During a luncheon for press and analysts, Benioff was asked about this seemingly competitive swipe at Oracle. “Larry is my mentor,” he said. “They are a vendor to us. We have a great relationship with them.” In his 2009 book, “Behind the Cloud,” Benioff has a brief section called “The Larry Ellison Playbook,” where he talks about lessons he learned from Ellison, such as “always have a vision” and “think of it as you want it, not as it is!” Benioff, though, is no clone of Ellison. During the lunch he also talked about the company’s proposed campus in San Francisco, on the land next to a new UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, for which he and his wife donated $100 million. He said the big campus will be important in growing the company and its workforce. “It’s very important for us to have employees for life,” he said. Benioff also went around talking to and giving kudos to many top Salesforce executives during the lunch, in contrast to what he calls Ellison’s “management-by-ridicule” tactics.That was out of the Wall Street Journal's Market Watch. You can find that article, in full, here. E-Consultancy also mentioned the book:
Marc Benioff probably doesn't mind a few clouds. Salesforce.com's CEO believes that cloud computing is a big part of the future, and has called the book he wrote about Salesforce.com's rise Behind the Cloud. But Benioff isn't just talking about and promoting the cloud. He's putting his money where his mouth is, and Salesforce.com is increasingly looking to play a larger role in the cloud computing market. Yesterday, the company made one of its biggest announcements yet: Database.com. Billed as "the enterprise cloud database," Database.com aims to make your existing database a thing of the past. Instead of installing MySQL on your server, or spending thousands upon thousands of dollars licensing MS SQL Server or Oracle, Benioff believes "Databases need to be in the cloud" and wants businesses to store, manage and interact with their data using Database.com, which will be publicly available in 2011.Find the rest of that article, here.
