into large corporate accounts, in which Microsoft is dominant. "I think it will have a significant impact on Microsoft over time, but how soon and how large is hard to say."
Google Apps has a price advantage, but its feature functionality is lagging behind Microsoft in such areas as the detail of its spreadsheets, analysts say. And Buttigieg notes that Google Apps lacks an offline version. This may factor into large enterprise customers' hesitancy to use it, for fear of losing the ability to operate critical parts of their business, should the servers that host the applications crash.
As part of the agreement, Google Apps, Gmail, Calendar, and Google Talk will be tightly integrated with Salesforce, marking a move by Salesforce to offer a wider package of Web-based applications and cutting ties to desktop versions.
Another analyst, meanwhile, characterizes the Salesforce-Google announcement as a defensive move by Salesforce against the launch of Microsoft's hosted CRM service, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.
"Microsoft Outlook is ubiquitous. And that gives Microsoft a huge advantage in CRM because almost everyone uses Outlook in the business world. Google is not a threat to Microsoft, but Microsoft is a threat to Salesforce," said Pat Walravens, an analyst at JMP Securities.
Ironically, as Monday becomes the first day the free 30-day trial of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 becomes available, Salesforce is announcing its Google deal, Walravens observed.
He also noted that pricing on Microsoft's CRM offering will be competitive to Salesforce. Microsoft is offering two versions, both of which will include core sales, marketing, and service functionalities. But the basic version, with a monthly price of $39 per user, will include 5GB of database storage, while the professional-plus version will be offered at $59 per user, with 20GB of database storage and offline data synching.
Microsoft is also believed to have created an inside sales team to focus exclusively on its on-demand CRM version, Walravens noted, as a further sign of stiffening competition between Salesforce and Microsoft.
The Salesforce-Google deal is not the first between the two companies. Last year, Salesforce and Google announced a partnership in which Salesforce would be a reseller of Google AdWords. At the time, the companies said they hoped that the partnership would drive other development projects between the companies.
Evidently, it is doing just that.
Update: April 14, Monday, 12:20 p.m.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has no plans to change its strategy as a result of the Salesforce-Google deal, said Brad Wilson, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
The software giant intends to continue to invest heavily in on-demand services, data centers, and Internet-delivered applications, he noted.
Wilson said the Google-Salesforce partnership validates Microsoft's efforts to integrate CRM applications with personal productivity tools, a step it took five years ago.
Sometimes, you get a press release that's so accidentally, astonishingly funny that you can't stop laughing long enough to make fun of it. This morning's latte-through-the-nose nominee is the deadpan announcement "Kodak Names Chief Blogger: Company Extends its Revolutionary Approach to Product Innovation with Cutting-edge Approach to Social Media."
According to the release, "Just over 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies have public blogs. Fewer still have Chief Bloggers, and Kodak is among the first to name a female Chief Blogger." Wow. I had thought that writing, customer service, and public relations jobs were chock full 'o women, but now I discover that Chief Blogger was a job title heretofore out of my chromosomal reach. So much more rewarding than CTO or CFO.
Now, there are lots of corporate blogs and bloggers out there (can I officially coin the terms "clog" and "clogger"?), some of whom I even read, like Adobe's John Nack. But really, once you've appointed an official blogging overlord and publicly announce it just to impress Wall Street analysts, blogs take on all the glamour and interest of CRM.
SugarCRM has landed a $20 million venture investment round, designed to boost international expansion by the maker of open-source customer relationship management software, the company said Thursday.
Taking the lead on the funding was New Enterprise Associates, with existing investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International joining in. That brings SugarCRM's total funding to $46 million.
The company plans to use the funds for not only research and development, but also increasing its global footprint--particularly in Europe and Asia.
SugarCRM, founded in 2004, released its Sugar 5.0 software in December. To date, the company has racked up over 4 million downloads of its commercial open-source CRM goodies and counts more than 60,000 community members.
With its infusion of funds, SugarCRM will have more leeway as it heads down the path toward an IPO within the next two years. But with the recent industry consolidation--case in point being Sun Microsystems' planned $1 billion merger with MySQL--SugarCRM may find that option just as tasty.
SugarCRM is pulling out both barrels in Japan, announcing today that it has signed an agreement with Softbank Technology to distribute SugarCRM solutions in Japan, including as an ASP/hosted service.
This is exciting news, as relationships are key to cracking the conservative Japanese market, and Softbank Technology (along with existing partner CareBrains) is a great channel into Japan.
But the real news is in who SugarCRM beat to get Softbank's nod:
... Read moreApplications company SugarCRM intends to file to become a public company within two years, said CEO John Roberts.
SugarCRM launched three years ago in what Roberts said was an "experiment" to use an open-source business model to create high-quality customer relationship management applications. The company on Monday released a beta of Sugar 5.0, a major update to its application suite.
Since its launch, SugarCRM has funded its growth largely from revenue, rather than the $26 million in venture funding it raised, he said.
"Now we're at a point where we're acquiring customers extremely fast," Roberts said. "We've gone from 'we hope to (go public)' to 'we absolutely are on track.'"
Roberts anticipates that the company, which now has 125 employees, can grow to $100 million in yearly revenue in the next couple of years.
The open-source business model, which had not been tried in packaged applications before SugarCRM launched, is what has allowed the company to grow so rapidly and to focus on making quality software, he said.
Doing software engineering in the open, where outsiders can view the source code, has improved the product development process, Roberts said.
Selling is easier, too. Because the company makes a low-end version available for free, most of its customers are already very familiar with the product and don't require a costly sales and marketing process, he said.
