BEA Channel Vet Joins Salesforce.com
Even though Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has always insisted that resellers and systems integrators have a significant role to play in his company's grand plan, it wasn't until April that he finally put his money where his mouth is, hiring longtime channel veteran Bobby Napiltonia from BEA to step in and run Salesforce's burgeoning partner program.
As senior vice president of channels and alliances, Napiltonia will oversee the expansion of Salesforce's partner relationships, from large consultants on down to regional systems integrators and independent VARs. Napiltonia and his bosses hope this army of allies will help the company broaden its on-demand computing model beyond its signature CRM services to a much wider array of business-intelligence solutions.
Salesforce.com took the latest step in this expansion on Tuesday, unveiling Summer '05, the 18th generation of its on-demand Salesforce and Supportforce CRM solutions. The launch includes Multiforce 1.0, an on-demand operating system; the Customforce 2.0 on-demand application-customization tool; and the Sforce 6.0 on-demand integration platform.
Summer '05 is designed to enable enterprises of all sizes, industries and geographies to gather, organize, share and communicate information. The key to the release is Multiforce 1.0, which will serve as the hub around which the multiple Salesforce.com and customer- and partner-created on-demand applications will run.
Salesforce will roll out its first-ever partner program at its Dreamforce event in mid-September, but Napiltonia gave VARBusiness a preview of what the channel can expect. He said he decided to join Salesforce because of his belief in how the company is trying to change enterprise computing.
"In my opinion, the world is moving to software as a services and to open source, and we enable both; so it's a great fit," he said.
He compared Salesforce to another industry-influencing company in the key area of customer reach.
"We're a lot like Microsoft in that we can serve everyone from Fortune 500 companies on down to companies with one or two users with the same product and the same code base," Napiltonia said.
The plan of attack for the Salesforce partner program has already begun as the company forms new alliances with large IT consultants; for example, Accenture announced in May that it would resell Salesforce applications. From there, Salesforce will expand its partner net to include, in order, Indian systems integrators, business-process outsourcing vendors, OEMs, regional systems integrators and traditional VARs. There's no formal time table for the program, but the company hopes to eventually approach 20,000 partners worldwide.
Napiltonia said the message Salesforce brings to companies with limited IT budgets is one of cost savings that can be translated into more powerful, better-integrated networks.
"If you have a $10 million IT budget, about $6 million to $7 million of that goes into basic hardware and software purchases," he said. "We can say that for the same $10 million, customers can spend $1 million to $2 million on Salesforce and the rest on whatever high-value changes they want to make to their systems."
That is where the VARs come in. Although some resellers worry that the eventual realization of "pure" plug-and-play, on-demand computing could leave them out in the cold, Napiltonia and Salesforce insist there always will be a place for industrious VARs.
"All the on-demand products won't necessarily be interconnected, and many of them will run on disparate systems," Napiltonia said. "We're looking for how to give VARs the capability to solve customer needs and help give them the value-added services customers will need."