who will buy Salesforce?

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This is a buzz that has moved the market after Salesforce jumped 15% in the market: NYSE:CRM. This is just pure speculation exercise, nothing else.

I have several questions, who, why, when.

Who and why: there are different alternatives, and plausible reasons. These are my bets.

Oracle

  • Salesforce is having some inability to make waves outside its core competency (CRM) software. Force.com is a growing ecosystem but it’s not enough.
  • Oracle is being unable to be widely considered as a major cloud computing player.
  • The 15% rise is not a overnight consequence, these ORCL-CR discussions come since 2014 (at least).

Amazon

  • Both companies has a powerful ecosystem (infrastructure & software) oriented mainly on enterprises market.
  • Amazon never published the contribution of AWS to their business and suddenly they did this time, why do they need to show their AWS is a healthy business? A reason could be: we need some money to be able to buy something.

Microsoft

  • Microsoft Dynamics is so far away of the leader of the CRM market: Salesforce. MS Dynamics is covering small size market, but for the blue chips Salesforce is the standard election.
  • Microsoft changes are driving their cloud strategy to better situation and they are capturing a good piece of the infrastructure market.
  • Microsoft SharePoint was supposed to be the collaboration environment with B2B capabilities, but the reality is that it’s not as powerful as it should be. Force.com ecosystem is working better for B2B. SharePoint could stay as document management environment.

SAP

  • SAP was not able to jump to the cloud by themselves and after that they bought Ariba.
  • A better integration between CRM & ERP could generate good synergies and opportunities.

Is this the right moment? (when), the overall stock market is living a 6 years rising trend, and there are voices that start to say the market is living a bubble. The question is that money is moved from one place to other when they feel they can earn more in other place. There are 2 worldwide tensions: China (saturated real state market and lowest growth in last 20 years) and oil price (low prices and fracking companies with credit risk). Some of these two could be the ones who make the market to fall. To me this is not the best time to buy.

Bets opened!

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