Trends And Opportunities In Cloud Computing: Jim Burleigh, CEO Of Cloud9 (Part 2)

Sramana: I am a huge fan of the thought leadership and processes that Salesforce.com has brought to our industry, as well as the evangelizing of a completely new paradigm. What are some of your key reasons for success?

Jim Burleigh: There were a few different things that came together at one point that made salesforce.com such a huge success. It was the right idea at the right time. At that time CRM was established, but the universal problem was that existing CRM solutions were heavyweight software. CRM is for the sales team, and salespeople do not have the same tolerance as others, such as purchasing people, to deal with complex software. Universally, salespeople want you to get out of their way and let them sell.

That philosophy includes more than just the salesperson; it includes the entire sales organization. They don’t want to deal with IT, they just want technology that enables them. They want to move fast and change fast. Existing CRMs at that time meant that any change required the sales group to work with the CRM vendor or work with IT. That was a problem that presented opportunities.

The first opportunity for us was the chance to take IT out of the mix. This is the genesis of the famous “no software.” There was no software involved, you used our product like a website as a service. That empowered sales. There was one big meshing of the right message with the right delivery that encompassed a huge marketplace.

Another big part of the success was not that we were just promoting a better way to do CRM. At the time the terms were hosted or ASP, but it was a paradigm shift. Not only did we make a better mousetrap, but we got to play in a whole new shift, which was technology being delivered and consumed via the Internet. That got as much press as CRM did.

We also had a perfect storm of things that were interesting for press and analysts to write about. That pumped our name up even further. We had Larry Ellison on the board. We had Marc [Benioff] as our chairman. We had Tom Siebel on the board; he was another Oracle disciple. We got to play the “these are all people descended out of Oracle” card.

Sramana: I remember that Marc played off Siebel big time.

Jim Burleigh: Absolutely. Then we fired Larry from the board. A tiny startup fired Larry Ellison from its board, although it was not really a firing and more of a mutual agreement to move on. However, we made press and noise about that. The PR from that was tremendous. Marc is a genius at PR and is amazing at generating buzz and interest.

We leveraged all of these different points to have a continuous flow of buzz about salesforce.com. That is critical to reaching the SMB market. The SMB market is very expensive to reach. Time and time again, you see great ideas that cannot survive because they are unable to reach the SMB market.

Sramana: That was all before social media. Today, social media goes a long way in addressing that challenge.

Jim Burleigh: Very true, things have definitely changed there. I think there is still a discussion to be had there about what types of small businesses are reached via social media rather than consumers. At that time, articles in WSJ and USA Today were huge. That was the backbone of launching Salesforce.com on the path that it has been on.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Trends And Opportunities In Cloud Computing: Jim Burleigh, CEO Of Cloud9
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