Copacetic

TechCrunch thinks SalesForce may be hawking itself to Oracle for $75 a share. I never know whether the prices make sense in these deals, but from a technology perspective it would be a huge win for Oracle. Oracle has been trying to get into the OnDemand space for years, but their OnDemand offering is shit, not to put too fine an edge on it. They have failed abjectly in every attempt for reasons such as,

• Channel conflict
• Obsession with build all their own technology (e.g. network management and storage management tools)
• Failure to re-architect the Oracle database to suit an OnDemand architecture (sensible out of the box defaults for a start)
• Failure to create a single OnDemand organisation, instead spreading the activity throughout the global support organisation
• Failure to price appropriately
• Failure to deploy billing infrastructure to bill appropriately
• Failure to deploy any kind of virtualisation at the OS level
• etc. etc.

SalesForce has solved all these problems and they have solved them using Oracle as a backend. They would inject the appropriate engineering/support DNA into Oracle and make the whole OnDemand effort more customer focussed.

Makes sense, but will Larry bite?