CLOUDscore - Salesforce.com versus Oracle CRM

With Dreamforce and Oracle Open World both in the last 30 days there has been a lot of new and announcements about their various products. Some of it is really good news. Some is interesting. Some is false..

We worked up a quick CLOUDscore for them both based on what we know. Salesforce.com scores an 81 and Oracle scores a 67. Both of them make a good product for our use case, salesforce.com was a better choise. This does not mean that it is a better choice for you since you may rank them or score the differently.. Let's walk through the differences.

Company wise they both have solid datacenters, recoverability and are stable companies with great management teams. With Oracle it's a bit hard to tell. Their website is a little hard to follow and we don't yet have a relationship with Oracle but we think it's a pretty safe bet that they have redundancy built into their cloud solution, since they have a practice around DR.

Relationship wise though salesforce.com is much closer to us. To be fair we have worked with them for many years and our relationship with Oracle really revolves around them auditing us for licensing every few years. Oracle very well may be better or at least comparable when it comes to company relationships, attention and influence. Use your best judgement on that.

From a Legal perspective they both score roughly the same. I could not find specific mention of a SAS70 or SSAE certification on the Oracle side, but they listed enough other certifications to make me believe they have it and just didn't list it. Ask before you sign though and make sure it covers the general computer controls you expect.

Neither deal with assignment if you get bought , Oracle's SLA penalty is actually better then Salesforce.com's. They will give you 10% back for a missed SLA. As the contract reads though that looks like the max as well. So if they go down once, you get 10%. If they go down 10 times, you still get 10%. Salesforce.com seems to be 3% per issue. Neither talks about maximum increases in their default contracts, though this is probably negotiable given a large enough deal.

Under Openness, salesforce has a trust site, where Oracle doesn't, at least not that we could find. Oracle does though have the option to bring their solution in house which really helps make them attractive. Salesforce.com has no option other than their hosted model.

Salesforce does a better job on free training resources for users. We couldn't find much detail around Oracle's infrastructure and how global it was or how well it would perform. We gave them fairly high marks because of their other practices in this space. Oracle does have a desktop client though which is good and bad. It's good in that it allows them to offer offline pretty seamlessly, but it makes more requirement for the client.

Salesforce.com seems to have a better development community, or at least a more focused one. Oracle owns Java which is obviously widely used, but it was hard to find CRM specific development groups. While they may exist they seemed hard to find. While Oracle having the option to bring the software in house helps them with Openness, it hurts them here since they tend to have a slower pace of innovation. Of course they are huge, so when they want to make a splash it can be a big one, but having to test more installations means they need to spend at least some time on that. Not that they aren't still releasing regularly, we think salesforce.com is a little faster to market.

Just a reminder this is based on a single CLOUDscore and our environment may not match yours. We encourage people to do their own due diligence, but do recommend you use our CLOUDscore methodology. We think it is good. :)

If you want to run your own numbers you can get the public cloud score sheet from here. If you do, we would love to see your score and add it to our database, Please share it with us and email it to us at info at scorethecloud.com