Marc Benioff Uses His $700 Million Purchase Of Buddy Media To Trash A Rival
Marc Benioff just subtly slammed SAP in the Wall Street Journal.
In an article about why Salesforce.com spent $700 million to buy Buddy Media, Benioff said, "I know that other vendors, because of our success, are trying to stitch it all together by acquiring at the core," Mr. Benioff said. "We're acquiring at the edge."
He's gunning at SAP who spent $3.4 billion to buy cloud HR company SuccessFactors and then turned around and spent $4.3 billion for supplier relationship management cloud company Ariba.
SAP is hoping that SuccessFactors' big personality founder, Lars Dalgaard, can help it learn how to do cloud right. SAP's got an uphill climb when it comes to cloud.
As an enterprise software company, SAP has been all about closing massive multi-year licensing deals and then getting customers to pay for services as they go along. It's got such a high pressure sales culture that it's North American president was shown the door for missing one quarterly target.
But cloud is all about keeping customers happy month-to-month so they don't drop their subscription. We've written before about how SAP's hard core sales culture will need an overhaul if it really wants to do cloud right.
SAP is looking to Dalgaard to be its own Benioff -- a flamboyant personality that can bring some life to the company's cloud efforts.
As for Benioff slamming SAP, we thought that was Larry Ellison's job.
Don't miss: The 10 Most Outrageously Entertaining Things Larry Ellison Just Said
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