Mr Marc Benioff: There is an opportunity to go forward and have collaboration as a service based on the Facebook paradigm.

Mr Marc Benioff, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Salesforce.com, believes that social networks and collaboration will be the next economic driver for version 2 of cloud computing, and that the Facebook and Twitter models will be the ones businesses need to embrace. He shared his vision on Cloud2 at a recent keynote address as part of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore’s Distinguished Infocomm Speaker series.

Efficiency in multi-tenancy
The fundamental premise of cloud computing - whether it is applications, platforms or collaboration - is that it is multi-tenanted, shared, and based on a pay-as-you-go model. It is elastic - it grows when you need it to grow, and comes down when you need it to come down. Our customers benefitted from that during the last recession as they were able to withdraw from our service easily, and now during growth, to expand on our service easily - five times faster and at half the cost, is what IDC (research firm International Data Corporation) says.

Salesforce.com has 77,000 customers. In the old model, each SME would need at least one server, and the larger customers would need multiple servers, so more than 100,000 servers would be needed. Salesforce.com with its three global data centres, including disaster recovery and backup, has about 3,000 servers. That is the efficiency of the multi-tenant software, elasticity and sharing.

False clouds versus real clouds
Many vendors claim to have cloud computing and to be able to put it in your data centre claiming to have a cloud server, or a cloud wrap. But cloud computing is not about renaming or rebranding. You don’t get the 3 per cent efficiency if you are still buying servers and software. If you are not sharing servers, where is your efficiency?

Smaller customers must have access to the same servers and capabilities as large customers. This is an economic accelerator to empower small and large businesses. How can a small company buy a private cloud and put it in their data centre? Most don’t even have a data centre. One way to tell if you are dealing with a false cloud or a real cloud is whether you are paying for your updates and paying for maintenance. So beware of the false cloud, because it is not cloud computing.

What’s driving Cloud2?
Technology is a continuum. It started with the mainframe, and moved into minicomputers, and then client-server, and then Internet computing. But every 10 years, technology changes dramatically.

In 2009, social networking users surpassed e-mail users. People have accounts with Facebook or Twitter, or other social networking engines. Not just that, what people do on the Internet has fundamentally changed.

And it is not just what they are doing, but how they are doing it. PCs and notebook usage has flattened out. What’s hot are smartphones like iPhones and Blackberries. The iPad is the single most exciting thing I’ve used to date. When you put these things together, you get a fundamental shift in cloud computing. It is moving from low-cost, fast, and easy to use, to collaboration, in real-time, and in a mobile way. This is a fundamental shift.

Towards collaboration as a service
A lot of the first generation Internet sites have gone away. A lot of their growth has stopped, and what is growing is Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This is what is growing and exciting.

The question is this, “Why is not all enterprise software like Facebook?” Change is underway. In Cloud 1, we had Amazon.com, and tab-based interfaces, pulling information out of the Internet, clicking with our desktops or laptops, but we didn’t move around too much, no one really knew where we were, and applications were in silos.

Facebook has 500 million users. It is the biggest, most important application in the world today, and it will soon have a billion users on it. It is based on feeds, profiles, and groups, and people interacting with all kinds of devices from anywhere and at anytime, in real time. It is a new desktopless world. It is about the people in the applications.

Today, individuals and teams are working together using very old technology. But there is an opportunity to go forward and have collaboration as a service based on the Facebook paradigm.