They've cloned sheep. Can they clone Larry Ellison? We're starting to think it's possible after the success of Thomas Siebel and a promising start by Marc Benioff. Both are former protйgйs of Mr. Ellison, chief executive officer of
Oracle.
Mr. Benioff, a former Oracle vice president, left last spring to start Salesforce.com, which just announced $17 million in venture funding. That adds to the $4 million seed funding from The Big E. himself, CNet CEO Halsey Minor, and Magdalena Yesil of U.S. Venture Partners, all of whom are Salesforce.com directors.
New investors include investment banker William Hambrecht, IDG chairman Patrick McGovern, John Friedenrich of Bay Partners, and Igor Sill of Geneva Venture Partners.
Salesforce.com also officially announced the arrival of John Dillon as president, CEO, and director. Mr. Dillon was CEO of Arbor Software and then head of Hyperion Solutions, after it bought Arbor. Prior to that, he worked in various sales management positions at -- guess where? -- and also spent time on nuclear submarines in the Navy, retiring as a commander in the Naval Reserve.
BIG BRITCHESMr. Benioff, who comes across as a Mini-Me of Mr. Ellison, says he chose Mr. Dillon because "he has actively managed publicly traded companies." Mr. Benioff adds, "Even though I spent 13 years at Oracle, I didn't run the show," as though there might be some confusion on that point.
Salesforce.com is an application services provider (ASP). It hosts sales force automation tools on its Web site that allow a company's sales team to access, manage, and share sales information in real time. Reps can keep track of sales goals and accounts, add new leads, project forecasts, and create pie charts and reports. All of this for $50 per user per month.
Mr. Benioff says he's aiming for small businesses that may not have the money to spend on more expensive client/server applications for managing sales. One of the main features he touts about the Salesforce.com site is its easy accessibility. "Because salesmen are constantly on the road, our site was designed to run efficiently over 28.8 and 56K modems," he says. The applications Salesforce.com uses are Java and Unix-based, running on Sun servers and databases bought from Mr. Benioff's old boss.
OLD FRIENDS?Because of the easy interface, Mr. Benioff adds, sales reps need only minimal training in order to manage their accounts on the site. "Enterprise computing has been too hard and too complex," he says. "Our customers can just sign on and are instantly automated with no tough installations and no hardware to buy. Our system takes advantage of the Internet so there's no need to spend a million with Siebel Systems [Nasdaq: SEBL]."
With that comment, Mr. Benioff took a knock at Mr. Siebel, another former Oracle exec who left to develop sales automation and customer service software. (Siebel Systems sports a market cap of $13 billion.) Mr. Benioff was an angel investor in Siebel, but there are signs that the former camaraderie may be withering. Mr. Siebel recently resigned from the board of Blue Martini Software, a company that both he and Mr. Benioff helped to fund. Blue Martini chose Salesforce.com's service over Siebel's.
Besides Blue Martini, Salesforce has signed up 25 other companies, the most recent convert being Xerox. The site is still under wraps, though, so that Mr. Benioff and Mr. Dillon can ensure that it's perfect. "Our goal is to have a thousand sales reps online managing their sales. When we have that, it's a proving point that we can open up our site to the general public," Mr. Benioff says. That is expected to happen sometime next month.