Benioff: One to know

Salesforce.com publicity did a little personal (or maybe personnel) PR on Friday, announcing that chairman and CEO Marc Benioff was named number 11 on Business 2.0 magazine’s list of “50 People Who Matter Now.” Benioff just barely missed cracking a top ten that included Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the ubiquitous News Corporation CEO Rupert Murdoch, Apple Computer CEO Steve Jobs, and Toyota Chairman Fujio Cho.

At the heart of the “50 People Who Matter Now” list, explained Business 2.0 editorial staff, was “one key question: What have you done for us lately?” The list also identified “people whose ideas, products, and business insights are changing the world we live in today — those who are reshaping our future by inventing important new technologies, exploiting emerging opportunities, or throwing their weight around in ways that are sure to make everyone else take notice.” The Business 2.0 piece portrays Benioff as a visionary and harbinger both with his “vision of the future” involving purely software-free environments, which has proven “prophetic, foreshadowing the rise of the Web 2.0 phenomenon and creating nightmares for software vendors like Microsoft, SAP, and Siebel.” Benioff founded salesforce.com in March 1999 with the new technology model entitled “End Of Software,” which replaces traditional software with web-based applications.

Salesforce.com is currently the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. Salesforce.com’s on-demand platform AppExchange allows the building of powerful new applications, customization and integration of the Salesforce suite. Salesforce.com today manages customer information for approximately 22,700 customers and approximately 444,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices, America Online, Cendant Rental Car Group, Dow Jones Newswires, Nokia, Polycom and SunTrust.