SAN FRANCISCO — Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has been drumming the same beat with the same examples for weeks and months now when it comes to the social enterprise, but at least most of the argument is fairly solid.
Rehashing much of what Benioff has been arguing at Dreamforce 2011 and as recently during his “keynote” address across the street from Oracle OpenWorld earlier this month, Benioff reititerated that social, mobile, and cloud technologies fueling the IT revolution.
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“Customers and employees did not have as much of a voice as today,” said Benioff, while speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit on Monday.
Benioff pointed towards Facebook as the best example of a platform that understands and promotes his trinity of revolutionary technologies the most.
“Facebook is becoming a vision and certainly an execution of what a consumer operating system is,” Benioff proclaimed. “When I look at Facebook, it is a tremendous direction for where we are going as an industry.”
For enterprise clients, Benioff argued that it’s extremely relevant for them because that’s where their customers are going and using.
“All of these things set the stage for what we should be looking at in the enterprise world,” Benioff asserted.
Enterprises also need to pay attention to what their customers are saying about them via social media, Benioff warned. Pointing once again towards the Arab Spring movement in the Middle East this year, Benioff noted how Facebook and Twitter played such a key role in promoting these events.
“We didn’t see signs that said, ‘Thank you, Microsoft,’” Benioff said.
Much of what Benioff touched on was also supported by Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president of research at Gartner. While speaking at Gartner’s Symposium in Orlando earlier on Monday, Sondergaard posited that companies “must immediately incorporate social throughout” enterprise systems.
Both Benioff and Sondergaard have strong arguments for the importance of socializing the enterprise world, but both need to learn some patience as these kinds of “revolutions” can’t always create change overnight.
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