MARC Benioff has been up since the early hours feeding his Microsoft
obsession. The Salesforce.com boss has learned that Steve Ballmer is
boasting he’ll take him on at his own game with Live CRM, a web-based
application similar to Salesforce’s flagship offering.

Benioff has already fired off an early morning email to all staff
noting with some glee that Microsoft is being "hustled out" of the
application space by everyone from Google to Yahoo.

Benioff has lots of obsessions. He’s obsessed about Ballmer and
Oracle boss Larry Ellison in a bad way, and obsessed about Google
founders Larry Page and Serge Brin in a good way.

He’s obsessed about Web 2.0, and he hates client/server software so
much he has even staged a mock protest against it, featuring actors
holding signs with Salesforce’s trademark "no software" tagline.

Sitting in Singapore’s Ritz Carlton hotel
in a suite the size of most houses, the big man is already fired up,
following a breakfast interview with CNBC, and he is keen to get back
on his software-as-a-service hobbyhorse.

WHAT will the applications of
the future look like, and how will they be different from the
client-side software we’re familiar with today?

We’ve seen the emergence of the consumer web over the past decade
with the likes of Google, Yahoo and eBay, and the consumer web has
changed how we inform, educate and entertain ourselves personally.

Now we’re seeing the emergence of the business web, which helps
companies control their operations and allows them to take use the same
delivery model that consumers do.

What’s the future for Microsoft? Do you feel threatened by Live CRM?

Companies are challenging Microsoft in the area of email, search and
even customer relationship management, but Microsoft continues to be a
software company.

It has been left behind in some areas, such as search, and Salesforce has given it a strong run for its money in CRM.

Microsoft still doesn’t have CRM on-demand, and although it has now announced it, it has not yet delivered it.

AppExchange enables companies to develop and publish applications for the Salesforce platform, which is very exciting.

It means we’re already 300 applications ahead of Microsoft because they don’t have anything like that.

It’s an unusual idea: two different companies getting together to
make an integrated application. In the past you bought some Oracle
software and then you bought the mapping software and you had to be
responsible for the integration — it was very complicated.

There’s so much happening on the web we have to ask: if we can run
our lives with eBay and Google, why not run our businesses with similar
applications? Well, we can.

Salesforce is more like Google with its desktop, or Apple with its widgets, than it is like Oracle or SAP.

CRM Live is a very big change for Microsoft. That means it now has
two CRM product lines: Live and Dead. I’m kidding, but it does mean
Microsoft is effectively saying this is the end of software. It has to
take a good look at Google and Writely. Microsoft has not been good at
staying ahead of the curve in terms of the internet.

Microsoft is, however, a big company with a lot of cash. Surely it can face the challenge?

Can it face the challenge from Google, iTunes, Skype, Yahoo? It’s
not just a challenge from us they’re facing, it’s a challenge from
everyone on the internet.

You seem to see AppExchange as a platform for a variety of applications. Do you see Salesforce as the next Microsoft?

In the new world there won’t be a Microsoft. That is not likely
because you can’t lock up distribution the way Microsoft did any more.
It’s unlikely that we’ll end up with one platform such as Microsoft.

We’re already making large strides in our platform strategy and we
have 300 applications already. That’s more evidence of our commitment
to be an on-demand application provider.

The world is changing and this is what people will mandate in the
future. Even Microsoft says this is what it will be. It used to be that
we were the only ones doing on-demand, but even Microsoft says it is
the end of software.

The resistance to on-demand applications is decreasing, and this is
making the market larger for everyone because it is educating people on
how the concept works.

Our competitors, such as Oracle, are also calling their products
on-demand, but it’s not just about taking old products and repackaging
them, it’s about rewriting the applications, and about the business
model.

We’re the only company like that in this area. Lots of companies
ranging from our big competitors to smaller companies that are not
around any more said they were going to do what Salesforce did, but the
reality is that we are the only ones, and we’re continuing to lead the
effort.

We have 22,700 customers and we have the business model.

We also don’t have a software sideshow to look after because this is the future of software.

You have to understand that Steve Ballmer announced recently that
Microsoft was in demand, and a few hours later he announced that Vista
was delayed yet again.

He also said about a year ago that Microsoft was going to be the
leader in search, but most people can’t even find the Microsoft search
bar. If you and I understand that, don’t you think that the consumer
also understands that?

They know Microsoft doesn’t make good products. It’s not the 1990s
any more. What has changed is distribution. It’s much easier to
distribute applications now than it was back then.

What about the big enterprise resource planning players? What’s the future for them?

SAP dominates the top 500 companies in general ledger, but it
certainly doesn’t dominate in spreadsheet or word processing, email or
search.

They’re very limited in what they offer. What we’re offering is a
platform on which you can run your entire business. You can create
composite applications for the entire company.

What’s interesting about applications like Writely is not just that
it’s better than Microsoft Word, but that there are hundreds of them.
There are so many Web 2.0 applications already.

Are clients concerned about the stability, physical and
financial, of software-as-a-service providers, not to mention the
commitment to the product if they are acquired?

It doesn’t really matter which provider you look at, you always face that problem. That’s true with Siebel too.

No matter who you go with, that’s true. For physical security, all
of the largest US banks are running much of their sales activity on
Salesforce, and no-one is more sensitive to security or has more
security employees than banks. Our security is better than that of the
largest companies and certainly a whole lot better than our small and
medium business customers.

The power of a multi-tenant system is that we can share security
resources. The data is much safer in our systems than in their own, and
the whole world is now moving to outsourced systems.

Is it important for you to hit more big accounts?

Yes, that’s important. It means we have to tell people how we’ve
been successful with large companies such as Merrill Lynch and Sprint
and Nextel and Corporate Express, and the list goes on. We have to talk
about that, and why large companies that could afford anything have
chosen Salesforce.

What sort of challenges do you face in the growing Asian market?

We’re having great success in Asia, and it’s our fastest growing
market because of its investment in the internet and the fact it has
not relied so much on a traditional software model.

So it has been able to take advantage of our model faster than Europe, which has fallen behind.

Australia is certainly an excellent market, and one with which we have no complaints.

You come up with an idea, you start a company and then you build it,
and then you hire a US sales team, then you go to Europe, especially
Britain, because it’s a huge market. Then if you’re aggressive, you go
to Japan.

Once you’ve done that you start to look at the other
English-speaking markets such as Australia and Singapore, and then the
big developing markets such as China and India.

Is piracy a problem for you in the same way it is for traditional software vendors?

You can imitate us, but we offer more than just a pretty picture on
the screen. The hundreds of millions of dollars we have spent on
infrastructure is not easily replicated.

Ninety-five per cent of our offer is behind the screen. It’s like
being a phone company. You can provide a telephone, but the power is in
the network.

Where’s the next hot technology location? Bangalore or Silicon Valley?

The next Silicon Valley is a virtual Silicon Valley. I think the
network makes it unnecessary to have a physical location. Software
development can be done anywhere in the world where they have internet
access. We want to be a catalyst of that change.

  Source: The Australian

                        

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