Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff reels off the numerous reasons why he doesn't care for Oracle, which he views as still just a big database maker, and Microsoft, which he called irrelevant.
NEW YORK - If
there was a theme for Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) CEO Marc Benioff's question and
answer session at Cloudforce here Nov. 30, it was how to run an enterprise
software business that is vastly different from the world Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL)
and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) dominated.
Noting that
Oracle appears to simply want to sell database computers and that Microsoft's
approach for "Windows everywhere" has run its course, Benioff
referred to the new business software world as the "social
enterprise."
In a
Salesforce.com nutshell, it's selling customer relationship software as a
service online through a Web browser on any device, from desktops to
smartphones and tablets. Salesforce.com then augments that service through
social technologies, such as status updates and file sharing.
Benioff and
his team launched their most ambitious social enterprise effort yet today in
the form of the
Social Marketing Cloud, which is grounded in the
company's Radian6 software,
acquired earlier this year for $326 million.
Radian6 builds social monitoring, engagement and analytics tools to help
companies better understand the market's perception of their brands, and how to
use that information to better appeal to customers.
True to his
allegiance to mobile as the viable platform of the future for enterprise applications,
Benioff and Co. also made their AppExchange store
available on Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhones and iPads, as well as on Google's
Android smartphones and tablets.
While Benioff
breezed through two hours of customer and product success stories, ranging from
the Chatter social collaboration platform, to Database.com, the Heroku Ruby on
Rails development platform among other toolsets, he preserved his snarky self
for the Q&A for press and analysts later here at Cloudforce.
Per custom, he
bashed Oracle and Microsoft and praised Facebook, which he holds up as the
consumer operating system of the future, as well as the platform through which
he bets his customers market themselves and engage with their own customers.
For example,
Benioff said that despite Oracle's acquisition of RightNow Technologies in an
apparent bid to gun for Salesforce.com's software-as-a-service (SaaS) CRM
business, RightNow's product isn't that good. Both Zynga and Electronic Arts,
he noted, terminated their deals with RightNow to get on Salesforce.com.
What about
Oracle's strategy to challenge Salesforce.com? Benioff said it looks like
Oracle just wants to keep selling companies database computers. "I don't
know what their strategy is," he said, adding that perhaps Oracle wants to
be the Teradata of the 21st century.
He also
repeated a rumor he'd heard that Oracle was jettisoning its CRM on Demand
software and moving the existing customers to its Fusion platform, which he
noted was not a multi-tenant cloud.
Generally,
repeating rumors about rivals is taboo for CEOs, but Benioff is no traditional
CEO. He noted that perhaps Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is turning his company into
a "scavenger" of dead or dying companies.
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