Roberts said that SugarCRM's approach can be replicated by other companies. Database company MySQL has said that it intends to go public, and middleware provider JBoss was sold to Red Hat for $420 million. Last week, XenSource, which has built its commercial product on top of an open-source hypervisor, was bought by Citrix for $500 million.
Traidtional software companies spend too much on marketing and sales and not enough on research and development, Roberts argued.
"I came to Silicon Valley to write great software. But we saw this disconnect in enterprise software companies," he said.
Enhancements to Sugar 5.0 focus on making the application foundation more robust and appropriate for large-scale deployments. A final version is slated for release by the end of September or in early October. It will be released under the General Public License version 3.0.
New features include an Ajax e-mail client that is closely integrated with the applications and a revamped on-demand version. On-demand installations account for 40 percent of SugarCRM's customers.
The new version also includes a Module Builder that lets business users visually create and share their own application add-ons.
Excuse me, Mr. President.
Those words will soon turn four heads at Salesforce.com, which announced its chief financial officer, Steve Cakebread will be promoted to president and chief strategy officer early next year.
Cakebread, who joined the company five years ago, will relinquish his CFO post during Salesforce's fiscal first quarter, which begins in February. He will join
As for the CFO post that Cakebread will be vacating, it will be filled by Graham Smith, who currently serves as Advent Software's CFO. Smith will join Salesforce in the fiscal fourth quarter, learning the proverbial ropes before taking over in the following quarter.
For Smith and Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff, it will be a reunion of sorts. Benioff and Smith worked together for roughly a decade at Oracle, where Smith worked in the finance department, holding various senior finance positions.
Update: this blog incorrectly represented Compiere's position on the GPLv3, which the company has not yet announced. That paragraph has been deleted.
SugarCRM intends to adopt the General Public License version 3 for a forthcoming update of its open-source applications.
Sugar Community Edition 5.0, scheduled to go into beta in a few weeks and be released in September of this year, will use GPLv3, the company said on Wednesday. Its current products use either the Mozilla Public License (MPL) or the very similar Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL), according to SugarCRM CEO John Roberts.
One of the advantages of the GPLv3 is it makes it easier for people to share code from different GPL-controlled open-source projects, Roberts said. At the same time, SugarCRM is able to offer customers of its Professional edition a typical commercial license, where people can see the product's source code but cannot distribute it, he added.
"My hope is that it becomes a global standard," Roberts said.
The company's decision to use the GPLv3 is an endorsement for the latest edition of the most commonly used open-source and free software license.
Finalized in late June, GPLv3 places tougher restrictions on software patents and a provision to prevent "patent protection" deals like the one between Microsoft and Novell. During its development, it drew criticisms from high-profile open-source participants, including developers of the Linux kernel.
But since its release, open-source projects have started to voice plans to adopt it.
Sun Chief Executive Jonathan Schwartz has said he hopes GPLv3 can be Sun's unifying open-source software license, but so far the company hasn't released its two highest-profile open-source sofware projects, Java and OpenSolaris, under GPLv3.
Open-source database company MySQL has said it will wait to see how the license is received before deciding whether to move its open-source database of the same name from GPLv2 to GPLv3.
Some important projects are moving to GPLv3 with their next versions. Among them are Samba, used to share files over Windows networks, and the
--CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.
Ian Howells, Alfresco's chief marketing officer, did some analysis of the company's customer and user community, and I found the results interesting. I've been hearing rumblings for some time that Windows increasingly serves as a great evaluation platform for open source, 
but most companies use Linux when they're serious and want to go into production. Ian's data confirmed this, and more. (Zmanda has published data that corroborates our findings.)
First of all, the Alfresco data shows that Windows is plays a healthy role in the open source ecosystem. (In the graph, Windows = green, and Linux = blue, in case you can't see it well.) We have plenty of companies going into production with open-source Alfresco sitting on top of closed-source Windows. From my work with SugarCRM, JasperSoft and others, I know the same holds true for them. I don't suspect that this is going to change anytime soon.
Windows plays a large role because it's the OS sitting on the most desktops. But when customers are serious about production, the majority favor Linux. Again, I think you'd find very similar results were you to talk with MuleSource, Funambol, SugarCRM, etc.
... Read moreI have to say I'm disappointed. CentricCRM released a significant chunk of code under an OSI-approved open-source license, yet still doesn't seem to appreciate that open source means something to the community, and to the industry. That meaning is not for CentricCRM to define. It is for the community to define, and such definition has almost universally been found in the OSI (Open Source Initiative) for nearly a decade.
As Brian Behlendorf has declared, the purest right in open source is the right to fork. That right is inviolable if you want to call your software open source. This is nonnegotiable. Period.
... Read moreCompetitors were quick to respond to Microsoft's latest plans for hosted CRM.
Microsoft's pricing was clearly aimed squarely at Salesforce.com, which was quick to dismiss Microsoft's entry into the market, noting that the company has been talking about its plans for sometime without actually releasing the product.
"I think that Microsoft has announced this service more often than Roger Federer has won Wimbledon," Bruce Francis, Salesforce VP of corporate strategy, said in a statement.
Another rival, SugarCRM, took issue with the notion that rivals don't offer the option of moving from a hosted to an on-premise model, saying that it offers just that choice.
"SugarCRM has been providing the ability for customers to swap deployments from on-demand to on-site and vice versa since December 2004, and we have had dozens of customers who took advantage of this," Tara Spalding, SugarCRM's vice president of corporate marketing, said in an e-mail.
