IDC blog has a post highlighting one of their predictions for 2007. Salesforce.com will be acquired in 2007. We believe the growing importance of online delivery of software and business services will make salesforce.com (and particularly its AppExchange hub) a very tempting target to both large players (like IBM, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft) still struggling to scale down and move online, and consumer-heavy players (like Google, Yahoo!, AOL) trying to "scale up" to the business market as a way to further monetize their online presence.

In the post they go on to list the five core market premises underlie this prediction:

SaaS is strategic. Developing SaaS capabilty (and SaaS' merging with/morphing to online business service delivery) is clearly becoming a critically important capability for the future of "traditional" software and services vendors

The platform and ecosystem are the strategic core. While salesforce.com isn't the only SaaS player to consider for acquisition, it is arguably the most visible one; and its development of the AppExchange/Apex platform and ecosystem is arguably the most strategically valuable

Acquisition is (relatively) fast & easy. Acquisition (vs. organic development) will be the fastest way for at least some of the key players to develop a SaaS platform and ecossystem.

Everything's for sale. Salesforce.com management may not be interested in selling, but - let's face it - all companies are for sale, at the right price.

"Disruptors" are more likely buyers. more likely buyer category would, in my view, be the online players who don't have the complicating legacy middleware commitment.

What do you think ?

Source: 1

Prashanth Rai