SaaS, Salesforce and Our New Central Sourcing Business

There is a great article over at Businessweek titled “Software as a Service Myths.” (Thanks to Yves Lermusiaux at Taleo for pointing the article out .)

We have launched a new Central Sourcing Business (if something is strategic it is a business, not a function – see Draw the Lines), and we are using Salesforce.com as our technology platform of choice. We have developed a “central platform / local service” approach that extends leading-edge sourcing management capabilities to all of our studio sourcers while ensuring that they can maintain local control, support and configuration management.

We looked at a couple of vendors to build this new integrated application set on, and it was a tight race between Microsoft CRM 3.0 and Salesforce, but in the end Salesforce won the initial deal because I didn’t want to have to deal with installing and managing a platform. I sold some of the first ASP solutions in 1996 and I have been a fan of that approach ever since. Now ASP has morphed into SaaS (Software as a Service), but the concept is essentially the same: if you don’t make money by supporting software, give the business to someone who does. EA does not make money by hosting front- or back-office applications, so I wanted to work with someone who does. Salesforce did, Microsoft didn’t.

It was clear that Microsoft wouldn’t be left behind for long, and I think their Live concept will work (and I am really excited to see what Ray does with Groove in the next Office suite). In the meantime, Salesforce was the logical choice. I’ll keep you posted.

Comments

[Jeremy Langhans]

salesforce is great!
ms crm 3.0 is great!
live is great!
technology is great!

PEOPLE are MORE then great *wink*

~jer
www.o0.typepad.com