dreamforce

Google's Schmidt talks Apple, patents, jobs

SAN FRANCISCO--Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt sat down for an afternoon interview with Salesforce.com's CEO and chairman, Marc Benioff, at Dreamforce 2011 here yesterday.

Unlike some of Schmidt's recent public talks about Google+, Google TV, and what Google wants to do with online identities, this discussion was less controversial and spoke more broadly about the IT industry as a whole.

This being Salesforce's major annual conference, naturally Schmidt discussed cloud computing. When asked about his early days back at Sun Microsystems in the 1980s, Schmidt noted that company "tried to imagine a world that … Read more

Salesforce-Oracle rivalry heats up with Database.com

At the Oracle OpenWorld conference back in September, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff exchanged on-stage jabs as Ellison played up his company's push into Salesforce's territory: the cloud.

Later today, as Benioff takes the stage to kick off his company's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, he'll announce his company's push into Oracle's territory: databases.

Today, Salesforce is launching Database.com, pitching it as "the world's first enterprise database built for the cloud." In a statement, Benioff said:

We see cloud databases as a massive market opportunity that … Read more

Salesforce to offer social networking for companies

Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced a social networking service called Salesforce Chatter for its customers' in-house operations, giving a corporate flavor to a technology that's largely been for personal use.

Salesforce Chatter lets employees set up profiles to connect with coworkers, issue status updates to say what they're up to, and subscribe to feeds from people--and from applications. Also for collaboration, it lets people join groups to share updates and content. And the service integrates with today's two hot social-networking services, Twitter and Facebook.

Chief Executive Marc Benioff announced the service in San Francisco at the company'… Read more