Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes says Saleforce can’t copy his mind

“Watch out, Hootsuite. Or is it goodbye?”

That was the warning in the title of VentureBeat’s article today on the news that Saleforce will go toe to toe with the Vancouver-based company with a new offering call “Social Studio”, a social tool that will combine a number of recent acquisitions, including Fredericton’s Radian6 and Pardot.

“It’s one simple tool with easy automated rules, team collaboration, and the ability to assign cases in Salesforce,” said Radian6 founder Marcel LeBrun, who has assumed the role of Salesforce’s chief product officer for its marketing cloud. Is a little cross-Canada rivalry shaping up for the worldwide social media management space?

VentureBeat Writer John Koetsier says the new competitor will be tackling what it perceives to be a weakness in Hootsuite’s game.

“The challenge for Social Studio, now a key part of Salesforce’s ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, will be to prove that it’s better for the enterprise than HootSuite, clearly the current leader in the space,” said Koetsier. “While other solo competitors such as Spredfast, Expion, Sprinklr, and Hearsay nip at its heels, HootSuite’s 7-8 million users and its $165 million war chest are pretty well unmatched by anything except, perhaps, what the other major marketing suites from Adobe, Oracle, IBM, and others can put together.”

Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes, meanwhile, brushed off the Salesforce.com news in a way that perhaps only he can; by quoting Rudyard Kipling on his Twitter account.

“They copied all they could follow
but they couldn’t copy my mind
so I left them sweating and stealing
a year and a half behind.”

Ouch. Score the first round for the West Coast.

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