SAN FRANCISCO -- GigaOm founder Om Malik's third annual Structure conference
here at the University of California, San Francisco's new eastside
campus June 23 and 24 brought out the heavy hitters in the cloud
computing business, and they certainly delivered cogent insights for
attendees to think about.
For example, Marc Benioff, CEO of super cloud service provider
Salesforce.com, put forth the idea that a Cloud 2 era is about to dawn
-- never mind that Cloud 1 is still in the process of discovery by a
fair number of old-school enterprise IT folks.
"The idea of Cloud 2 is what I would call a combination of cloud
computing, social networking, and mobile applications," Benioff said.
"I used to think, back when I started Salesforce, that why isn't all
enterprise software like Amazon? Now I'm thinking: Why isn't all
enterprise software like Facebook?"
Facebook, with its more than 450 million regular users, is the most
complex popular application ever, Benioff said. "It's got a
half-billion users going to more than 1 billion users. How can we bring
that kind of capability into the enterprise?" he asked.
"There's a shift going on from Amazon to Facebook: Where I was having
to pull information from the Internet, now it's being pushed at
me," Benioff said. "[We use] computers that we are touching, not
clicking. We're adopting this new technology really fast; you're
walking around with your iPad, but it's subtle what kind of a change
this is."
The big existing players -- IT companies such as Microsoft and IBM,
Benioff said -- are getting "dropped away, they're just gone, in terms
of new purchase decisions, new technology decisions, and great new
technologies getting dropped straight into the mainstream of the
market. That's what's really exciting to me right now."
Salesforce.com is exceeding a $1.5 billion-per-year run rate, Benioff
said, and is now at the 77,300-customer level. "That was the first
shift -- us [Salesforce] moving our customers from the client-server
model of the old Siebel/Oracle/SAP stuff into the cloud," Benioff said.
'A door has opened and we're all walking through it'
Cloud 2 is another shift that's happening, Benioff said. "That's where
a door has opened that we're all walking through that's going to create
more value and more capability," he said.
Benioff cited Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker's recent report
on the mobile Internet asserting that "Apple's iPhone, iPad and iTunes
ecosystem might well become the fastest-ramping and most disruptive IT
product-service launch the world has ever seen."
"These ideas that we're moving into a new mobile, social world -- this
is going to create more value and more capability for the industry than
the last shift, which I kind of characterized as Cloud 1," Benioff said.
Fundamentally, Cloud 2 is an enterprise IT system that takes into
account on-demand cloud computing services, making sure they are all
adapted for use by mobile devices, and that they are interwoven with,
and working hand-in-hand, with social networking services like
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter for immediate communication purposes.
If companies don't recognize and embrace this soon, they will be left
behind, because that's where the future of business is going, Benioff
said.
This coming shift means that Salesforce also will have to do some
updating, Benioff said. Salesforce.com on June 23 released its new Chatter collaboration tool on June 23 as part of this upgrade.
"We have to transform. We're working hard at that. We've been working
on rewriting our core apps, a new version of our sales app was actually
released on Friday (June 18); a new version of our customer service
call center and contact center; a customer portal app that we also
released on Friday; and a new version of our platform that will utilize
Java," he said.
Benioff cited Apple CEO Steve Jobs, "who has not only rolled out the
iPad and now the iPhone 4 -- you have to take that leadership
imperative that he has, drop the gauntlet on it, and say: 'Everybody
needs to move forward again.'"
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