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SAP on Salesforce?

Plattner said he had no problem with companies adopting solutions like Salesforce on a departmental level if it works or solves a problem, but again, he said SaaS wasn't ready for a prime time, enterprise-wide deployment. He also said SAP found developing on-demand for the enterprise more complex than expected. Benioff was quick to offer a solution:

"I want to figure out how to get SAP on the Salesforce platform. I'm not kidding," said Benioff. "They haven't had a lot of success (in SaaS) and we have 41,000 customers. They need us." As Plattner stared at the ceiling, Benioff said it would be too difficult for SAP to figure out how to move effectively to the SaaS. "There's no way they'll figure it out," he said.

Plattner wasn't buying it, but later he said if Saleforce's Apex development language was as good as Benifoff said he'd want to check it out.

Benioff (L) and Plattner (R) Source: Dave Needle

Benioff admitted the SaaS model isn't infallible. Salesforce, for example, has had outages on occasion that made its software inaccessible. Then, turning that negative into a positive, he said, "no one has a hundred percent uptime, but we have transparency (with our customers). On-demand is like a marriage, it's not a one night stand like most enterprise software is where they drop off the CD and say good luck."

Of course Plattner disagreed with that appraisal and pointed to SAP's customer successes.

The difference between the two firm's approaches came into sharp focus during the Q&A session. An audience member, identified as a CIO and SAP customer, said he wasn't interested in all the talk about platforms and technologies, but solutions.

He said the Salesforce model is appealing because of the ease of plugging in different on-demand solutions. He also liked and needs the end-to-end support SAP provides to run his business, but feels it's too closed.

Plattner suggested he needed to upgrade to a newer version of SAP to get more features and flexibility. Benioff said with Salesforce, new features come free as part of the standard subscription price instead of a major upgrade cost.

But the evening ended on a conciliatory note, as both executives were asked to name what they admired about the other. Benioff said he had great respect for Plattner's tenure and "spectacular accomplishments through multiple paradigm shifts."

Plattner credited Salesforce for creating a "fantastic" solution no one had thought of before.