[Video] VMforce: VMware Spring Framework Brings Java To Salesforce.com Cloud2

April 27, 2010

VMware's Spring Framework is the force behind VMforce, Salesforce.com's Java extension

When you listen Salesforce.com top chief Marc Benioff speak about VMforce, you sure would think the San Francisco, Calif.-company launched yet another Godzilla-esque “trusted” cloud platform.

Yet, after you get rid of the boat-load of marketing speak delivered this morning at the launch event, what you end up with is actually a very simple proposition: with VMforce, Salesforce.com is adding a second computing language, i.e. Java, to its existing application cloud, Force.com; which so far is using its proprietary Apex code language.

So why all the fuss?

In supporting Java, Salesforce.com hopes to lure some of the 6 million Java developers to start building their enterprise apps on its Force.com platform.

With VMware, Force.com becomes an easy to use Java Application cloud platform provider

“Force.com is fundamentally extended with VMware’s technology. And now Java runs on Force.com. That is really powerful [sic!]. And Java now runs in the Cloud. And not just in the cloud, but at the enterprise level, with the security, the reliability, the availability, the scalability that developers need to be successful,” said Benioff.

And everybody will love it, boasts the Salesforce.com co-founder.

“Force.com developers are going to love VMforce because they can now use Java for the first time. Force.com developers can incorporate Java into their apps… And Java developers will love VMforce because it means that they can easily write and deploy enterprise quality apps into the cloud: 5 times faster, and half the cost than traditional environments.”

And the vision?

“To take these 6 million Java developers and transform them through VMforce to deliver the next generation of Cloud 2 apps.”

Java developers, Salesforce.com wants to transform you! You have been warned!

1 Comment | news, software, web 2.0 | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Benioff: Salesforce Chatter And Google Buzz Will Integrate

February 17, 2010

A tired Marc Benioff unveils Salesforce.com Chatter, a collaboration in the cloud service

It was a more subdued Marc Benioff that kicked off Salesforce.com’s Chatter luncheon event today in downtown San Francisco.

And this of course has nothing to do with the fact that there was hardly any new news about the company’s “Facebook for the Enterprise” collaboration service, which was originally unveiled last Fall, at the Dreamforce conference.

More likely, the culprit who sucked off Salesforce.com’s CEO stamina was his arrival late last night from Hawaii (and we all can imagine how tough that can be :)

“I’m on a different time-zone and it’s also a smaller room,” joked Benioff who will celebrate Salesforce.com’s 11th birthday on March 8.

Chatter to roll-out mid-year

Despite the lack of new features on Chatter (we’re still waiting for video conferencing), I was impressed to see how Saleforce.com managed to deeply integrate Facebook and Twitter-like features such as profiles and feeds inside its entire stack: from the platform (Force.com) to enterprise custom applications. Making it easy to “chaterrize” any customer applications running on Salesforce.com’s cloud.

“Facebook showed us a smarter way to do business,” told VP of Products Kraig Swensrud to a small audience of customers and press.

Specifically, Swensrud demoed how easy it was to “follow” people, documents, groups, projects and virtually any objects on the Salesforce.com platform.

Google Buzz is no Chatter competitor

When I asked Benioff about Google Buzz, he quickly dismissed it as a competitive threat to Chatter, despite the search engine’s intention to take Buzz to the enterprise.

“We will integrate the 2 systems, and you’ll be able to get your Chatter feed inside Buzz. Chatter is a core messaging architecture layer and you can receive those (feeds) either directly on our own interface or through other interfaces,” explains Benioff.

And on Yammer’s competition? “I’m not familiar with the product, so I don’t know,” he says. What do you think?

Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | hardware, news, software, web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

DEMOfall To Honour 15 Tech Stars

September 20, 2009
For the very first time, Demo will honour some of its previous presenters that became Tech stars

For the very first time, DEMO organisers will honour 15 of its previous presenters that subsequently became some of the biggest success in Tech

For the first time this year, the DEMO award ceremony will be held during the lunch’s dessert – instead of the usual dinner ceremony – , followed by the Lifetime Achievement awards given to some high-power individuals, including (I wonder how many of them will actually show up?):

