CNET informs me of the announcement by Salesforce.com to expand the war front. They have announced a service that extends beyond their traditionally known customer relationship management (CRM) service and allows customers to use many hosted applications at once, even software developed by other companies.

Per CNET, Siebel fired off a response:

"Salesforce.com's stated strategy is 'no more software.' I think what they mean is, 'We don't want to write software for you. Do it yourself.' More and more customers tell us they want to look to one company to deliver a solution to them," Keith Raffel, Siebel group vice president of products, said in a statement."

Now here's a quick glimpse lay of the land for Salesforce.com and Siebel with data taken from ITWorld and Yahoo!Finance:

• Siebel $1.4 billion revenue (hosted and non-hosted service)
• Salesforce.com $96 million (hosted service)
• Siebel's OnDemand has 28,000 end users at the end of 2004
• Salesforce.com has 214,000 subscribers from 13,000+ companies
• Siebel has 2.9 million users worldwide (across both hosted and non-hosted).

Interesting flanking moves going on here.

Steve Shu