Bonvanie joined the San Francisco-based company as general manager of AppExchange in February this year from German business applications giant SAP, where he spent a year as senior vice president of global marketing.
He has left Salesforce to join Californian application lifecycle software firm Serena Software as senior vice president of marketing, partnerships and on-demand.
AppExchange, which is Salesforce.com’s online marketplace for ISVs to sell add-on on demand applications for its CRM platform, will now be run by chief marketing officer George Hu, according to Salesforce.com.
Salesforce.com has been quiet about Bonvanie’s resignation, and the short period of time he stayed at the company suggests a sticky relationship. However Bonvanie played down any potential differences, saying in a statement that he left so soon because opportunity knocked.
He said that Serena presented an irresistible chance to work with a pioneer in on-demand application development.
I continue to admire [Salesforce.com] and look forward to working with them as a customer and partner in the future, Bonvanie said.
Bonvanie made a name for himself at French-US business intelligence firm Business Objects where he served as CMO. During his tenure there he made what many regarded as promotional and inflammatory comments from which Business Objects had to backtrack on and publicly disclose. Prior to that Bonvanie also had long management stints at Oracle and Ingres.
Salesforce.com’s stock fell around 5% after the news was announced. That drop was also caused by Wall Street concerns over sub-par closing rates this quarter in its North American small and medium sized business segment.
Our View
Bonvanie’s departure comes at a time when Salesforce.com is trying to expand its AppExchange network. Bonvanie was hired specifically to set the strategic agenda for both AppExchange and Salesforce.com’s new Apex on-demand applications development platform announced last year. Both initiatives seek to encourage greater partner development of add-on applications for Salesforce.com’s core CRM platform.
It’s unclear how AppExchange is doing right now. In a first-quarter earnings call in May, CFO Steve Cakebreak said that revenue steams were pretty immaterial from the system because it was only just starting to ramp up.
It’s equally unclear what impact Bonvanie’s departure will now have on the ramp up plans laid out for AppExchange. At the beginning of this year Salesforce.com introduced a new revenue scheme that forced AppExchange partners to pay referral fees for at least 10% on any Salesforce.com-influenced sales revenue they generate in the first-year. And at the end of this year Salesforce.com is expected to debut a new check-out systems for AppExchange checkout system that evolves it from just a basic online directory to a more fully fledged e-commerce system.
Analyst firm Citicorp cited Bonvanie’s departure as disappointing coming as it did so soon after he joined – with great fanfare it must be said. In Citicorp’s opinion Mr Bonvanie was a relatively high-profile hire, and represented a symbolic move because he was hired from SAP. But his departure is really a non-event. It’s hard to see Bonvanie, a chronic job hopper, making any significant difference during his short stint at Salesforce.com, apart from pulling a fat monthly paycheck.
