Diving into data has never been more critical for businesses in order to make fast, accurate decisions about customer behaviors and needs and drive holistic business knowledge.
Parker Harris
I think the legacy is really the company that we built. That's what makes me happy. I'm a very simple person, so that's all I really need.
Businesses can't afford to react to what their customers want; they need to anticipate their needs.
I remember my school had some of the first Apple IIs in North Carolina. I remember, when I first started using them, we were using a cassette tape to store programs because we didn't have floppy disk drives.
I was lucky enough to go see Steve Jobs with Marc Benioff. We were talking about the iPad, and one of the things Jobs said - and it was a little self-serving - was go and build your iPad app, and that is going to change the way you think about your online app, and you will go back, and you will redo your online app. I believe that.
When you come to San Francisco, we want you to know where Salesforce is.
My favourite moments at Dreamforce are when people come up and thank me randomly. It's a selfish time for me, as I get lots of positive feedback.
Our output and continued success is all about our culture. Ours has to be highly collaborative, and we have company-wide events and processes to make sure everyone stays aligned.
I grew up loving computers and math, actually. I also loved English literature and French, but I became obsessed with computers when the Apple II was coming out.
I still believe heavily that we have to be careful about having this ego and hubris as a successful corporation, that we should do it all. Because then I think we start to fail our customers and we're too focused on taking over the world.
Phones are a big deal, but tablets are an even bigger deal. So we're doing a lot of design work and experimentation around the tablet experience.
Wearable technology is not just for consumers. It creates a tremendous opportunity for businesses, too.
After the dotcom boom blew up, it increased the focus on questions like, 'Why should I trust you to help run my business? How do I know you're not going to go away like every other company?' That was hard. We had to keep proving ourselves.
Many people have said we just need to add more products. Look at Oracle, look at SAP. Add ERP and inventory or compensation. Add all this stuff. What we realized is we're the customer company. We're the front office solution, and our customers would be really upset if we just added a whole bunch of stuff and lost focus.
One of our first jobs was at Saba Software. We were helping them build their products for the cloud. We wanted to build our own product and move away from consulting. We were looking for a change. The CEO of Saba introduced me to Marc Benioff.
Looking at the trends that we have gone through as a company, where we started the company, it's all about cloud computing, and we're still cloud computing. And then we went through this space on social. When Facebook came out, that was amazing.
What I'll take credit for is finding visionary people in the company, or bringing them in, and then empowering them to help me.
I took a detour to France in my senior year in high school. So that's part of what ended up sending me, actually, to Middlebury because I went to school with people who were more from the Northeast.
I grew up in North Carolina. My father was a salesperson; he sold textiles.
Social computing is doing what agile methodology is doing to our process - it's breaking down our visibility.
By flattening time and space, social computing and business is unlocking credible potential within business. For example, individuals and organizations that weren't connected before are now connected together.
Those trying to get support for their iPhones don't necessary trust their carriers, so they ask their friends for help.
We are building technology to keep up with what's happening in the world. It's transforming the way people are working. We're bringing the enterprise to the world.
Where I'm focused now is how I get more women leaders. We decided not to just look outside the company for great women to hire, but to help women rise up through the ranks internally.
When we started, we thought about the scale of the Internet - if everyone was using the service at the same time, what would that look like?
If you want a database, you don't go out and say you're going to write it. I see platforms as going in that direction.
All business leaders need to be technologists, as every industry now has a Netflix or an Uber on the horizon, threatening to upend business as usual. Apps are driving this disruption, and every enterprise needs to become an app company.
I've used the term 'Facebook for the enterprise,' and everyone goes, 'We don't want Facebook in the enterprise,' because it conjures up that it's not secure, and it's going to be a waste of time. All these things are true, which is why Facebook is not in the enterprise.
What I see now is the consumerisation of IT. I don't want my company to tell me that I have to use a BlackBerry or I have to use a Windows phone. I just want to use the phone I want and have it all work.
We actually went public partly because we wanted companies to realise we were not going away.
People think floating should be the easiest and happiest time for a company, but it's actually really hard. We were meant to think we'd won - we'd gone public and could go on to new things. But we were only just getting started.
We're paying a lot of attention to the iPad. But we're expanding that to a tablet focus.
We're a very iterative company, so we jump on basically all new technology.
We do a lot of outbound work where we're talking about the future. As we get involved with these new products, it helps us have a platform to talk about where the future is going.
For me, what's crazy is CRM has really evolved, and keeps evolving.
I have employees that are, you know, other types of diversity, coming to me and saying 'Well, why aren't we focused on these other areas as well?' and I said yes, we should focus them, but, you know, the phrase we use internally is, 'If everything is important, then nothing is important.'
