Salesforce CEO on SAP, Oracle: We're the 'customer company'
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff repeatedly defined the CRM giant as a "customer company" during the quarterly conference call on Tuesday after the bell -- especially in comparison to competitors SAP and Oracle.
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When asked by analysts about Oracle's cloud strategy, in particular, following Oracle OpenWorld in October, Benioff responded frankly.
"With Oracle, I think they repositioned themselves as a mainframe company and operating system provider and depositioned themselves from our core space through their conference," Benioff explained.
As far as SAP is concerned, Benioff said that his "analysis" for the business management solutions provider is that it has "repositioned" itself as a company that offers analytics through data warehousing, among other priorities, with an "immaterial percentage of revenue in the cloud."
"In terms of those two companies, it's not that we don’t see them," Benioff clarified. However, he argued that "they have not provided the next-generation vision for customer-based systems" on how to connect with customers, employees, investors, and products.
Benioff continued that Salesforce's approach has "been very consistent," citing that at Dreamforce '12 in September, the social enterprise proponent "tried to be extremely mindful to project the future" for its customers.
"Their positioning, whether it's SAP as the HANA company or Oracle as the Exadata company, we want to be the customer company," Benioff concluded.