Salesforce.com CEO and founder Marc Benioff took the stage today at Oracle OpenWorld. The fact that Benioff is making an appearance is very strange considering Benioff and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison have been at odds over the past year. They are the perfect Frenemies. Taking the stage with Benioff is Michael Dell, which isn’t surprising considering the recent partnership between Dell computers and Salesforce.com.
Benioff and Ellison have an interesting past. Benioff worked at Oracle for some years and Ellison was one of the first investors as Salesforce, which Benioff highlighted in his speech. Benioff enumerated on the power of cloud computing, saying that it is more elastic, scalable and generally easier for companies to use. Salesforce currently has 63,200 paying customers.
Michael Dell came on stage, also prosthelytizing the virtues of cloud computing and software as a service. He says that the success of cloud technologies is the reason why Dell bought IT consulting firm Perrot Systems.
Benioff didn’t spare any digs at Oracle, saying that when he used to come to Open World he used to feel it was targeted towards just large businesses. But Salesforce, he says, can be used by both small and large businesses. He emphasized Salesforce’s “top” security systems, which aren’t compromised despite being in the cloud. Benioff spoke about powers of Salesforce’s application management Force.com platform and app exchange.
The Service Cloud, which is Salesforce’s fastest growing product line, is hoping to revolutionize call center technologies, says Benioff. Salesforce recently launched a new version of the Service Cloud, adding in-depth integration with Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Dell was actually a pilot partner using the Service Cloud.
I respect salesforce for believing in cloud computing even during the early days when organizations were skeptical of hosted services. In many ways they did all the hard work of building trust in the cloud for all the hosted services that followed.
Where’s the video?
http://www.yout...h?v=H1P4fedN7II
Hmm… seems like Dell has been doing lots of acquisitions lately. Both Perrot and Perot systems?
Please don’t use moronic words like ‘Frenemy’ in blog posts. Sounds like you’re a 12 year old.
what is wrong with frenemy? I understood it as Marc / Larry’s relationship being situational – a friend and an enemy and the need may be.
“enumerated on”???
How would you put it Marc?
I’m just giving my point of view. Language is a tool. Whether you like it or not, you’ll be judged by your use of it. Especially, if you are a communicator, journalist, pundit, etc. It matters. It’s important. It sets Presidential candidates apart. It comes down to personal judgment. Is it cute or is it sounding like a 12 year old? You’ve already read my opinion. A tree is known by it’s fruit, so to speak.
Pardon the apostrophe for those who are judging me.
We need to hear more about Force.com and competitors like LongJump and Rollbase. What are enterprise sft companies like Oracle doing to ensure they have a similar cloud strategy?
Oracle will buy someone. No need to come up with one when you can buy it. Maybe this is the first step in the acquisition talks.
First part of Marc Benioff’s Oracle Open World keynote can be seen here:
http://www.yout...h?v=H1P4fedN7II
Oracle is late to the cloud computing market which is the problem of being one of the market leaders.
The enterprise software market using servers has stopped growing.
Oracle needs to buy a Salesforce or a Zoho.
Zoho would be a much better deal and business than Salesforce.