The current Economist debates is:

Cloud Computing: This house believes that the cloud can’t be entirely trusted.

With Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, surprise-surprise being Against the motion.

So a brief resume of Marc Benioff, and his poster child salesforce.com:

Intrigued by web sites like Amazon.com Marc started salesforce.com in the mid-1990s whilst still working part-time at ORACLE (which then employed 200 people).  Larry Ellison, CEO of ORACLE, was his mentor and provided some $2 million seed money to Marc’s and his “software on the web, on-demand” company (though this phrase is currently out of favour, with Marc prefering real-time, SaaS and multitenant).  In this short history salesforce.com has received many business awards: The Wired 40 three years in a row: 2005-2007 (No. 7 in 2007), Forbes Top Ten Disrupters (2006-2007), Forbes 25 Fastest-growing Tech Companies (2007, No. 3), and  BusinessWeek Top 100 Most Innovative Companies (2006, No. 79).  Essentially, salesforce.com continues to be a disruptive success.

Salesforce.com reported in July 2009, at its earnings conference Q2 2010: 2 million users, a customer base of 63,200, and a net-profit of $21.2 million.  It’s moving up market with customers like CNN, Motorola, and Starbucks.   It’s moving vertically with investments in the financial and healthcare industry.  A threat?  Well Microsoft and ORACLE are expanding their offerings to compete in the SaaS arena. At the Q2 conference Benioff boasted scoring wins against Microsoft (much in love with their own CRM) and ORACLE (busy building it’s own CRM).  Then, in October, Microsoft offers customers of salesforce.com, and ORACLE CRM, the equivalent of 7 months free switch subscription until the end of 2009 (however, after the trial the standard twelve months contract would apply – compare this with salesforce.com rolling monthly contract …)

But salesforce.com, with its Cloud suite, is very much tied to success of it’s customers with Applications, then Platform, then tools to build applications

• Sales Cloud: SFA and CRM applications
• Service Cloud: customer services, call centres, and web-portals
• Custom Cloud: the Force.com platform for custom applications

The latter two being more than 25% of new business.

Contra to the scale of the Google kingdom Salesforce.com relies on only two data centres – and, the main one in California has only 500 servers and handles 200 million transactions per day.

The Economist debate ends with a Post Debate follow-up on Friday 20th November – so go there soon …