back to article Salesforce boss: One day I'll run a $10bn... er, software biz?

Marc Benioff has accused the world’s largest business software maker and the industry’s biggest database firm of not cutting the mustard on Salesforce's cloudy home turf. Yet his sales fluffer is doing rather well as a – wait for it – software company. Benioff says it will hit $6bn in revenue in 12 months' time. From there, …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "The next version of SAP’s core business suite will only run on HANA, SAP’s in-memory database and not on relational databases from IBM, Microsoft or Oracle."

    At least he has 1 point. I'm amazed companies still try their had at lock-in like this when there is plenty of evidence that it's just not working like it "should" anymore. Those days are fading, and fast. I guess SAP has done their research though...just like the #1 Microsoft.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Salesforce puts you in a locked-in situation. Migrating away is a costly exercise because of it.

      1. Anonymous Blowhard

        HANA isn't about lock-in

        It's about getting a bigger share of the pie; what's the point going through an expensive sales cycle to get a customer and then have to hand over a large percentage of the profit to the company providing the DB software? SAP used to be pretty keen on MySQL, but its acquisition by Oracle probably cooled their ardour on open source a bit.

        As far as lock-in goes, it's one thing to be locked into a software vendor, you can have escrow agreements in case they go out of business, but what do you do if the company has all your data? Any company looking at a cloud solution for a major part of it's infrastructure is basically saying "they are more likely to survive than we are"; which may be the case, but how can you know that? I'm sure some of these companies looked pretty solid too:

        http://www.businessinsider.com/largest-bankruptcies-in-american-history-2011-11?op=1&IR=T

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. Mark 65

    “Salesforce.com [is] now the sixth largest software company in the world, the number one cloud computing company in the world, very unique in the industry,” he said.

    And yet loses $240+m per year. Way to go. How does that compare with those others (VMWare etc)? I see little point in having huge revenues and bigging up the size of your company if it is still just a loss-maker.

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