Marc Benioff on The Social Enterprise

Mark Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, wrote a guest post for TechCrunch entitled "The Facebook Imperative." In it, Mark discusses the needs for increased collaboration for the enterprise and also notes how a the more traditional enterprise software (Lotus Notes, Sharepoint, etc.) hasn't really changed since it's inception.  Sure there are add-ons and "socially" things you can do with them that you couldn't 10 - 15 years ago, but nevertheless, proprietary enterprise applications are fundamentally unchanged.

That's one of the things that excites me so much about our upcoming Social Office release.  I see where we are headed with it, and I am confident in saying that Social Office is, indeed, a game changer.  This application is being designed to facilitate the natural social interactions and need to collaborate that knowledge workers have.  It is done with an intuitive interface that is easy to use, understand and master.  From a sales perspective, I know that Social Office is scratching an itch felt by companies worldwide because the pre-release interest has been massive.

Say what you will about Mark Benioff, but his vision for software as a service fundamentally changed the ecosystem of corporate acceptance of how software can be delivered.  I think the vision he presents in "The Facebook Imperative" is a worthwhile read and something that businesses should react to.

 

[Luis Mas]

Hope to see soon many implementations of Liferay offered as SAAS.