Andreessen and Benioff Marc the Clouds

SAN FRANCISCO – Marc Andreessen is probably best known as the co-founder of Mosaic, the first widely-used Web browser, but he’s also the co-founder of Netscape, Loudcloud and now Ning, his latest venture that provides a platform for social networking sites.

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, characterizes Andreessen as the person who “practically invented the core technologies we are using mainstream today.”

Benioff is probably best known as a primary founder of the software-as-a-service movement, delivering applications over those core technologies he attributes to Andreessen. Now he is among the proponents of cloud computing, making those core technologies a platform as a service.

The two spoke in an exchange Jan. 17 at Salesforce.com’s Tour de Force, a day-long conference for developers, where Andreessen said he believes the platform-as-a-service wave is just beginning.

MB: We saw the emergence of the PC, Windows, Linux and the horizontal aspects of platforms – and database, analytics, applications companies. Are we going to see a whole new range of platform companies?

MA: Yes, I think there’s going to be a whole range, thousands of platform companies.

There’s a common definition of what a platform is: it means you can program it…This shift to an Internet, the cloud, or whatever you want to call it is a very, very big deal from many different perspectives. I think there is going to be literally thousand of new companies in this approach. We’re just starting to see cascade of that.

MB: In our world, we are seeing the first layer [of an on demand platform] is a global trusted platform – the data management layer is there, the integration layer, the Web services APIs, or meta data API.  On top of that is logic, or workflow, and on top of that maybe some kind of user interface and packaging mechanism. Is that how you see [PAAS] getting laid out? Is that how it will evolve as stack?

MA: That’s the general stack of how we thought about it in the old days. The new analogy to the old way of thinking about the platform stack [is to] add a few things on top of that. Clearly significant is that [an on-demand] infrastructure relieves developers of worrying about infrastructure. Some of our networks are growing 10, 20 percent a week

So as traffic takes off, you don’t want to worry about the underlying stuff, the run time.

That’s a very, very big deal.

The second part is that the platform doesn’t have to be just about running code, it can be about accessing other services. Running financials, tying to Google, tying to Amazon. It can be live services. It’s not just code, its access to services and to data that are actually live connections.

The other thing is that by definition it’s a service that can be used simultaneously by thousands or millions of people. So it’s inherently social. People can collaborate on building an application, but on using an application too. All the sudden you have live data, live services, and live people and the whole thing is connected. That’s a much more fertile ground for innovation versus a server sitting on the floor. It’s just code. It’s inert.