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Comment by cl42 | Hacker News Reader

I love this. Mulesoft, Tableau -- there's a very clear strategy here for Salesforce. You're running all of your customer-facing operations on Salesforce, so why not also integrate the BI stack into everything?

I've worked with a lot of companies who spend months (if not years) integrating their data into a few disparate systems... The finance team has one system (and underlying data lake), the commerce team another, the marketing team another... If Salesforce thinks they can run the entire underlying data infrastructure in addition to the actual customer-facing functions, then this is a smart play.

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If Salesforce wants to run my entire underlying data infrastructure, I think we’re in trouble. I see this more of a land grab, with SaaS vendors trying to push their own BI stacks and create an even tighter era of lock-in. I don’t think it is necessarily a good thing.

Data is an asset and liability - when somebody else has all of yours in their proprietary platform and under the control of their cloud, that is a scary proposition to me.

Fair enough if you are running your infrastructure on open standard tech and common cloud platforms, but not locked away in Salesforce.

This is reminding me of the behavior of other large orgs, like Oracle.

On the flip side, if Salesforce does not own its own BI stack, their customer might go to a different vendor that has better integration (i.e.: Microsoft PowerBI).

Salesforce data is stored in Oracle DBs

It’s a risky play. At my enterprise company, we’re not allowed to use a single vendor for everything, we explicitly must use different companies if a favoured vendor hits a certain spend threshold.

This is to prevent cost overruns and solution capture, where every solution to your company’s problems becomes “give it to X vendor” and then X vendor kills a product line and you’re toast.

Salesforce needs to be careful or else they’ll hit that threshold where companies don’t want to use them because you as a client are too small. Google is facing this problem right now.

Interesting! I haven't seen that requirement before, but it does make sense.

I’ve seen requirements by Target and Walmart to not use any AWS infrastructure in the service you are providing them.

I've seen that with retailers too-- but this is often driven by a fear/hate of Amazon rather than any real IT policy.

Yes, that seems more like Walmart/Target not wanting to support their main competitor in the retail space (Amazon) even though it's a different division.

It also happens to be Amazon's most profitable division, so it kinda makes sense.

Actually does Amazon's marketplace make any profit?

What are these spend thresholds?

Is this somewhat common? It makes intuitive sense, but the big 3 or 4 or whatever number it is (IBM, P&Y, etc) consultancies have "use us for everything" as their explicit strategy / part of their sales pitch.

So while they might lose customers like you, there is clearly ridiculously large piles of money up for grabs if they diversify their products, rather than remain specialized. And, of course, any sufficiently good specialist is at risk of being acquired by one of these behemoth generalists.

Although there is a good % of the market that works in a similar way to your business, it is worth noting that when a deal is exceptionally good, executives will create exceptions. MS Suite and some of its satellite offerings (PowerBI,Sharepoint,etc) is a good example of an exception.

There are also cases where a company will pick multiple vendors in an attempt to de-risk and/or for negotiating tactics. If you are fully dependent on a single vendor, the cost of migrating tends to skyrocket and the negotiating power moves towards the vendor.

> If you are fully dependent on a single vendor, the cost of migrating tends to skyrocket and the negotiating power moves towards the vendor.

This is particularly important with SaaS, as you lack the leverage to walk away. If you're fighting with a vendor, you had best resolve it by your contract date, as they will happily shut you off and wait for you grovel (and pay).

It is smart. It works the other way too. Tableau customers will see more reasons to switch to Salesforce.

They've already got a product called `Dataroma`, I'm not sure if this acquistion might cannibalize Dataroma customers.

Also an acquisition btw

https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-salesforce-buys-israeli-c...

Dataroma was all about its pre-built hooks into every Marketing platform in earth

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