Salesforce Site.com and why PLM vendors need to be concerned?

If you following cloud news and especially what Salesforce.com is up to, you probably noticed this announcement – Saleforce.com is launching a new service called site.com. You can read more about this announcement here. What was my immediate reaction? There are few software packages Salesforce.com dreams to make obsolete. SharePoint and WordPress among them. I can recommend you the following RWW article – Next, Salesforce Aims to Obsolete the CMS with Site.com Launch. To me the following passage was a key:

“We are extending the social enterprise out to all of your customers, all of your partners, and all of your prospects,” says Andrew Leigh, director of product management for the Force.com platform, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb, “by allowing you through a single cloud-based platform to be able to basically publish any data or any content out to an external audience.”

Take a look on the following videos about site.com (sorry, they have some marketing flavor).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q2rP578VjU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tf_WaD52mI

With the price tag of $1,500 per month, Site.com in my view, won’t be very competitive to your small business WordPress hosted website. However, thinking about larger companies, it can be a good idea. The amount of money IT spends on organizing of websites, content integration is significant.

Now, let me move towards my PLM-related to thoughts. Why do I think PLM vendors need to be concerned? Here is my take. Manufacturing is going towards decentralization. More suppliers and partners. More services online. More information need to be provided outside of your company to make your business production. Think about engineering services, component suppliers and many others. PLM companies so far failed to provide something that can serve these needs. Salesforce site.com platform connected to the data in your company and integrated with all social services can be an interesting option.

What is my conclusion? Site.com is not going to compete with PLM products tomorrow. Calm down. However, the idea data platform integrating internal company data and external website behaviors and appearance is something that can be interesting to many manufacturing companies and supply chain. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg