Let them do their jobs

During the joint Salesforce/Workday call yesterday afternoon Marc Benioff said

We both offer phenomenal solutions, but those solutions are better when they work together. And that's what customers want. They want that integration. They want partnership. They want vendors to have working relationships with each other.

Well said.

Talk to any customer into cloud computing for the last few years and Salesforce and Workday are part of the landscape, or have both been evaluated. Like HP which presented at Workday Rising last week, and has done several webinars with Salesforce. Like Thomson Reuters whose  SVP of Global HR Systems,  Sue Laskey-Myers was honored as a visionary at Rising, and is also a big Salesforce user. And many more.

But, I was amazed at the number of analysts on the call who started their questions with a “Congratulations on the partnership”.

I was amused with all the speculation leading up to the call.

“It’s a bromance”. Any one who has spoken to Aneel Bhusri in person or has heard him in public knows his admiration for Marc. They also happen to be neighbors and friends. Not new.

“It is meant to trump Oracle’s earnings call (which was around the same time).” or “There is a major pre-Oracle OpenWorld (next week) announcement”. Hello, Rising would have been a better megaphone last week.

Marc and Aneel and their companies deserve plenty of ink. But let’s save it for things they do well for their customers and their charities. Not for doing what they should be doing.