Farber: The whole concept of verticals comes from the world of client-server computing. In this model, enterprise software was rigid and inflexible, and customers were discouraged from making their own changes since those changes would make them unwilling to upgrade. So verticals were a halfhearted attempt at making customers succeed. They succeed in telling a customer: "You're a drug company? You must run your business exactly like every other drug company." No customer of ours thinks like that.
We don't think people need vertical solutions because all companies are unique. Having a telco vertical template doesn't necessarily give every Telco what they need. It gives them a generic mould that they must fit their business into. Salesforce.com has created customforce, which allows companies to build their own custom version of our application, so it fits their model exactly. As such, we've built salesforce.com as a platform that gives our customers the power to be unique. So with single users, SMEs, mid-market, and enterprise customers in finance, telecommunications, retail, logistics, law, health, and entertainment using it, we provide a customisation platform that allows these companies to configure salesforce.com according to their own business requirements.
Farber:
What are your thoughts on the on-demand market and what it offers to users, both for CRM and for other applications?
Robinson:
To date, most on-demand providers have described a tactical use of software rather than a true business enabler. In saying that, you must plan your route map and understand your relationship landscape before you can select the vehicle to take you to your destination -- and on-demand is simply one of the available vehicles.How the software is delivered is really irrelevant, it's the relationship marketing strategy and the ability of the platform to deliver the strategic requirements that should be most important.
Robinson:
How scalable is a hosted solution like yours? Do you have a saturation limit for growing your customer base?
Farber:
It's as scalable as an organisation needs it to be -- ask White Cloud Trading, which is behind the retail Tree of Life stores; or Australian-listed SMS Management Technology; or multinationals like Vodafone, Cisco, and Travelex. Our experience tells us that as successful as our 13,900 customers have been so far, we are just beginning to discover the possibilities -- not test the limits.
Farber:
Gartner recently announced it thought salesforce.com would be among the top three CRM vendors of the year, beating the combined licence revenues of Oracle and Peoplesoft. How does Pivotal intend to maintain revenues in the face of a smaller slice of the pie on offer?
Robinson:
Pivotal continues to grow from strength to strength. Neither Oracle nor Peoplesoft have appropriate CRM solutions for this market. They are costly, hard to implement, and not deemed as true CRM competitors in the mid-enterprise space. Pivotal, however, is perfect for this space (which contains the majority of Australasian businesses). We have predicted growth of some 50 percent for ANZ for 2005.
Your question is based on an assumption that the slice of the pie available to Pivotal will be smaller. In fact we're finding this not to be the case. With the realisation by so many businesses that effective management of stakeholder relationships is a pathway to greater profitability we have found more of the type of organisation we are interested in working with are coming into the market. So in fact our experience is that Pivotal's slice is growing!
Robinson:
Which person (alive today) do you admire most in the world and why?
Farber:
The Dalai Lama. He inspires millions with his compassion and wisdom yet maintains an amazing amount of humility and grace.
Farber:
Which IT company would you most like to work for (other than Pivotal)?
Robinson:
I can't imagine working for any other player in the CRM market. So I'd have to look out-side CRM if I were to work elsewhere. But if there were no opportunities within an existing organisation, I might have to create my own.
This article was first published in Technology & Business magazine.
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I find it haerd to seethese two as CRM leader , They have little abity tooscale as aproduct such Netsuite does from It PC awrd wing netcrm product
( also tyye bother to spend the mony to Auastalianise the product