Salesforce1 is nothing more than an attempt by Salesforce to smooth over its customer message in the face of falling share value, a Gartner analyst has accused.
Speaking to Computing at Salesforce's Dreamforce 2013 conference in San Francisco, analyst Robert DeSisto rebuffed CEO Marc Benioff's "internet of customers" message from the past few days, stating that the reveal of the company's new ‘mobile first' platform, Salesforce1, is simply a change of message to mask ongoing problems.
Further reading Dreamforce 2013: 'We all have a need to become customer companies' says Benioff, as Salesforce1 plans become clear Dreamforce 2013: Salesforce promises tougher security Dreamforce 2013: Salesforce1 will 'jumpstart innovation', predicts VP Rosenbaum
"Marc Benioff's kind of a magician on things," said DeSisto, "It's always 'the year of something' [at Dreamforce].
"If you go back five or six years, it was 'the year of the platform' - there was only one platform, and that was Force.com. Now we've got Force.com, Heroku, ExactTarget, you could throw in Radian6. And what it turned into is not a one platform anymore, but all of these platforms."
Despite the company's $1bn earnings in Q3 this year - announced on Monday this week - and its announcement of Salesforce1 yesterday, Salesforce's shares fell by five per cent to $52.74 at close yesterday. DeSisto puts it down to what he considers to be a pile-up of platforms as Salesforce continues its hungry acquisition behaviour, which now totals over $3bn worth of marketing software companies.
"[Customers] start asking questions and they say, ‘Okay, you preached about one platform, and yet you've got all these other things now.' So [Salesforce] needed to change the dialogue that was beginning to develop. What they're trying to do is brand the fact that it's only one platform. Because the reality is, there's no SKU. You can't go out and buy SalesForce1."
"There's no ‘it'", DeSisto insisted.
"They've increased the plumbing between the multiple ‘its'. They run on separate things, on separate platforms. For example, Heroku is in a separate stack, written on top of Force.com. Now what do you really get? Increased APIs, better web services and extensions to [component-based UI framework] Visualforce for modelling web applications."
While DeSisto said that he is no way "minimising" these bonuses, he feels the company is not doing enough to unify the platform, choosing instead to react to "clear deficiencies there that meant they had to do that. But I think they're using the branding to try and get around the questions people were asking."
DeSisto regards Salesforce1 as an admission by the company that they "can't now just have one technical platform", and a further admission of the realisation that, in order to maintain a growth rate that seems to be levelling, acquisitions will now have to become the core of the business plan.
"They can't grow at the same pace they did anymore," DeSisto told Computing.
"They have to buy companies. That's why they bought ExactTarget. They need a story for when they buy those companies to tell the consumers. So now Salesforce1 gives them a consumption story. They buy a company, they do API development, and it becomes part of the Salesforce1 family of platforms. This story doesn't just clean up their existing act, but lets them carry on buying companies in order to grow."
As for the converged infrastructure "Superpod" offering that Benioff announced with HP CEO Meg Whitman yesterday, DeSisto sees less an ambitious attempt to become more like Amazon, as some are saying, and more Salesforce paying for an "operational issue" that other firms will now demand to capitalise on.
"That is basically the toothpaste out of the tube, the genie out of the bottle," he said.
"They've laid the framework now. There's going to be a list of companies that want this, and that's not a practice you want to be in, to start with individual customer pods; it's an example of what happens when companies get enough of a pull. There a lot of customers of comparable size that can make the same demand."
How do you feel about Salesforce1? Do its possibilities fill you with excitement, or is it all just so much Saleshype? Let us know in the comments below.
