Analysts Views

Best of cloud and on-premise is the new mantra, says Saugatuck

Salesforce.com announced the availability of new, jointly-marketed Cloud-based CRM solutions from Salesforce.com and Dell Inc. Dell will offer Salesforce.com's SaaS-based CRM and sales automation applications to its SMB clients, and will provide implementation and integration with existing systems and databases. Subscription based pricing starts from $9 per user per month. At Oracle Corporation's OpenWorld conference, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, in his keynote entitled ‘The Best of Both Worlds’, laid out a vision of a hybrid cloud in which on-premises applications work together with on-demand applications.

According to research and consultancy firm Saugatuck Technology, the announcement and speech represent an acknowledgement by three of the biggest forces in software and hardware (Dell, Salesforce, and host company Oracle) that the IT model of today and of the future—is one that integrates on-premise and Cloud-based hardware, software and services.

Salesforce.com is acknowledging that in spite of the shift from client/server to cloud computing that is currently underway, on-premise software applications (and the customer benefits that accompany it) are not going away, Saugatuck noted.

"Now that Salesforce has expanded well beyond simply Cloud-based software to become a Cloud-based enterprise computing platform, the need for interaction with on-premise software and systems becomes strategically important. Thus we see a movement away from the ‘no software’ mantra of the last 10 years, and the introduction of a new theme—Best of Both Worlds’,” said Saugatuck.

According to the research body, this new theme will suit enterprise CIOs that Oracle is targeting, who today are bogged with the dilemma of choosing the right workloads to migrate to the cloud, as well as the time to move them. Dell and Salesforce.com, which have had success pursuing and engaging with large enterprises but have been successful first and foremost with SMBs, Saugatuck noted.