Benioff: Platform as a service needs a decade to cook

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff reckons that its platform as a service initiatives will take about a decade to truly bake.

Benioff made those comments in an interview with News.com's Dan Farber and Charles Cooper. The interview is worth a read given that Benioff and Dan usually have a few interesting riffs. A few key excerpts:

On the popularity of Salesforce.com's (BTL posts and all resources) platform as a service:

I think that it's going to take a decade to make platform as a service happen because it's the re-creation of all the ISVs (independent software vendors), the technology also, the ecosystem, the implementation, and so forth.

And just in the same way that we don't want to be the only ones doing software as a service, we certainly don't want to be the only ones doing platform as a service. We want to be able to clearly show that this is the future of the industry, too.

What is platform as a service anyway?

It is a really a new concept. Certainly, eBay is a platform as a service in many ways because there is an ecosystem that is evolving around it. But I think we mean something more along the lines of .Net as a service or the traditional application servers delivered as a service. In the same way that before you had to buy an operating system and database and an application server, you will be able to get that all delivered to you, as a multi-tenant shared service. This is a tremendous revelation for the IT department because to build new apps, you don't want to have to invest a risk that's traditionally associated with the software industry.

Will platform as a service be the premier way to distribute and implement software in the future?