The Cloud Pleaser
Myron: At the start, you were a disruptive force in the software industry. You described Siebel Systems in the book as an elephant and Salesforce.com as a gnat on the elephant. You have to be fair and acknowledge that Salesforce.com is now an elephant.
Benioff: We’ll do more than $1.25 billion in revenue this year. [Editors’ Note: Salesforce.com’s 2010 fiscal year ends in January 2010.] We’re getting close to where Siebel was at its peak.
Myron: So how do you avoid suffering Siebel’s downfall?
Benioff: Siebel’s downfall was that [its] customers weren’t successful. They had [sold to] the Merrill Lynches and Ciscos of the world and left them high and dry. That is not what we’ve done. We’re just getting going in the market. This is still a nascent opportunity. Cloud computing has this tremendous characteristic and we’re extremely well positioned on these three axes: sales, service, and custom. And, of course, we have a strong sales offering, a strong service offering, but then we have the platform offering. Siebel [only] had sales and service. It never actually built an application developed on its own platform because that wasn’t who it was. They were building on other people’s platforms. So that third axis is very different. Cloud computing is still at such an early stage. You don’t have to go any farther than what’s happening in Iran with Twitter to look at the potential for cloud computing. [Editors’ Note: The political protests that followed Iran’s presidential election were microblogged in real time—and often retweeted—around the world.]These things are still evolving and changing rapidly. Corporations still have not done a good job with bringing this technology in, whether it’s in enterprise apps, whether it’s in platform, or even in what we’re seeing in a lot of these new models like the Twitters and Facebooks and that kind of thing. New doors are opening for the industry and it’s going to be a requirement for all of us to be able to figure out how we walk through them.
Myron: Salesforce.com has its own social community with IdeaExchange and Salesforce Ideas has helped companies like Starbucks and Dell build their own. Do you have plans to integrate something like Ideas into the Force.com platform, so that your customers can build or manage it themselves?
Benioff: We’ve been trying to do that. We’ve integrated Twitter into the Service Cloud. That’s been a huge success for our customers like Comcast and others. We have integrated Facebook into our core applications. That’s been a huge success for customers like Dell and others. We are doing that. Customers can take advantage of these things to create much greater intimacy with their own customer base or create more-successful marketing campaigns. But it’s also our obligation to provide deeper integration and better capability, and that’s what we’ve really been working on. We’ve really done a good job showing people what’s possible there.
Myron: Not to say that Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn aren’t used for enterprise purposes, but any thoughts on integrating some of the more sophisticated social media/social CRM tools out there with Salesforce.com solutions?
Benioff: I think it’s very important to look at those things going forward. I really do. It takes up a lot of my mind. I spend a lot of time looking at how people use Facebook, how they use Twitter, and how to make them extensions of our products and how our customers can be more successful with these things. It’s important to me. I do think it’s a huge change in our industry. And I don’t think people realize yet how big of a change it is. But we’ve got an early look at that…. The thing that’s really worked the best for us has been the consumer apps. Those things have developed a lot of traction internally. People use those—Facebook and Twitter—really successfully.We built some of this into our core technology like our content management app and that kind of thing has been getting more traction internally. Ideas, that’s obviously very important.