Salesforce eats own dog-food

Beverley Head
Thursday, 06 October 2011 08:25

Having been ousted from his scheduled spot at Oracle's OpenWorld conference, Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and his team harnessed social media to pull together and promote an alternative presentation in which he likened companies which were cloud-deniers or social network agnostics to Egypt's deposed President Mubarak.

Mr Benioff said that a new era of social computing was emerging, riding the wave of enthusiasm for social networking. 'This is not just about the consumer, this is about the enterprise,' he said.

Companies which didn't listen to and engage with customers using social networks were going to face problems he said, offering HP and NetFlix as two examples of companies struggling to engage at that level.  He said that the rise of social networking, which has people spending four hours a month on Facebook, was influencing both corporations and society at large, as evidenced by the speed at which to so called 'Arab Spring' percolated through the Middle East.

Mr Benioff said that by contrast Oracle's OpenWorld had been 'mainly about next generation mainframes' rather than the cloud and the emergence of social computing. He said it was Salesforce's 'contrarian position that caused the cancellation of the keynote.'

According to Mr Benioff while 'You can be Mubarak and say this doesn't' exist,' companies which failed to acknowledge the shift toward social computing were wrong-headed. He also warned enterprises to 'beware the false cloud' where suppliers claimed to have a cloud strategy, but were instead still focussed on selling conventional hardware and software, albeit packaged differently.

Speaking about Oracle's decision to reschedule Salesforce's presentation Mr Benioff said; 'At 3.30 in the afternoon we got a phone call that we had been cancelled. That we could go on at 8am when the show was cancelled.'

In response to a request for further information about the decision to cancel Mr Benioff's presentation an Oracle spokeswoman forwarded the company's statement that; 'Due to the overwhelming attendance at Oracle OpenWorld we had to make several session changes. The Salesforce.com Executive Solution Session was moved to Thursday at 8:00am in the Novellus Theatre.'