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Are they serving the same market as Google? It seems as though the two are serving different use cases, both of which need data viz. Salesforce gives you a sale

Are they serving the same market as Google? It seems as though the two are serving different use cases, both of which need data viz. Salesforce gives you a sales database and a front end out of the box, and you can tweak it and add to it with add ons. Google gives you compute and storage, but the application logic is all owned by you.

ineedasername 7y ago
That's what makes this seem like a strange deal to me. There's pretty much 0 overlap with Google on CRM, and the next comparable tech stack that does compete with them is MS Dynamics CRM combined with Power BI. But Dynamics doesn't appear to be a growing threat for CRM marketshare. That said, Salesforce (based on my usage ~4 years ago) has truly awful baked-in BI and analytics, necessitating third party products and data engineering to fill that gap. Tableau will fix that, but I'm staggered at the price.
- reilly3000 7y ago
  Salesforce is a sales organization par excellence. They sell whatever they have, be it social media monitoring, CPQ, marketing automation, Heroku, Jigsaw data, IoT etc. they develop deep wallet share in large accounts and are constantly cross-selling. Their core audience is business people, and that is in stark contrast with GCP which is almost entirely dev focused. I’m not saying CRM is an afterthought but they have plenty of accounts that don’t use their CRM. That said, Google has deep inroads with their apps suite, and it’s really a race to have their tech run business processes. That and their ecosystem like Insightly are making big inroads to CRM’s SBM market. Their analytics is shit, but I think the important thing here is that they know their audience very well, and business people love Tableau. They bought $15B worth of sales leads for cross selling their portfolio of services.
  - freewilly1040 7y ago
    So is Google making a play for Saleforce’s core business? I don’t know a lot about the details of what Salesforce does but from my view it looks like there is not that much overlap
    - ineedasername 7y ago
      As I think about it, I don't see this as a play for business or much of direct competition at all, they simply both had strategic gaps, but for very different reasons, in their BI/Analytics offerings.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    Good points, it's easy (well for me it was) to overlook gradual expansion beyond the CRM sphere.

ineedasername 7y ago

That's what makes this seem like a strange deal to me. There's pretty much 0 overlap with Google on CRM, and the next comparable tech stack that does compete with them is MS Dynamics CRM combined with Power BI. But Dynamics doesn't appear to be a growing threat for CRM marketshare. That said, Salesforce (based on my usage ~4 years ago) has truly awful baked-in BI and analytics, necessitating third party products and data engineering to fill that gap. Tableau will fix that, but I'm staggered at the price.

reilly3000 7y ago
Salesforce is a sales organization par excellence. They sell whatever they have, be it social media monitoring, CPQ, marketing automation, Heroku, Jigsaw data, IoT etc. they develop deep wallet share in large accounts and are constantly cross-selling. Their core audience is business people, and that is in stark contrast with GCP which is almost entirely dev focused. I’m not saying CRM is an afterthought but they have plenty of accounts that don’t use their CRM. That said, Google has deep inroads with their apps suite, and it’s really a race to have their tech run business processes. That and their ecosystem like Insightly are making big inroads to CRM’s SBM market. Their analytics is shit, but I think the important thing here is that they know their audience very well, and business people love Tableau. They bought $15B worth of sales leads for cross selling their portfolio of services.
- freewilly1040 7y ago
  So is Google making a play for Saleforce’s core business? I don’t know a lot about the details of what Salesforce does but from my view it looks like there is not that much overlap
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    As I think about it, I don't see this as a play for business or much of direct competition at all, they simply both had strategic gaps, but for very different reasons, in their BI/Analytics offerings.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  Good points, it's easy (well for me it was) to overlook gradual expansion beyond the CRM sphere.