The interesting folks over at Enterprise Irregulars have a rather interesting blog where they rate CRM companies, and they put Salesforce right near the top of the very big CRM players. The list goes like this:
1. Oracle
2. SAP
3. Microsoft
4. Salesforce.com
So how can Salesforce, with revenues not even 1/15th of the others, be 4th on the list?
Well, from my own experience, I'd have to put them right there as well (if not a little higher). At ebizQ, we regularly use Salesforce to communicate with our many customers and contacts, so Saleforce is really the only CRM product I have direct experience with.
Second, I am responsible for the Forum and Social Media on ebizQ, which means, for everyone question I generate on the Forum, I try to generate some viral buzz on places like Twitter.
But this past Wednesday, for the life of me, I couldn't get a single retweet of any of my tweets because all of Twitter was abuzz with the big Chatter announcement from Salesforce. And this was happening at the same time as the big Web 2.0 show was fighting for dominance of Twitter buzz.
While I know my selection of Twitterers in no way represents a fair sample of the tech world, but from my point of view, Salesforce and their announcement of Chatter clearly won the battle of last Wednesday's buzz.
So what I'm trying to say is that Salesforce, no matter where they fall on anyone's list, is clearly a CRM force to be reckoned with.
Marc Benioff is a master of buzz - and Salesforce belongs on this list because they are essentially a CRM 'pure play' (for the others, CRM is only a relatively - or in some cases like Microsoft very - small % of their total revenue).
The big question about Chatter isn't 'buzz' - it's how widely (or not) it is adopted. We won't know for a while since the product won't be available until later '10. More here... http://bit.ly/7vaqG2