The candid CEO
for the world's largest customer software-as-a-service company doesn't use a
single Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows-based PC or product when he travels.
Salesforce.com
(NYSE:CRM) CEO Marc Benioff said he travels with a new Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Kindle Fire tablet, an Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPad and a BlackBerry 9930
smartphone from Research in Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM).
Benioff ticked
off that list of devices at the company's Cloudforce event in New York City,
where his team unveiled
the Social Marketing Cloud, cemented by the social monitoring and
engagement software it gained from buying Radian6 earlier this year.
The new Cloud
also includes a social analytics and a workflow automation hub to help
enterprise application customers get a handle on what people and competitors
are saying about their brands.
Marketing
Cloud may have been the big news of the day for the company, but consummate
showman Benioff generated more interest with his candid criticisms of rivals
Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT).
After
dismissing Oracle as a database computer maker that can't figure out its
strategy, he called
Microsoft irrelevant in this new age of the mobile, social cloud, which he
sees being led by Facebook, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Twitter.
"I think
they've lost they're relevancy," Benioff said of Microsoft. "I just
don't think they matter anymore." Windows 8, Benioff said, is a big
"who cares?" and Facebook is the true consumer operating system of
the future.
"What we
want is operating system as a service, that's social and mobile," Benioff
added. "I want it to come from the cloud. I don't want it to run on any
one of my computers."
To illustrate
his point, Benioff noted that while he used to use Microsoft Exchange and
Outlook for email, he no longer uses any Windows products.
When he
travels, he uses a Kindle Fire to watch movies and TV shows, accesses
Salesforce.com's Chatter social collaboration application from his iPad, and
exchanges emails on his BlackBerry Bold 9930 smartphone.
Meanwhile,
back to the Cloudforce event itself, which was a success, drawing more than
10,000 people to the Jacob Javits Center.
Financial
analysts such as J. Derrick Wood of Susquehanna Financial Group, came away
bullish on the company's pipeline prospects and the fact that Salesforce.com
raised fourth-quarter revenue guidance to $3 billion, along with strong fiscal
year 2012 growth projections.
"Customers
have commented that CRM's platform is helping to transform entire business
models, and conversations around CRM deployments are happening more at the CEO
level than ever before," Wood noted, citing clothier Burberry as one
example of a company that has leveraged Salesforce.com's CRM platform.
Moreover,
Toyota (320,000 employees), Dell (125,000 employees), Verizon (94,000
employees), and ADP (55,000 employees) all use Chatter to communicate with one
another. Facebook has built 12 custom applications with Force.com and
Salesforce.com's platform to do a lot of back-office automation.