Salesforce.com chief emerges from quiet zone
Published: 23 Jul 2004 11:00 BST
Reporters once could count on Marc Benioff as a veritable rent-a-quote machine. Over the years, the larger-than-life chief executive of Salesforce.com -- Benioff stands 6 foot 5 and has an ego to match -- positively delighted in veering off the corporate script, turning the verbal cannons loose on whatever target was in his sights.
That was before he had a publicly traded stock to worry about as chief executive.
Five years after founding Salesforce.com, Benioff's company went public last month on the New York Stock Exchange. But Salesforce.com's path to Wall Street took an unexpected detour when the US Securities and Exchange Commission delayed the offering because an overly chatty Benioff violated quiet-period rules by granting an on-the-record interview to The New York Times in May.
Since then, Benioff, once profiled in a magazine article as "the biggest mouth in Silicon Valley," has been doing a good impersonation of Greta Garbo.
Ducking the limelight until the conclusion of the post-IPO quiet period, he finally ended his silent treatment of the media on Wednesday to host a briefing for securities analysts in New York. While Benioff's pre-IPO trouble did nothing to dent investor enthusiasm for the company on its initial day of trading -- shares climbed by 56 percent that day -- Wall Street wasn't so impressed with the company's reported 2004 earnings and sales forecast, sending shares down roughly 27 percent.
Stock fluctuations notwithstanding, Benioff remains optimistic that Salesforce's business model will prove its value. The company sells monthly subscriptions to customers who use the company's sales and customer service applications online over the Web.
An outspoken critic of the way enterprise software gets sold, Benioff -- who spent years learning the ropes at Oracle under Larry Ellison's tutelage -- maintains that such pay-by-the-month programs over the Internet are quicker to set up and easier to maintain than rival products offered by the likes of Siebel Systems, SAP and Oracle.
ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com caught up with Benioff shortly after he wrapped up his first public presentation as a public chief executive.
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