eWEEK - May 16, 2011

service) that was powering more than 105,000 social and mobile cloud applications and boasted a worldwide development community of more than 1 million coders. Its customers include Twitter, Groupon and Hulu.

“We bought Heroku because we
want customers to use any language
they choose [in their own platforms],”
Benioff said. “We now have more
than 130,000 apps on Heroku, and
there are 3,000 to 4,000 new apps
going up every week.”
Examples of these applications
include Flightcaster, a complex flight
prediction application; CloudApp,
an easy way to share files on a Mac;
and Clobby, which adds group chat
to Facebook.

“This is all [done in] recognition
that enterprises realize they need to
change because where their custom-
ers are has changed,” Benioff said.
“Customers are in the cloud.”
Benioff knew what he wanted with
Salesforce early on, said Charles
King, principal analyst with Pund-
IT in Alameda, Calif. “Benioff
approached the Internet
differently,” King said.
“Before the [tech] bubble
burst [around 2000-2001],
the hot new trend was for
an Internet company to
become an ‘application
service provider’ [ASP].

“This was the early version of the cloud, but the key factors weren’t in place yet to make it work correctly. I remember talking to some of Benioff’s people about their new startup in about 1999 and asking them if they were an ASP. They immediately said: ‘Don’t ever mention that term in connection with us again. We’re not in that boat.’”

Convergence causes the shift
The current convergence of sev-
eral factors is the reason for these
changes: the emergence of broad-
band connectivity as a de facto stan-
dard, vastly improved servers and
networking equipment, relatively
inexpensive (and virtually limit-
less) storage capacities, and great
improvements in the deployment of
online services since the ASP days
of the late 1990s.

“We always look at the consumer network as the first place to go,” Benioff said. “When you combine the Facebook user base with the Twitter user base, you’ve got more than a billion people in social networks.

“Those people are being condi-
tioned to think about the Internet,
the network and the devices differ-
ently: how they use them, what they
use them for, how they interoperate,
the concept of a profile, the concept
of a status update, the concept of
information being pushed at you.
It’s more fun.”
But Benioff doesn’t think that
first version of the Internet took
the industry to a new level. “The
first version let us have browsers,
which was very important because
that let us get out of the operat-
ing system,” he explained. “The Chatter, shown here on an iPad, is a Facebook-like internal enterprise social network.