The cloud-era of the Riders Marc Benioff

Cloud ERA Business

In 1999, when most people do not yet know what cloud computing is and the dotcom bubble is crumbling, Marc Russell Benioff rented a small old apartment in San Francisco, founded his own cloud computing company Salesforce.com, and defined the site's mission as "end of Software "(Termination software). Within a short span of more than 10 years, it has grown into one of the fastest-growing and most innovative drivers of industrial change in the world.

Benioff, a pioneer in cloud computing, is the creator of the term PAAs (Platform as a service, platform, services), in addition to the idea of spreading SaaS (Software as a service, software, services). As a cloud-computing preacher, Benioff published three books to promote his ideas, including the best-selling book "Behind The Cloud" ("Cloud Raiders"). Salesforce and Amazon and Google are considered to be the three leading companies in cloud computing.

Life Experience

Benioff was born in 1964 to a family of pioneering genes in California, USA. A lawyer's grandfather was the inventor of the Bay Area's rapid transit system, while his father ran his own women's chain. In high school, he co-founded a company called Liberty Software, which specializes in producing and selling games for Atari Systems, and her grandmother was responsible for making music. In 1984, he spent his summer internship at Apple's Macintosh computer department as an assembly-language programmer who witnessed the company's unique culture of innovation under Mr Jobs. At the same time, Benioff also majors in corporate management and technology innovation at the University of Southern California.

After graduating from university, Benioff ended his part-time pioneering career and entered Oracle to accumulate work experience. You know, his first job was to answer the company's 800 hotline! But he soon fell in love with the profession, found it interesting to deal with clients and was better at dealing with people than programming. Out of love for Apple, he always lost no time in selling his plans for the Apple market to Larry Ellison, and was soon promoted to the head of Oracle's MAC department. At the age of 23, he was awarded the honor of Oracle's best rookie. 3 years later, he was promoted to the post of Vice president and became the youngest person in the company to have the title. Oracle's experience gave Benioff a deep understanding of the management software, and had different ideas about the "owning and controlling" of the traditional enterprise software. This became the main reason why he founded Salesforce.

Interestingly, Larry Ellison is very supportive of Benioff's entrepreneurial career. In addition to investing 2 million of dollars, he also allowed Benioff to work in Salesforce in the morning, came to Oracle in the afternoon, and advised him to resign after 90 days when the new company's finances could be independent, and promised to return to Oracle if the company was poorly managed in the future. He even agreed to Benioff dug three Oracle employees.

The Internet bubble burst in 2001, many network company user loses, Salesforce encounters unprecedented formidable challenge. But in disguise, the economic downturn has led many big companies to a new model of Salesforce. Through innovative technology models and marketing models, Salesforce became the first cloud computing company to break 1 billion dollars in annual revenue. Today it handles more than 36 billion transactions a day for more than 100,000 clients.

Enthusiastic charity

In the field of cloud computing success, Benioff also does not forget social public welfare, creating a "1/1/1" of the comprehensive charitable model-the company contributes 1% of the profits, 1% of the equity and 1% of people back to the community. This has affected many companies, including companies like Google, which have adopted a similar pattern. Because of his contribution to the charitable field, 9374.html "The World Economic Forum in 2005 awarded him the title of" Global youth leader ". In 2010, Benioff and his wife, Lynne, announced their donation to the UCSF Children's Hospital for 100 million dollars, and were therefore included in the Barron weekly as the 25 most efficient philanthropists.

The future of the cloud

Salesforce's latest move is to acquire Heroku, launch face.com, and implement the Salesforce.com as a SaaS while cooperating with PAAs. Benioff also attaches great importance to the socialization of technology, the enterprise micro-BO chatter and Toyota partners with the owner of the social network Toyota Friend is the embodiment of this idea. Some people evaluate Benioff is building the entire Internet backend, of course, this is born in the cloud era of the people should do.

This article is selected from the "Programmer" magazine 2011 12, more exciting content please pay attention to 12 issue magazine

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)