  1. Shai Agassi, Founder, TopTier Software, currently Founder and CEO, Better Place
  2. Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, salesforce.com
  3. Donna Dubinsky, Founder, CEO & Board Chair, Numenta
  4. Jeff Hawkins, Founder, Numenta
  5. Subrah Iyar, Founder and former CEO, WebEx
  6. Keng Lim, Founder, Chairman and CEO, NextLabs
  7. Kevin Lynch, Chief Technology Officer, Senior Vice President, Experience & Technology Organization, Adobe Systems
  8. Andy Rubin, Co-founder, Danger Inc., currently Vice President, Engineering, Google
  9. Mike Cassidy, Co-founder, Xfire, currently Co-founder & CEO, Ruba.com
  10. Diane Greene, Co-founder, VMware
  11. Colin Angle, Chairman, CEO and Co-founder, iRobot
  12. Helen Greiner, Co-founder, iRobot, currently Founder, The Droid Works
  13. Teresa Meng, Founder, Atheros Communications, currently Reid Weaver Dennis Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University
  14. Ben Trott, Founder & CTO, Six Apart
  15. Mena Trott, Founder & President, Six Apart

Leave a Comment » | news | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Oracle Fires Apps Chief Ed Abbo Over Cratered Sales, Salesforce CEO Reveals

June 25, 2009
Oracles chief of applications was fired over a plunge in revenue sales, said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff (photo credit: Dan Farber)

Oracle's chief of applications was fired over plunging revenue sales, said Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff (photo credit: Dan Farber)

For Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, Oracle’s problems last quarter came from its applications business – which competes with Salesforce.com, SAP and a slew of enterprise software companies – not from its lower profitability.

“It’s applications license revenue cratered. They fired their head of [the applications business]… He was gone without a trace the next day – Ed Abbo, the head of all Apps for Oracle. And their overall apps revenue decline very significantly,” revealed Benioff during a conversation at the Structure 09 conference.

As senior vice-president of Apps – and former CTO at Siebel – Abbo supervised Oracle’s “legacy” applications business, including the various CRM products acquired from Siebel, Peoplesoft… which compete squarely with Salesforce.com offering.

Later, Benioff took another yet another jab at Oracle pointing that its past mentor – Larry Ellison – hasn’t delivered a killer app in a long time; which for him explains Oracle’s latest move into the cloud space.

Follows the Benioff’s video comments on the news:

2 Comments | news, software, web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Benioff Spells The Truth Behind The High Cost Of Enterprise Software: Maintenance

June 25, 2009

Listening today at Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff at GigaOM’s Infrastructure 09 conference, one would think that the enterprise software business is a real racket… or cash-cow, depending on where you stand!

“The way enterprise software has worked for a lot of the large scale CIOs… You buy these enterprise software products maybe 10 years ago… and let’s say you paid a million dollars for that product.

Well Oracle and SAP charges you 22% a year on what you paid 10 years ago, even if they haven’t given you any updates or upgrades or anything. Just to have it on your servers,” explains Benioff.

That’s a lot of money considering that you are running on old infrastructures, architectures, etc… But as Benioff pointed out, it will take a while for CIOs to get out of the grip of traditional software companies like Oracle or SAP and move their infrastructure to the cloud; simply because it’s complex and requires to be highly integrated.

And, if ain’t broken… don’t fix it!

Here’s a short video clip of Benioff’s remarks on why the enterprise software business is a real racket for companies:

1 Comment | software | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Salesforce.com CEO Ridicules Oracle “Zen” Cloud Strategy

June 25, 2009
Benioff pokes fun at former mentor Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on his cloud computing vision

Benioff pokes fun at former mentor Oracle CEO Larry Ellison on his cloud computing vision

Benioff will always be Benioff, even sick like he was today at GigaOM’s Structure 09 conference.

Asked by Om Malik about Oracle’s CEO “flip-flop” cloud computing strategy, the Salesforce.com CEO and co-founder just couldn’t help ridicule his former mentor, Larry Ellison.

“6 months ago he said it’s ridiculous and made some very caustic remarks which is not very much like him and then he said something very Zen in a kind of very spiritual or mentor way…

the key to cloud computing, the key… grasshopper… to on-demand is on premise. And the key to on-premise is on-demand. And you can not have on-demand without on-premise, and you can not have on-premise without on-demand.

It was very Zen. It was like hitting a new level of enlightenment when I heard of it. This guy’s got it. On-demand is on-premise and yet on-premise is on-demand.

