Deals are being 'inspected by higher levels of management,' says Salesforce Salesforce said last night it was seeing sales cycles stretch and was taking a "very deliberate" approach to hiring after it missed analysts' expectations for revenue growth. The SaaS CRM giant posted revenue of $7.72 billion for the second quarter, an increase of 22 percent on the same period a year earlier. Net income fell …
Just stop and take the politics out for a moment, okay?
The fact is Salesforce, as a SAAS vendor, dabbled in the business of one of their customers. Whether they should or should not have is a different debate. The fundamental fact is they did, and appear to continue to do so.
This highlights for customers that Salesforce is the owner & final guardian of their data & information. This could be enough to give executives pause, and make them re-think their decision to enlist a cloud vendor. With SFDC, a 3rd party is in ultimate control of a company's on / off switch. There isn't even the benefit of legal due process. The whims of a SFDC executive decision is all that it would take.
No, I am not saying this one case is the death blow to cloud adoption. Far from it. I am just saying it is a bit of balance to an otherwise cloud-first mindset. Enough to make some organizations think twice.
Not because they are doing anything bad. Because it is a calculated risk to their business continuity. What SFDC did to RNC changed the SAAS game from 'theoretically possible' to 'it has happened'. That is several orders of magnitude of increased risk over the previous 'it has never happened'.
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