Missed Opportunity

At first blush, the quarter looked perky enough: A record $91.1 million in sales, up 10 percent sequentially and a whopping 67 percent from last year’s period. Profit at about $6 million. It was almost easy to forget that the company that has promised a zillion-nines availability and reliability recently suffered some embarrassing outages.

In fact, some Wall Street boosters didn’t even mention the O word in their earnings synopses. Shame on them.

Look, services, like the software that Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff so loves to disparage, will sometimes fail. Everything fails. What truly shocked me was that few competitors took the low road and blasted the snafus. (Oracle probably couldn’t comment for obvious reasons—one of which is Salesforce.com uses Oracle infrastructure.)

But why didn’t Microsoft, for example, hit the hustings, blaring out how its partner-supported ERP and CRM programs give you a local and technically-savvy throat to choke if there’s a problem? That’s a whole lot more fulfilling than staring at a blank Web page instead of your sales numbers. Why not drag out some tried-and-true Navision, Axapta or Great Plains integrators and say: “Look, Mr. SMB Manager, if you have a problem with your setup, here are the guys who will back you up. And I will back them up if need be.”

But none of that was forthcoming. Why didn’t Siebel or Oracle or any other purveyor of dinosaurlike on-premises software yell that if you were running their stuff and if the system’s down, at least you’d know the data is there and your integrator/IT staff combo will get it up and running PDQ?

But noooooooo.

Could it be that these companies are now behaving like (gasp) adults? More likely, it’s probably the old glass-house syndrome. Microsoft, pummeled for its own security woes, is loath to throw stones at a competitor. And Oracle … well, shall we just say that since a series of published vulnerabilities in its own wares, it has muted its “unbreakable” message of late.

Maybe everyone’s older and wiser and smarter. But man, oh man, they’re not as much fun.

Why do you think everyone took the high road? Get back to me a t (781) 839-1223 or via e-mail at [email protected].