And if you can understand that then you’ll know why cloud computing is what it is.”

So here it go. The secret of cloud computing. Now study that… grasshopper :-)

And for your amusement, here’s the video clip where Benioff explained Oracle’s cloud vision!

Leave a Comment » | Interviews, software, web 2.0 | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Salesforce.com Will Add Social Networks LinkedIn, MySpace to Enterprise Cloud Platform

November 5, 2008

Salesforce.com confirmed that they will be adding social networks LinkedIn and MySpace to the the list of partners.

This follows the San Francisco, Calif., company partnership earlier this week with Facebook to create a new class of enterprise applications, combining Salesforce.com more reliable infrastructure and Facebook’s social features.

“We love LinkedIn and MySpace and there’s no reason why the things that you saw with Facebook will not also work for the others. But you want to start with the best, the #1 social network in the world,” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com.

To further explain the choice of Facebook, Benioff points to the lack of heavy integration required to link Salesforce.com and Facebook, as opposed to the other social networks.

Leave a Comment » | news | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Why Benioff Is Wrong To View Open Source As Most “Un-Green” Model

November 4, 2008

I thought Marc Benioff a.k.a. “there’s no greener model than our model” made a fool of himself when he painted open source as “un-green”.

It not only sends the wrong message especially to cost conscious companies, but worse, Salesforce.com chief comments reflect a complete misunderstanding of what open source really is.

“Open source is the most un-green model there is. Because still every customer has to set up there own data centers, set up there own servers, install all those stuffs, its just open source… that’s not green,” explains Benioff.

Yes, software can make a difference it terms of power consumption. But it’s wrong to think that open source would be less “efficient” than let’s say proprietary software.

And the best proof of that is Salesforce.com itself which uses open source software and virtualization to make its “multi-tennant” model work!

Another perfect example of the contrary is SugarCRM, a Salesforce.com “open source” competitor that also offer an “on-demand” solution. So what’s wrong with that?

Leave a Comment » | news, software | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Salesforce.com Touts CRM and Platform As Most Strategic Aspects Of Cloud Computing; Urge Others To Build Enterprise Applications [video]

November 4, 2008

Salesforce in the CloudSalesforce.com wants to remain focus in what it does best i.e. CRM, an application that manages relationships with customers and its platform. “Two of the most strategic aspects of cloud computing,” says Salesforce.com CEO citing Merrill Lynch report expecting the cloud computing market to reach $100 billion in 2010.

For Marc Benioff, the San Francisco, Calif.-based company will not build other categories of enterprise applications like ones managing human resources, enterprise/manufacturing resources planning (ERP) or enterprise financials (payable/receivable/general ledger…) because it will distract the company for its core.

“If all the sudden we decide to start selling some new category of applications, there will be competition between [our internal] resources [like taking some sales people out of CRM for example],” explains Benioff.

Salesforce.com growth is constrained by its salesforce or the lack thereof… Can it really scale?

In an usual turn of event, Benioff admitted that he was jealous of SAP’s and Oracle’s salesforce. “If I’m jealous of Oracle or SAP for anything, it’s because they have sales forces in the 10s of thousands. We only have 3,000+ employees… I wish I had twice, 3 times as many salespeople that I have,” added the company’s chief. “We view ourselves as a distribution constrained organisation”.

The only way Salesforce.com can scale is if it can attract developers on its platforms and start developing those hard, heavy and complex enterprise applications. ”I want to have all these applications on our platform but I just don’t want to pay for their development and I’d really like to see other people to sell it if they can,” said Benioff.

Anyone out there interested?

Here’s a video excerpt of Benioff’s comments:

Leave a Comment » | news, software | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

Best Of Benioff: Bailout SAP, Open Source Is Most Un-Green Model, Natives Are Restless, Listen To Customers More And Sale As Much As We Can! [video]

November 4, 2008

I had a blast yesterday with some of the things the colourful CEO of Salesforce.com said during his briefing with the media.

So I decided to do a short video of my favourite moments that I refer to as “BoB” that stands for the “Best of Benioff”!

My favourite of all? Unfortunately, I didn’t caught it on tape and it was Benioff’s “love” everybody strategy!

Enjoy the short clips. I’ll add some of the transcripts after the jump.

1 Comment | news | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by TechPulse 360

« Previous Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 32 other followers