THS Articles

Q and A with Marc Benioff

By Cliff Boodoosingh

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, has been recognized "for almost single-handedly legitimizing the ASP business model" for software distribution. BusinessWeek named him one of the 25 people responsible for turning eBusiness around. His "End of Software" philosophy has helped make Salesforce.com 'the' household name in on-demand CRM with an industry leading 308,000 subscribers and 16,900 customers and counting.

THS: Halsey Minor from Grand Central Communications made a statement recently: "In four years basically the whole notion of enterprise application software is going to be dead." That's kind of your mantra is it not?

MB: Yeah, well Halsey started Salesforce.com with me (in 1999). So he was my business partner and he owns 10 percent of Salesforce.com. He's financially-incented.

We believe that this new idea of on-demand services will replace the traditional very high cost, very complex, very high failure rate traditional enterprise software. And that's what we've been working on the last six years is to do everything we can to destroy that software industry

THS: So, basically, you are on the same page with that. That's basically the "the End of Software" philosophy you've promoted.

MB: Yeah, we believe that this new idea of on-demand services will replace the traditional very high cost, very complex, very high failure rate traditional enterprise software. And that's what we've been working on the last six years is to do everything we can to destroy that software industry. We even registered a URL theendofsoftware.com in 1999.

THS: The endofsoftware.com, is that just adjoined to your website or is it totally different?

MB: No, is not even a live website, it was just kind of our stake in the ground that we believed strongly enough in the end of software that we would even put it down as a URL.

THS: A few years ago I spoke with Cary Fullbright, Vice President of Product Strategy, and at that time we were very excited about the ASP model that was set for take off. We all know what happened. But now again there is a kind of resurgence in the ASP model, a validation of sorts, and I was wondering what has changed in the last couple of years to resurrect the model.

MB: Well, honestly I think Salesforce.com has been a lot of it. We have proven that this is a real model, that it can work (and) that you can generate revenue and profit and take a company public and that has raised a lot of eyebrows. You know we have been very fortunate to be able to execute well in this marketplace and to severely injure Seibel Systems and other enterprise software companies and show customers that they were paying more than they needed to pay for this type of functionality and because of that I think we are at a new level now and we have a lot of other on-demand service providers starting up. In fact, even, we have a community starting up around us; we have a lot of what we call Sforce partners who are building solutions on top of Salesforce.com to get to our customers.

THS: Are there any market indicators or trends in the field that shows that the on-demand or ASP model has legs?