Dreamforce 2009: Benioff's wisdom of the Cloud

On the adoption curve for Cloud Computing:

“We are on a technology adoption curve. You have to follow that curve. You have early adopters and laggers and the ones in the middle [but] we are moving up. The Cloud Computing metaphor is the future. If it isn't then I guess Google, Amazon and eBay are in a lot of trouble. What are trying to with Chatter and the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud is to show customers a new way, [of] lower cost and that's easier to use and at the same time show them the ability to integrate into that capability."

On the competitive landscape:

“We are 1/60 the size of the largest software company today so we still very much feel like the David. Thos software companies, however, continue to launch their status quo technologies. What we are trying to do is to show customers a new way. I think SAP are in a lot of trouble. I would say that their religious and fanatical denial of the Cloud may have destroyed their company. SAP remains an innovation-less company. But they are very nice people. I believe that Microsoft does get it now. I was impressed by their launch of Azure. If you look at all their on-demand attempts, such as NetWeaver and CRM-on-demands, they have never happened. Oracle do get things but I think they are disabling those things with the Fusion migration.

On on premise licensing

"[On premise software vendors] think it's their purpose in life to collect taxes on software development technologies that were developed a decade ago. When are you going to ask for innovation instead of paying maintenance?"

On the security implications of the Cloud:

“In almost all our cases our customers security is far below where we are. It is really important to us and we are doing a lot of the right things. There is no finish line when we talk about security but if you chose to plug yourself into the internet you know that people out there are going to be looking in your file servers or trying to and if you don't have vast security teams working on this then you need to work with vendors. The largest companies have those teams but small ones don't. That's where we become their surrogate CIO.”

On collaboration:

“We have seen the revelation of how to collaborate. It is called Facebook. It is called Twitter. We are just collaborating around a lot of stuff that so far hasn't made us smarter in our business lives. I've got 5,000 friends on Facebook. And I know more about these strangers than I do about my employees or my key customers. I know when I've been tagged in an old college photo, but I've no idea when an important deal document has been updated. It's easier for me to see a college photo of myself being tagged and enhanced than it is for me to see developments in the PowerPoint slides I'm using tomorrow. I know more about what's happening in Iran from bloggers on Twitter than I do in my own software development work teams. When using Facebook I get smarter. I know that someone likes this movie, went to the football. What if I knew as much about my own customers? I want that same level of detail and intimacy about my business and my products.”

On what Chatter is all about:

“We've repositioned customer relationship management as collaboration relationship management. Your applications are talking to you. Your content is talking to you. It's the magic of Facebook and Twitter brought to the enterprise. Chatter is a collaboration tool, not a social this or social that. We really want to talk about collaboration, because that really is a budget item for our customers. The vast majority of our customers are using us in discrete business functions, and we don’t have an enterprise-wide app. Now we do.”