Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff Named 2009 Executive of the Year by the San Francisco Business Times
The San Francisco Business Times has named Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce.com Inc., its 2009 Executive of the Year. — Benioff is being recognized as the executive …
Context & Ripple Effects
The honor closes out a year in which Benioff pushed hard to move cloud computing from curiosity to enterprise mainstay — he had already declared the cloud 'all grown up' for enterprise buyers in late 2008, and Salesforce.com kept growing through the downturn after being founded in a San Francisco apartment in 1999 during the dot-com bubble.
The award also lands after a turbulent stretch inside the company: President Steve Cakebread resigned and two executive vice presidents were laid off earlier in 2009, with reports of further vice-president exits left unconfirmed — making 2009 a year of both consolidation at the top and outward momentum for the founder.
First-order effects
- Benioff enters 2010 with a formal hometown endorsement from the San Francisco Business Times, reinforcing his position as the public face of cloud computing just as he argues the model is ready for enterprise action.
Second-order effects
- Legacy enterprise software vendors competing with Salesforce.com now face a rival whose founder carries both commercial momentum through the recession and civic credibility in its own backyard.
Third-order effects
- If regional business press keeps reserving its top executive honors for cloud-native founders, the signal is that subscription software has crossed from startup fringe into the established core of the business economy.
The trend: Cloud computing is moving from challenger narrative to establishment legitimacy, with its founders — Benioff foremost among them — collecting the institutional recognition once reserved for legacy software chiefs.