CloudForce: Benioff talks Cloud 2 and eyes new nemesis

Despite the tube strike forcing a late rescheduling of the London Salesforce.com jamboree, attendees packed out the capital’s Royal Festival Hall to hear from a host of customers and Salesforce.com execs. Unsurprisingly it was CEO Marc Benioff’s keynote that proved the biggest draw as he proposed to customers that he would show them that "there is a door that we can all walk through into the future of computing".

 

What won't lie on the other side of the door according to Benioff, however, is cloud computing – or at least, cloud computing mark one. The reason for this, he suggested, is the phenomenal impact of social networking. And to put this into context, the CEO took the audience back to the original inception of Salesforce.com.

 

"In 1999, right before I started Salesforce.com I was at Oracle and I was using my PC with the cathode ray tube monitor, I had my mouse, and I was using Amazon.com clicking on the tabs and just loving it. And I said to myself why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon – I didn’t install it, I don’t have to upgrade it, it is changing every day, this thing is fantastic! So that’s why I quit my job and started to make this CRM suite that looked like Amazon.com.

 

"But today in 2010 it is different and I say why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook, becuase I’m using Facebook every day - I’m communicating, I’m buying thing, I’m sharing information, letting people know where I am…. It is amazing. And the paradigm is so compelling – with the stats updates, and the feeds and profiles, and speed and how it works on my iPhone so well. So why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?

 

"And it’s scary because we were working making our enterprise software to look like Amazon and now the whole industry has changed. I call it the Facebook imperative. The world is changing from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2."