Salesforce CEO maintains Vmware is not into cloud computing

Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff pulled no punches on the competition in a roundtable Q&A session at Dreamforce 2011 last week where he said VMware and virtualization are important, but don't fit into his and Salesforce's vision of cloud computing.

"I watched the VMware keynote this week," Benioff added (referring to VMware CEO Paul Maritz's keynote address at VMworld in Las Vegas), "They talked about how they have like 50 percent now of the total market of servers that they are on, if I got the number right, and that they have loaded their software onto 50 percent of all servers and that they're that much more efficient and then they said 'and now they're all clouds.' That's now where you got my attention, because putting virtual machines on servers is great and I understand they call it private clouds, but our vision of cloud computing is not that."

VMware did not respond to CRN's request to comment. In the VMworld keynote last week, Maritz said: "We're not immune from cloud fever, we also tend to use this term a lot." Maritz laid out VMware's cloud stack and discussed its charge into the cloud computing market. Maritz also detailed VMware's Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service play, which will compete directly against Salesforce's cloud development platforms like Heroku and Force.com

But Benioff said Martiz's and VMware's private cloud vision isn't cloud computing as he understands it.

"Our vision of cloud computing is multi-tenancy, shared systems and public networks run as a 24x7 public trusted service …," Benioff continued. "If you're talking about more hardware or if you're talking about more software, it's not about the cloud. And the cloud is really this next generation of computing and that's new software and that's new services."

According to Benioff, Salesforce is targeting companies looking to keep close contact with their customers and to create that relationship, Salesforce's social enterprise combines social, mobile and open cloud elements to transform a business.

"We're not selling components. We're not selling virtual machines," Benioff said. "We're not selling hardware. We're selling social enterprise and it's the cloud that makes it possible." While Benioff said that Salesforce still has a strong relationship with VMware -- which Benioff considers a "tremendous" Salesforce partner -- the pair's VMforce partnership for Java development in the cloud may be dissolving slightly as Salesforce adds Java support to Heroku, a Ruby-based development platform Salesforce acquired last year. Though Benioff said VMware's SpringSource technology is integrated into Heroku for Java.

 Benioff said there's a good way for network managers to determine whether a vendor is offering true cloud computing services or virtualization.

"Some of those companies are software companies," he said, according to CloudPro. "They have versions with numbers after it. That is when you know you are dealing with software; if you hear about versions, you know you are not in the cloud." Benioff also dismissed the notion that virtualization is necessary as a migration tool to the cloud, telling attendees at a Q&A session, "I obviously don't believe that and I don't believe we need more software."

"The deviation between Salesforce and VMware is: VMware, VM, virtual machine; they're about virtual machines and about virtualization," Benioff said. "We have a different approach to cloud computing, which is public services."