A hat tip to Daniel for pointing out that Sarah Lacy got to interview Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff – you ca tell that Sarah was please as punch to have got Benioff, she even dragged out her ladylike dress, the pearls and had her hair done for the day!
It’s a pretty good interview, even if Lacy lets Benioff get away with saying some pretty audacious things – things like "everyone has moved to the SaaS model". While I agree that in time most people will move to SaaS, it’s a little presumptuous to say that they already have. Benioff admits that the SFDC PaaS offering is fairly similar to the other PaaS offerings- interesting he didn’t try and talk up their own point of difference to claim superiority.
Interesting to hear of businesses using the Force PaaS service while not actually using SFDC’s original CRM offering – I wonder if there are some internal tensions within Salesforce between the traditional CRM staffers and the platform people.
Benioff sidesteps the obvious questions about his own plans viz a vis his shareholding in SFDC, he also talks openly about the number one enemy – Microsoft. He also pulls few punches when talking about SAP’s abysmal entry into SaaS.
It’s well worth a watch – check it out here.
Mark Benioff isn’t far wrong. You will struggle to find SME’s in Australia that haven’t deployed some form of SaaS already. You have to stretch to include webmail like Gmail to make the statement work. Anyway, I think he’s just talking about “the model” as being accepted but maybe not fully implemented. Gmail first, CRM second, then accounts etc. Many small/micro businesses haven’t moved but Mark Benioff would have had his head in Salesforces key demographic which is SMB and upward.
Or maybe it’s a cool kids statement. Like the iPhone, everyone’s buying one! But are they? Should it be “everyone that matters” is doing it.