A year or two ago I attended Sage’s global summit in New Orleans when the company announced its new client-side accounting software solution built upon Salesforce’s Force.com platform. Sage’s CEO, Stephen Kelly, was quick to wax poetic about how the Salesforce platform was the ideal tool on which to build a solution — pointing to the fact that Sage didn’t need to reinvent the wheel and could leverage Salesforce’s investment in its battle-hardened platform.

I was less sure, pointing to the fact that Force.com has, until now, been a platform focused on more enterprise-level use cases. As I saw it, building a small and mid-sized business (SMB) tool, on top of an enterprise platform created some weird dynamics in terms of economics and fit. Kelly disagreed and we were happy to respectfully see this issue from two different sides.

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Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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