SAP, Platform Leadership, And Salesforce.com

Bruce Richardson while assesing on the backplane opportunity for the enterprise software leader asks,"What is SAP’s equivalent to PCI, USB, or Pentium adoption?". Bruce writes, Shai Agassi, while launching netweaver divulged his plans to offer an SDK that would allows users and integrators to create their own xApps, SAP’s offering for composite apps. He described this as his top priority. This has not happened while customers and partners would love this, in the words of Bruce -"it is not clear whether it would help SAP sell more seats". Bruce also notes,"SAP has started to talk in general terms about building an Enterprise Services Repository (ESR) containing Web services, composite apps, and the modern equivalent of a data dictionary. Conceptually, this repository could be the new enterprise backplane, managing the flow of data into and out of a company and its extended ecosystem. SAP hasn’t provided any details on pricing or availability.If it helped to sell chips, Intel would likely have different agreements with participants (who contribute ideas) and adopters (who use the specifications to build products). No monies would change hands". My take: Bruce appears to be completely right upto this point.
In the second part, whenn he wrotes about salesforce.com looking for platform leadership – This clearly insults the notion of leadership and looks silly to compare salesforce.com with SAP /other CRM leaders .As Jeff points out, it is not easy to implement salesforce.com- the effort taken to customize for each and every enterprise’d need is substantial.