Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff touts 'social enterprise'

August 31, 2011, 2:35pm PDT | Length: 00:02:06
At the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff says that enterprise technology is going to face an uprising akin to the Arab Spring in the Middle East. The theme is that customers are going to revolt against traditional enterprise software as corporations become more social.

Transcript

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff touts 'social enterprise'

Music

Speaker: This social revolution is really unlike any other paradigm that we've experienced because just think about this. We just had Dreamforce 10 months ago. Remember that? Weren't we just here 10 months ago? How do we know there's a social revolution? Well, have you been watching the news? Have you even seen what's going on on the news? Arab spring, the fall of countries, protests of hundreds of thousands of people, the fall of dictators? And you know what's unusual about this time? There were no signs that said thank you, Microsoft. There were no signs that said thank you, IBM. No, look at this. Thank you, Facebook, in all these different languages and in all these different cultures in all these different parts of the world. Isn't that amazing? It's just phenomenal what is happening. The technology is creating this change and transformation. It's an Arab spring. But ladies and gentlemen, we need to pay attention to that here at this conference, too, and I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why we have to pay attention to it because it's not so long from now then we'll start to hear about a corporate spring, an enterprise spring. We've seen Mubarak fall. We've seen Gaddafi fall. When will the first corporate CEO fall for the same reason because his customers or her customers are rising up or not listening to their employees, not paying attention. I know I think about that myself everyday. Am I doing enough to listen to the customers? Am I doing enough to listen to the employees? Because we've seen -- and this is what this sign is -- that it's more important to listen than ever before. It just is. That's the social revolution.

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