Benioff a big man at 196cm, worked the stage with the same sort of intensity as his arch nemesis, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft chief executive and in Benioff's eyes the evil overlord of the biggest on-premises software outfit in the world.
Someone remarked that Dreamforce was the Woodstock of cloud computing, as 1970s soft-rock legend Neil Young took the stage to show off his green machine conversion of a '59 Lincoln Continental. But Benioff's opening keynote was all hard sell.
The former Oracle executive had clearly studied the tent evangelism style of mentor and Oracle boss Larry Ellison.
With his cloud crowd featuring people from all walks of business large and small, Benioff regaled the audience with how democratic Dreamforce was and how other vendors would invite large enterprises to their customer shows and “shake them down”.
“Me included” said Benioff to the crowd, referring to his 13-year career at Oracle. “But I've changed, I've reformed.”
Later, in an one-on-one interview with The Australian, he admitted his keynote speech at Dreamforce was the most important sales opportunity of the year and that months of planning had gone into it.
As his company stretches towards its first $US1 billion revenue year - still just a fraction of the take of on-premises software giants SAP, Oracle and Microsoft - Benioff says the future SaaS world is based on a number of big platforms that support everything else.
He says Salesforce, obviously, will be the business app platform, while Amazon does storage and transaction services, Google does search and desktop apps and social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace provide the social meeting zones.
At Dreamforce, Salesforce rolled out toolkits for its Force.com platform to give Force developers access to the application programming interfaces sitting inside Facebook and Amazon, as well as the Force.com Sites product, which lets users run their websites in the Salesforce environment.
The announcements linking the Force.com platform to Facebook and Amazon appear to have a lot of potential.
What sort of business apps do you see being developed on Force.com that tap into those big social network sites?
We tried to come up with some examples because no one has done this before.
One of the things this conference tries to do is create the future, so the example we gave of using Facebook for viral recruiting (through an embedded employee referral system) was very compelling, as well as moving My Starbucks Ideas (the coffee empire's website customer idea feedback zone) into Facebook and then tapping into the Amazon cloud for storage and burstable compute cycles.
I created the My Starbucks Ideas example, somebody else came up with the employee referral idea.
This technology is only weeks old, so it needs to be given some time to bake.
Where is the main weight of your business these days? Is it in small-to-medium business?
It is evenly distributed one-third small, one-third medium and one-third large enterprise.
Are you happy with that mix?
It's not a question of being happy or sad. It is what it is and it has been that way since we started the company and we can't really explain why.
Because we have a democratic solution, it's just a mirror of the IT industry itself and it just turns out that if you take a mirror to the industry it's a third, a third, a third.
What do you say to business people who need to touch, feel and control their technology infrastructure?
I say, talk to our customers. Talk to people who have used Salesforce and been successful at it and talk to people who have software. One model has a tremendously high level of customer satisfaction and one model doesn't.
You've said there has never been a better time for cloud computing, but given the current economic climate, isn't there a danger the whole market will contract over the next 18 months, making it a bad time for both on-premises and SaaS?
That's not really what we have seen. The issue for SAP is that they said in the last two weeks of the quarter all their transactions just dried up. Why was that? Because the credit market just didn't allow those customers to buy, because SAP only does mega-transactions with the world's biggest companies.
It comes back to your earlier question about whether I'm happy with the one-third, one-third and one-third mix. SAP wishes it had that but it doesn't: it has zero, zero and 100 per cent.
It is stuck. It can only sell huge transactions to huge companies. If there's no credit to do those transactions, plus credit for the hardware to run those transaction on, where do you end up?
Next year would appear to be a very tough year for everybody. Do you see it that way?
I can't give you a forward-looking statement for next year. I am just saying there has never been a better time for cloud computing for three reasons. People need to cut their operating expenses, people need to cut their capital expenses and people need to reduce their risk. Are you going to do that buying enterprise software? Probably not.
Companies still need to operate and manage their information, so this is a great opportunity to move away from the enterprise software model and the enterprise hardware model and the data centre model, where you create it, control it, and deliver it yourself with this new shared model - that's the power.
Given the current climate, have you or will you institute a hiring freeze at Salesforce?
I can't talk about material information around financials. I'm in a quiet period. We'll give our financial results in a controlled environment in three weeks.
You did speak about widening the spread of your data centres outside the US. You are about to open a data centre in Singapore and are considering opening data centres in Japan and Europe. From a customer perspective, are the reasons for building the new sites outside the US technological, psychological or both?
