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.