Bullish Benioff slams Oracle and IBM
Salesforce CEO berates Oracle's 'failure' on cloud
Salesforce's chief executive Marc Benioff has blasted rivals IBM and Oracle, branding the latter a failure in the cloud market.
Bullish Benioff (pictured) made the comments on a Q2 earnings call last night, when the company posted sales of $1.63bn (£1.04bn), an increase of nearly a quarter (24 per cent) compared with a year ago – beating analysts' expectations. The firm made a loss of $852,000, compared with a loss of $61m a year ago.
On the results call, addressing analysts, Benioff boasted about the company's success before lashing out at its rivals.
"Look, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP – they're selling millions of dollars of CRM, that's with an M," he said. "We are selling billions of dollars of CRM that's with a B. And that is the difference between us and the competition.
"No other enterprise cloud can match the breadth and depth of our trusted cloud platform and complete customer relationship management solutions, whether it's sales or service, marketing [or] community analytics apps within the Internet of Things. And no one can match the strength of the SalesForce ecosystem."
Back in June, Oracle's executive chairman Larry Ellison berated Salesforce on an earnings call and said his company will soon overtake its rival on cloud sales.
Benioff hit back at the claims on the Salesforce call when questioned about Ellison's comments.
"I think we've mostly seen Oracle actually fail in the cloud market," he said. "I mean, for a long time, Larry said the cloud was ridiculous and then he started taking it more seriously, but I just haven't seen any competitive cloud solutions from Oracle. And I think that's the shame.
"I do view Larry as one of the most capable leaders in our industry. He's amazing. Of course, he's one of my mentors. But in this area of the cloud, Oracle has not delivered."
Oracle was not the only competitor to be at the receiving end of a tongue-lashing from Benioff and IBM was next in line. When questioned about the changing software landscape, and how SalesForce fits in, he said:
"I think the way to understand the future is to look at the past, and you can look at IBM with the mainframe business. I think we all know IBM still sells a lot of mainframes.
"That doesn't mean IBM is innovating; that doesn't mean IBM is creating value for customers or helping them to transform customers' businesses or align them with modern trends. It just means they're selling them old technology and upgrading it.
"And that's what you see with companies like Oracle and SAP. These are old technology bases that are kind of meandering along like mainframes. And I think that is reflected... in their licence revenue growth, which has been poor, and then their movement to the cloud has been stunted because they don't want to shift those customers into new models. [It is] exactly why IBM lost the PC business because they were too afraid to let go of the mainframe. It's the past replaying itself. But instead of IBM, you've got Oracle and SAP basically running the same playbook."
Dinosaurs
Benioff said moving with the times is essential for technology companies, today more than ever.
"We all know that the world has changed – it's moved to the cloud; it's [about] multi-tenant architectures; it's about meta-database application development and deployment; social user interfaces; mobility; data science; and it's about the Internet of Things and the integration of everything," he said.
"And if you haven't done that, well, then you end up with a quarter like Oracle or SAP had. I think you've seen in the last four or six or eight quarters, they've missed almost all of them. And that's because their technology bases are degrading the way mainframes have. But they can hang in there with their revenue, and meander along like big dinosaurs moving down the desert for a while."