We had a chance to sit down with Parker Harris, EVP of Technology (and co-founder) of salesforce.com at Fortune Brainstorm. At one point in the conversation, he expressed regret SaaS was evolving so slowly at the larger players like SAP and Oracle.
No, he does not look forward to competing with their much larger sales and marketing machines. But he is facing engineering and operational challenges like how to continue to optimize his own compute/storage resources as cloud infrastructure vendors push pricing to levels unheard off just a couple of years ago. He is tackling issues of automating customer support for partners like Coda on his Force.com platform. Continuing evolution of technologies and practices around integration with legacy applications (yes including the new legacy – SAP, Oracle)
Not unique to salesforce.com. Issues SAP and Oracle and Lawson and other vendors will hit 2-3-5 years from now as they scale their own SaaS and learn how to mature operations for thousands of customers and partners. Sure, Parker could talk to peers at NetSuite, Workday and other SaaS vendors. But in some ways he wishes the larger vendors would be there today. There are common engineering and plumbing challenges every competitor hits which are useful to share experiences around. It would be good for the industry.
Not going to happen any time soon as the on-premise vendors continue to dabble grudgingly around SaaS . So he will need to continue to blaze his own path. Lonely as that may be.
