Sale-forced: Not enough room on the platform for Kenandy

In a mildly interesting bit of consolidation among ERP vendors on the Salesforce cloud platform, Rootstock is acquiring Kenandy, the second act of MANMAN creator Sandra Kurtzig.  As Brian Sommer delicately put it at Diginomica, Sandy "was encouraged to create Kenandy" by Marc Benioff and Ray Lane, back when he was at Kleiner Perkins.

Silly me, I'd always heard that story (the Benioff portion of which, at least, is said to have happened in adjacent beach chairs) and assumed there was an exit payday built in to that encouragement.  Apparently not.  Back to the delicate Sommer:

I asked Pat [Garrehy, Rootstock CEO] if this deal was a long-considered strategic initiative or was it opportunistic. His response: “Opportunistic.” Pat said that a lot of things fell together recently that made this deal possible. 

That leaves Rootstock and Financial Force as the ERP primary players on the Salesforce platform - and as Sommer notes, they sometimes work together too.  In fact, one hears that Rootstock didn't have its own accounting modules - at all - until just a few years ago.

Here's where your humble blogger makes another pitch for the commercial open source xTuple - an enterprise class ERP that has had a full suite of functionality for over 15 years, and is supported not just by one company, but a global community of Graveyard-proof ERP professionals.