It's neither. It has really been driven by the customer. If the customer is willing to pay for it, we'll deliver it.
We had a customer in Citibank - one of our largest customers in the world - that signed on for one of our largest transactions ever, at 30,000 users, and that wanted to pay for it, so we delivered it. Now other customers can take advantage of it.
Do you always need to build new data centres for Salesforce or can the platform be located in existing data centres?
We have our own architecture and our own technology. It's not very complicated, but it has to be assembled to our specification so we can get the level of performance, scale and security that our customers demand.
We have our own proprietary hardware architecture that mirrors our proprietary software architecture. Those two things together make up the data centre.
Coda, one of the SaaS suppliers on your platform, has developed an enterprise resource planning system. Do you see cloud-style ERP making much of a dent in the traditional ERP market in the near term?
I think so. We need a change in ERP. Many of these systems are one, two or in some cases three decades old in architecture and code base and no one has done a good job of focusing in that area.
And it's time. I hope Coda is very successful in this area. We see other companies building and delivering native ERP as well.
It is hard to see someone who has spent a lot of time, effort and expense bedding down an ERP system ripping it out, saying they'll do it in the cloud now.
Obviously you've never run your own ERP system. If you owned one and ran one, then you might think you would go for a better alternative if there was one.
These customers have to upgrade and update and maintain and put in the next version, upgrade their data centres and their hardware and their security models just to put their financial statements out. It's horrible. It's painful.
So you really think people will switch out of an entrenched ERP system?
Customers will want to switch off all on-premises software if they are given a high-quality product to do it, and we are trying to enable that.
We've done it with CRM, and we are trying to enable it now with ERP, but not doing it ourselves, rather enabling partners to do it. You'll see others here a year or two from now.
People used to run ERP on mainframes and then they switched them off to go to client/server because it was cheaper and easier. Now they are going to switch if they are given a viable alternative.
The momentum for cloud computing is clearly building, even with traditional on-premises software suppliers.
The big question is the rate at which the industry moves into the cloud.
What are the constraints on cloud computing at the moment?
Well, we just delivered a 49 per cent growth quarter and before that we delivered two 50 per cent growth quarters.
We are growing very quickly, we are over $1 billion in revenue. This is faster growth than either Microsoft or Oracle after a similar period of time.
Building an enterprise software company with that kind of scale is a lot of work and it takes time. People always overestimate what can be done in a year and underestimate what can be done in a decade.
I'm only done with my first decade at Salesforce and I'm still a relatively young man at 44. As I look forward into the next decade between 44 and 54 I hope to make this the platform.
The last 10 years have been about CRM, the next 10 years will be about CRM and the platform.
We want to build a multibillion-dollar company. At my last earnings call I said we had just crossed the $1 billion revenue run rate.
If you were given a perfect world right now, what bits would you fix to drive the cloud computing momentum harder?
Well, we would have a bigger distribution organisation than we already have. In the cloud computing industry there aren't other Salesforces that we can tap into.
In the PC world there are - there's the value-added reseller channel, the PC seller, and they are very good at selling software as well. But in our world it's up to us and we are masters of our own destiny.
That's our greatest asset and also our greatest weakness, so the bigger I can make the company the more sales people I can hire.
Today, Salesforce has more than 100 people in Australia. Two years ago, maybe we had 10 or 20.
Our job is to get to 1000 employees in Australia. When are we going to get there? I don't know. As fast as I can? Yeah.
The only way I am winning deals and creating success is aligning demand with our ability to meet it and that's that individual, face-to-face meeting. I don't know any other way to sell the product.
What about using the channel?
We leverage the channel in terms of services and systems integrators like Accenture and Fujitsu, but the channel has not really figured out how to sell cloud computing.
Why not?
I don't know why not.
What are they getting wrong or missing?
We have to go in there with them. It's a twin operation. They need a wingman. If they were flying the plane there would be two people in the plane.
That's ideal. I'd love to snap my fingers and have more people. I'm very jealous of Oracle - they have 25,000 sales reps and SAP has 10,000 sales reps.
They are mega-companies. My company only has 3300 employees and I can assure you they are not all in sales, so we are handicapped in our ability to make that sale.
When everybody comes to Dreamforce and I have them in front of me, I figure that keynote is the most important thing. I worked on it for two months.
I'm making my case every year about cloud computing and that keynote is like my closing argument.
