Oracle Gunning for Salesforce.com

However, Beagle Research analyst Denis Pombriant noted all of the vendors in Chowdry noted in his report have dabbled in the cloud at some point.  However, many vendors have also moved the data center to another location without realizing the improvements that Salesforce has delivered.  Pombriant told eWEEK:

The issue is that all the other approaches replicate the problems of the data center, then export them, including the ability to make spaghetti code that, down the road, is unmaintainable. Some companies will hear the siren song of this brand of cloud computing and move their operations to the cloud. 

But they will discover that they've only saved on the cost of hardware, licenses and other operational things like labor for exotic specialists who work in the stack. But they'll incur the same overhead in writing application code, versioning it and maintaining it. In other words, they won't get the full benefit of a more turnkey approach offered by Salesforce.

Ultimately, Pombriant said pitting several companies versus Salesforce.com and declaring the company troubled is unwise.

"Salesforce might be outcompeted for a specific deal against any one of those vendors but when you combine everything and ask which vendor has a vision of the future on all those fronts and is executing on the vision, you have to give Salesforce very high marks," he said. "I think Salesforce wins the big picture debate and that savvy CIOs will see that and act accordingly."

Pombriant has good points, but in a follow-up note Chowdry notes the history of Oracle putting successful companies in its sites and using them for cannon fodder en route to acquiring them.

"Sometimes we need to look at the past to anticipate Oracle's future actions," Chowdry claimed, pointing to Oracle crushing PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems and BEA Systems before buying those companies for a much lower price.

To wit, Chowdry said Oracle could acquire Salesforce.com in a few years and for roughly 50 to 60 percent of Salesforce.com's current share price of $130.