June 27th marked a key moment in enterprise software history: Oracle and salesforce.com revealed a new partnership.
Here are two points I would like to note, taken from the analyst call with salesforce.com‘s Marc Benioff and Oracle’s Larry Ellison (Go to this link for the full transcript).
Seamless Integration
There are numerous companies worldwide that use a wide variety of Oracle applications, and also use Salesforce as their CRM. Those customers are looking for effective integration between these products. Saleforce and Oracle don’t want each and every one of those customers have to hire a third-party or have to spend a lot of money to wire up the Salesforce applications to the Oracle applications. They’d like to deliver those integrations as products.
To make sure that our multi-vendor cloud application integrations work extremely well, Salesforce is continuing to be a user of Oracle’s applications – but, will also be a user of Oracle’s new Fusion HCM and financial applications. By the way, Marc Benioff said on the call that Oracle is going to be a user of Salesforce’s CRM applications. That’s huge!
By doing joint development and using each other’s technology, Salesforce and Oracle are attempting to ensure that their applications work seamlessly together when first implemented, and continue to work when they upgrade every release.
Lower Cost Implementation
When customers have to do their own integration to wire up a Salesforce CRM application to their enterprise software for example Oracle HCM application – it leads to astronomical expenditure. In addition, the quality of those integrations, and the security of those implementations won’t be as sound – as an Oracle-Salesforce product-sized integration. The savings is in time and dollars and downtime is potentially enormous.
Salesforce’s appexchange, has over 2,000 pre-built integrations, to thousands of ISVs all over the world. This demonstrates how through an efficient integration platform, it is possible to dramatically lower the cost of integration for customers.
But, the one company whose highly used software products that was missing from the appexchange was Oracle, and it will be exciting to see Oracle work into salesforce.com‘s app exchange with these pre-built, one-click integrations.
These pre-build on click-integrations will dramatically lower the cost for customers, and will give them the implementation capabilities into their existing Oracle applications, whether they’re the financial application, HCM, manufacturing applications, or others.
For users of Oracle and Salesforce these are exciting times and I am curious to see this play out in the near future.