Benioff: It doesn’t really change at all, actually. I think that their market is still their market, and this is a new market
and a new opportunity and a new level of demand. I’ve talked to all their CEOs, and they’re incredibly focused on their on-premise
opportunity. For example, let’s say you’re an InfoWorldand you want to build a Web site for advertisers to come in and check their ads, view the PDFs of the ads and when the ads
ran, and look at the whole history of the account. So InfoWorldalready has a Salesforce.com database with the customer information, but now they want to build this Web site so they could
use BEA’s application server but not buy a database, not buy an operating system, not need to buy another server behind it,
which they would normally have to do. I think that’s very powerful because we’re reducing the cost of the application deployment
in that example.
InfoWorld: So you’re also suggesting that the worlds of on-premise and hosted applications will always coexist?
Benioff: In that example, there isn’t anybody who has delivered that J2EE run-time environment as a service. Is that an opportunity?
It absolutely is a huge opportunity and I don’t know why [nobody’s] doing it. We are the first to put the words “on demand”
and “application server” together.
InfoWorld: You’re also talking about building ERP functionality into Salesforce.com.
Benioff: We demonstrated it [at Dreamforce].
InfoWorld: So clearly Salesforce.com's strategic focus is not just CRM anymore. It’s also about third-party applications and
your ERP applications. Does this mean you will become an ASP in a broader sense of the term?
Benioff: CRM is the big, big, big market opportunity. A lot of companies have the financials, but the [traditional on-premise]
CRM thing just did not work. You’re more likely to get QuickBooks running, or Solomon or Great Plains or SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft
financials than your CRM version from those guys.
InfoWorld: You frequently reference Amazon.com and eBay, indicating you want to create communities around your service. Do
you think people will start front-ending Salesforce.com?
Benioff: I think that they already are doing that in many situations, but that’s what we want them to do. We want them to
build applications that front-end us. And customers don’t even know that their data or whatever is being stored in Sforce
or Salesforce.com. We want to encourage people to do that, and I think that it’s in their interest to do it. It’s lower cost,
it’s easier, it’s more secure, it’s more reliable, it’s more available than even their internal systems. But it’s a big consciousness
shift from where they are today.
InfoWorld: Does that therefore mean developers will now assume responsibility for developing Salesforce.com's CRM functionality?
Benioff: I think that it’s both. I think that we will always add more features and functions, like we’re doing, and that
we will integrate them and make them easier to use. But we also want to amplify what’s happening down below architecturally.
InfoWorld: Looking ahead, how challenging will it be catering for the majority of Salesforce.com clients that move to a wireless
model over time?
Benioff: I think that there’s a lot of demand now that there wasn’t before. I took my BlackBerry from San Francisco to London
to Paris last week, and my e-mail and my wireless Salesforce.com still worked everywhere I was, and my HTML browser. I think
that as we sell more units and expand the market and there’s more revenue, that [the carriers] will fix [the wireless networks].
They will make it more solid and have higher throughput because they have to.
InfoWorld: What is Salesforce.com's biggest challenge now that your platform is becoming more mature?
Benioff: I think it is growth. We’re still growing at an unbelievably high rate, which is incredibly difficult. We need more
capacity, we need more salespeople, we need more consultants just to fill the customer demand. If you listen to the users,
they want more and we have to get it to them. So we need a bigger channel because the old channel is dedicated to the old
product lines.
InfoWorld: What does that channel look like?
Benioff: I think the channel is a combination of us directly selling and directly servicing, and being in with new systems
integrators because the old systems integrators are asleep, which is why their businesses are falling apart. [Traditional
systems integrators] think that somehow, magically, the Oracle or the PeopleSoft and the Siebel businesses are going to come
back and those glory days are going to be here again. They need to realize they need to either change or move away.
InfoWorld: So you think the next-generation integration business will focus on integrating legacy apps with Salesforce.com
type platforms?
Benioff: It's the new channel.
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