IT Data Centered

When it comes to talking a big game, I don’t think that Salesforce.com has many rivals.  The company that proclaimed the death of software and credits itself with pioneering cloud computing (among other things) does a better job of describing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow than pretty much any other tech vendor out there, IMHO.  It is an outstanding sales organization.

When ITDatabase chose a CRM solution, Salesforce.com was more of a reflex than a carefully analyzed purchase.  I was intrigued by the workflow API and what was possible with other types of integration scenarios, and just by virtue of having used Salesforce.com previously there was that familiarity factor.  And even though the licensing is moderately expensive for the enterprise version (~$1k/seat/annual subscription), it just didn’t feel like a great use of time to kick the tires on a bunch of CRM solutions out there.  I suspect a lot of folks that sign up with Salesforce.com follow a similar mental path to the one I followed.

You know what they say about throwing stones.  And ITDatabase is absolutely guilty of all of the same criticisms that I’m about to make of Salesforce.com (and more).  And SF.com has accomplished some extraordinary revenues and made a lot of investors rich.  But the company has been around for 10+ years, and repeatedly barfs out this pie in the sky vision of a world without computing boundaries.  Call me sanctimonious, but I think when you claim to have pioneered cloud computing and to have killed software, your product better be damn impressive and high performing, and neither is the case based on my two years using Salesforce.com.

ITDatabase recently took on a new technical lead who has pushed us into a bunch of new Atlassian products.  We were already using JIRA, but now we’re using Confluence, Bamboo, and other Atlassian products that were part of a really cool promo that they are running.  I saw that Atlassian was up for a Crunchie recently.  I’m told they were a runner up in their category – congrats to them.  In any case, I find it absolutely amazing that Atlassian – with the creativity and nearly perfect execution that goes into so many of its products – gets so relatively little discussion in the U.S. tech pubs and blogs.

As a longtime Salesforce.com user and a somewhat new Atlassian user, I want to point out three ways that I think that Atlassian (severely underrated) outshines Salesforce.com (severely overrated) in product execution:

“Just Enough”
For every Atlassian product I’m currently using, I would estimate that I use more than 75% of the features.  For Salesforce.com, I use about 10% of the features.  Sure – the very large enterprise users have a much more expansive set of use cases that would lead them into more of the features.  But it was Salesforce.com’s idea to force me into the enterprise edition (by withholding access to the few extra features that did reside there that I was interested in).

Meaningful Integration Between Functions
I love the way the discreet pieces of the puzzle work together with Atlassian.  They have this “Agile Planning Board” drill-down, for example, that lets you see the issues you created in JIRA in an entirely new format (in the context of product releases you’re working on, for example).  In Salesforce.com, the dashboards functionality is really limited, often generates error messages for improper configuration, and is just not very fun to use.  Any SF.com drones I suspect would point out that other people have no problems with the dashboards – but I have asked other folks who find them pretty miserable to use.  My greater point is that for a company that so emphasizes integration in its cloud hallucinations, the integration just within Salesforce.com between the different views and functionality (in their Enterprise Edition) is not very fluid or dynamic.

Speed Matters
This is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison at this point, because we are hosting our own installs of Atlassian – but Salesforce.com is miserably slow.  Every other web application that I use is zippy by comparison, and it’s just unacceptable that a company that big, with that many resources can’t figure out how to reduce these load times between page refreshes, or pull more xml / ajaxy stuff in to not require certain pages to refresh at all.  My experience w/ Sf.com has also been that the email client part isn’t a lot of fun. Very little has changed with the look and feel / performance of the email client in the last two years (which is pretty weak considering Sf.com’s vast revenues / virtually unlimited development resources). I would already far prefer sending emails from Outlook (and using the sf.com connector) than sending from w/ in Sf.com. The Sf.com email has a fixed window size. Once you’ve opened an email window and started drafting something, you can’t do a search for a contact or do anything else (you’re basically tied to either finishing / sending that email, or shutting out of it and going off to do something else). The email functionality of sf.com is in the dark ages … missing simple user conveniences that even a rough once-over by someone with a user hat on would detect.

Will I move off of Salesforce.com anytime soon?  Probably not, because the switching cost is that it’s a major pain in the butt to do so.  Would Salesforce.com care if they lost our two seats?  Of course not – they’re doing great financially (especially if you ask them).  But is it not reasonable for a customer to ask that one of the biggest blowhard companies in the tech industry drink its own Kool Aid and practice what it preaches?