How will SalesForce.com meet the ever-increasing competitive pressure in the cloud computing market they helped to create?
The vibrant world of enterprise software and cloud computing paradoxically generates larger-than-life executives in its own ranks through managing the business of corporations and monitoring client relationships. Consider Larry Ellison, the billionaire CEO of Oracle. It’s no accident that Marc Benioff worked for Ellison for 13 years before founding San Francisco-based SalesForce.com in 1999, a company based on the premise that business software–and maybe all software–was changing from a product to a service. Leaving Oracle was a risk for Benioff, but risk-taking is in keeping with his outsize, jovial personality which brought criticism the first time he stated software was dead.
A Fierce Rivalry
[This article has been reproduced with permission from Knowledge Network, the online thought leadership platform for Thunderbird School of Global Management https://thunderbird.asu.edu/knowledge-network/]