Salesforce.com's Benioff lauds leaderless IT revolution and warns of the 'false cloud'

The social media revolution currently shaking businesses is entirely leaderless, argued Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff (pictured), who was delivering a keynote speech at today's Saleforce 2011 event in New York.

The event was broadcast live on Facebook.

Benioff also claimed that this technology revolution is different from anything that has happened before.

"There is something very different about this social revolution in its impact on society. [Following Arab Spring uprisings] we saw signs in Tunisia and Egypt saying 'Thank you Facebook'. We never saw thank you IBM, or thank you Microsoft."

He gave the example of media streaming service Netflix which had been intending to raise its prices by around 60 per cent until it received 80,000 negative comments on Facebook, illustrating his point that enterprises must get it right, when it comes to social media.

"The Netflix CEO then wrote an apology on Facebook, and got another 20,000 negative comments."

Benioff added that this revolution is largely driven by the masses, rather than a handful of visionaries or business leaders.

"This revolution is leaderless. Who's the leader of Occupy Wall Street? A lot of the best initiatives in our organisation are leaderless, I call them social."

He explained that the core of the social network is in the cloud, but warned delegates at the event away from what he termed the 'false cloud'. To illustrate his point, he revealed a slide that appeared to show a server from Salesforce competitor Oracle.

"Beware the false cloud. It's not efficient, economic, environmental or open. We find the word 'cloud' being applied to new proprietary mainframes which are the false cloud.

"If you're upgrading and updating the cloud, or upgrading your hardware or updating your software, you're not in the cloud."

Benioff then introduced Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts, who claimed that businesses who fail to grasp the concept of the social enterprise are set to struggle in the coming years.

"You have to create a social enterprise, if you don't I don't know what your business model is in five years. You have to reach out to everyone who touches your brand."

Ahrendts explained that Burberry intends to release a fragrance shortly in a new way, inspired by the concept of the social enterprise.

"What if we launched a product socially? That's the future. We usually release fragrances through a single partner, but with our latest release we told every partner no, and we'll release it socially to every single customer individually."

Benioff concluded by adding that customer data is more important than ever, and said: "Delighting customers is knowing who they are and what they like."