Comments on: Salesforce.com Partner Infighting?

By: admin

admin — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:23:17 +0000

@Brent: Absolutely! Nobody at x2od questions Astadia’s commitment at all. In fact, Astadia has produced super products and has generated high customer satisfaction.
I should have been more clear that it may not have been the most PR-friendly move to include that graphic in Appirio’s official blog. (This puts Astadia in the same boat as Model Metrics, my example above.)
Let’s use this as an opportunity to remind ourselves to be careful what we publish (both in words and images) because it can have far-reaching consequences.

By: Brent Mellow

Brent Mellow — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:55:08 +0000

Anyone checking the facts on Astadia would find that Astadia is 100% committed to SaaS. In fact, Astadia’s decision to use Microsoft Exchange was enabled because it was purchased as a service from USA.NET… an independting hosting company. Astadia made the decision to get out of hosted software. Astadia uses hosted GL/ERP, salesforce.com for CRM and a host of other on-demand applications including from Google, where Astadia is also an enterprise partner.

Brent Mellow
EVP/CMO
Astadia

By: admin

admin — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:15:26 +0000

I think you both raise excellent points:

@Mike: You’re absolutely correct that the end-users don’t care (understandably)… until they’re hit in the wallet. Perhaps a full analysis comparing the MSFT models will show substantial economic benefit to the customer, enough so that if the partner wants any business, it will implement the SaaS version, ignoring the decreased commission. Does anyone know of a published case study with hard numbers?

@Jeff: The Appirio educators are among the best in the SFDC-verse. I’m glad you got to learn from Tom Scott. However, though Yankees and Red Sox might drink beer together, the team owners don’t much care for each other. Also, I don’t think Chris had an agenda or wanted to smear Astadia at all–for all we know, it was a good-natured jab or Chris was making a joke. His company is, after all, the top Google-SFDC integrator around, and pretty much is enabling people to go cold-turkey from Outlook!

By: Jeff Douglas

Jeff Douglas — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:00:11 +0000

I attended the Force.com Application Labratory last November in Atlanta and it was taught by Tom Scott from Appirio. Over half the class was made up of Astadia employees and everyone got along great. Everyone was very friendly and professional. I would have never guessed anything was brewing…

By: Mike Leach

Mike Leach — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:39:03 +0000

I think techno-guys, like Chris, myself, and others, recognize the inelegance of Microsoft’s SaaS implementation architecture. But it’s easy to forget that end-users really don’t care what goes on behind the curtain (ie multi-tenant vs. JIT provisioned VMs) so long as they get what they want, now, for cheap.

Best for partners to be Switzerland as this shakes out IMO :-)