Henning, meet Marc

If SAP were really serious about succeeding in the SMB market, it would have to make a very serious move. My idea: Buy Salesforce.com. It's no secret that Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff has toyed with the idea of selling his company, and SAP could certainly afford it. Salesforce.com has long since solved the technological problems that caused a spate of embarrassing outages a few years ago, and it has a large and loyal SMB customer base.

I don't expect that to happen; it would be an admission that SAP -- a well-known sufferer of the "not invented here" syndrome -- has failed a crucial test. And in a larger sense, that failure speaks to the larger failure of enterprise software to meet the needs of smaller businesses.

The wave of consolidation that has swept the enterprise software world since Oracle bought PeopleSoft has been accompanied by a drive on the part of the largest survivors to build and sell complete software stacks. Although there are reasons that the stack strategy offers benefits to the enterprise customer, it clearly doesn't serve the interests of the little guy.

Luckily there is a wealth of smaller companies busily adopting open standards and moving toward the SaaS model. If you're responsible for IT in the SMB world, that's the place to look.