Dreamforce: Benioff preaches cloud computing gospel, Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO--After a decade as the chief evangelist in the wilderness of software as a service, which has morphed into cloud computing, Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff is having a more challenging time coming up with groundbreaking industry disruptions. But that isn't stopping him from enthusiastically preaching the cloud computing gospel.

Benioff and company have built a $1 billion business and gradually expanded a CRM application, run like Google runs search in the cloud, into a platform that greatly reduces the friction involved in business software development and delivery. With Microsoft recently entering the cloud-computing platform arena with Azure and practically every vendor staking a claim to the cloud, Benioff's vision has been legitimized and turned into the next big thing. But that just makes Benioff try harder. Salesforce.com is no longer the underdog, but Benioff is relentlessly touting his "no software" theme and irreverently characterizing Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle as dinosaurs.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff

(Credit: Dan Farber)

At the Dreamforce annual customer conference here Monday morning, before a crowd of 10,000 adherents, a supercharged Benioff came out on stage, seeking to maintain his crown as the Pied Piper of cloud-based business software. "There has never been a better time for cloud computing and for Salesforce.com," he said. He was likely referring to the troubled economy, which makes cloud-based software services an attractive alternative to traditional software business models.

The news of the day is an evolution of the Force.com, the company's development platform for building and running business applications in the cloud. Force.com sites will allow customers to run their Web applications on Force.com, and takes care of the domain, URL, and RSS management. In effect, the new service further consolidates Salesforce.com's hold on a company's data and public Web presence. The company also announced Force.com for Amazon Web Services, which allows applications to be built between the Amazon and Force.com clouds.

In addition, the company announced Force.com for Facebook, which allows developers to use the Facebook APIs within Force.com applications and tap into Facebook social graph data via the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. The combination will lead to social CRM and social sales, Benioff said. "Facebook has over 300,000 pages run by businesses," said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg during the Dreamforce keynote. "By coming together with Force.com we are about to unleash enterprise apps on our network," she said.

Steve Fisher, senior vice president of the Salesforce.com platform, showed a Force.com recruiting application running within Facebook. The connection with Salesforce.com could also be another source of revenue for Facebook, beyond advertising.

Cloud computing is becoming mainstream and Benioff is trying to ensure that he is upstream from the competition. He may not remain in that position, but he will continue to push the industry a whole deeper into the cloud.