Oracle's from Mars, Salesforce.com's from Venus | News.blog | CNET News.com

I went up to that Oracle Fusion event last night, it really was pretty damn boring, but that's not the reason for this post. I found it noteworthy that Wookey made a couple of comments about customers using extensions to the product (another word for customizations) and urging them to abandon the custom code so they could upgrade to the Fusion applications when they become available in a couple of years.

What Alorie is pointing out in her piece on news.com today is something of extraordinary importance for the enterprise software market and something that starkly defines the new generation from the old guard. Companies like Oracle and SAP really need to get on board with the notion that web services and SOA are a means to an end where the vendor supplying the back end software may not be supplying the user experience. In other words, we should be embracing as fast as possible to a world where the end user application is an composite app of services from one or more vendors, and is an app that is composited when the user needs it based on the requirements they have at the moment.

What SFdC is doing is really interesting, and I have written about it on several occasions, most recently here. If they can get a community of user generated applications built on top of their hosted service built up to some level of critical mass they will be a force for change and that's good.

Link: Oracle's from Mars, Salesforce.com's from Venus | News.blog | CNET News.com.

Their messages to customers were worlds apart. While Oracle executives urged customers to "retire" custom-built programs so they can migrate more smoothly to next-generation releases, Salesforce encouraged customers to build custom programs on top of its software. In fact, Salesforce's lastest service is an online marketplace where customers can freely distribute and sell their home-brewed creations. The company wants to make custom software development as easy as blogging.