Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com CEO
Position: 12 Last year: 30
Why? Championing software as a service
Agree with panel rating?
This is the third appearance on the Agenda Setters list for CRM services company salesforce.com's founder and CEO, whose high point was number 10 in 2004.
In the past year, as well as leading a company that has gone from strength to strength, Benioff has continued to be one of the chief ambassadors for software as a service (SaaS), and has made big strides in creating converts to his cause.
In February, for example, salesforce.com secured a deal with investment bank Merrill Lynch for 25,000 users to use its on-demand CRM services.
In the past year, Benioff also made salesforce.com programming language Apex available to independent software developers. This has also meant that salesforce.com customers could use it to tailor their applications.
Benioff also offered to let developer teams using the code work in salesforce.com offices, and host applications to remove the overhead allowing businesses to focus on innovation.
And in the past month or so, salesforce.com launched a new SaaS CRM platform called Force.com, which makes it easier for businesses to develop their own apps, including the ability to create customer user interfaces for any device with web access.
Take a walk down memory lane - and find out who made the agenda setters poll in years past
"Blogging's definitely got to the point where there're enough mainstream consumers watching it for the top bloggers to be regarded as agenda setters."
Michael Smith,
Agenda Setters panellist
"Open source gets more important rather than being something that will get squeezed out of the enterprise."
Simon Briskman,
Agenda Setters panellist
The world's 50 most innovative companies BusinessWeek
The world's 100 most powerful women Forbes.com
Chron 500 - The San Francisco Bay Area's top public companies San Francisco Chronicle
100 fastest growing tech companies Business 2.0
Content featuring Marc Benioff
As head of Salesforce.com, the software-as-a-service CRM company he founded 10 years ago, Marc Benioff is one of the longest serving evangelists of software delivered over the internet. Benioff is a big character - as those who have shared a stage...
Chief executive Marc Benioff used the announcement to tout his company's cloud-computing philosophy: "With two-thirds of customer service interactions moving to the cloud and the popularity of social networks, it is high time for a change," he...
At salesforce.com's recent customer events I noticed the word cloud has been added to the familiar 'death to software' schtick that Marc Benioff has been pedalling for years. But too many buzzwords stop businesses from make sense of technology...
Chief executive, Marc Benioff, said in the conference call: "The numbers for the fourth quarter clearly demonstrate increasing adoption of the Force.com platform. Salesforce.com reported yesterday revenues of $1.08bn, a 44 per cent increase, for...
Introducing Service Cloud, Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive of Salesforce.com, said: "This has been made possible through the emergence of native cloud-computing platforms like Force.com that are built to harness the power of other...
CEO and founder of software-as-a-service vendor salesforce.com, Marc Benioff made some big announcements at November's Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco. There have been some big changes in the software industry over the past year - with...
Copyright © 2008 CBS Interactive Limited. All rights reserved. Top of page
RSS Feeds