Monday, July 7, 2008

Lucas Joins the Force

Looks like the word is finally out. Phil Wainewright reports today that “enterprise software giant SAP has lost one of its brightest software-as-a-service stars to SaaS titan Salesforce.com.”

Star Wars cliches aside, the news that after 10+ years at Crystal Decisions/Business Objects/SAP, Steve Lucas has joined Salesforce to run platform marketing, AppExchange, and Force.com is significant. Steve brings a great track record of leadership to Salesforce and this announcement once again confirms that SAP has its head in the ground when it comes to SaaS.

Last year Steve had this to say about the challenges enterprise software companies face when it comes to the market shift to SaaS in a Salesforce.com whitepaper called, “7 Habits of Highly Successful On-Demand Companies“:

“Although Business Objects has a traditional software heritage, we knew we needed a comprehensive on-demand strategy to stay competitive in the evolving software market. This led to the creation of a dedicated on-demand business unit, which was responsible for pioneering new ways to engage and retain our customers. More importantly, this shift made us focus more than ever on delivering solutions that will make our customers successful over the long term.”

With BusinessByDelay twisting in the wind and, as he states in the Phil Wainwright article, without “a single piece of paper that states what their SaaS strategy is,” it sounds like management at SAP didn’t come to the same realization that Steve and Business Objects did before being acquired last year.

I had the pleasure of working with Steve at Business Objects and I’m looking forward to working with him again as an AppExchange partner. SAP’s loss is definitely Salesforce’s gain.

I’m not exactly sure why, but in light of this announcement, this clip seemed appropriate to me…