Salesforce’s Benioff: “We Were Born Cloud, Now We’ve Been Reborn Social”

Today, at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, founder and CEO Marc Benioff took the stage to adress the event’s 40,000 attendees. We know Salesforce is bullish on the social enterprise and Benioff kicked his keynote off with this statement about Salesforce: “We’re were born cloud, and now we’ve been reborn Social.”

Benioff also said that Salesforce has passed a $2 billion annual run rate in revenue. The company is now powering more than 36 billion transactions a day for over 100,000 customers. And Benioff called out Apple’s Steve Jobs, who he said led the mobile era.

“It’s an amazing time in our industry,” Benioff says. “It’s a social revolution and it’s not just about consumers. It’s about enterprise.” Adding social to a company’s communications is more than just creating a Facebook for the enterprise, he explains. And Benioff warns against the false cloud, a dig at competitor Oracle’s CRM offering.

He wants to evangelize companies into the ‘Social Enterprise.’ First, the company has to develop a social customer profile, which creates a social picture for a company. The profile captures a company’s likes on Facebook, Twitter communications, connections on LinkedIn and more.

Second, a company needs to develop and employee social network, where a company’s employees can exchange internal, realtime communications and collaborate on work. And third, Salesforce believes that companies need to develop a Customer Social Network and a Product Social Network.

Benioff also announced that Database.com is now open to all developers. Salesforce also went into a demo of the newest version of Chatter, which we covered extensively here. And the company debuted a demo of it’s new HTML5 app.

Musician Neil Young then took the stage, explaining how he is using Chatter on the set of his new movie.

Social isn’t just for Chatter, says Benioff. Salesforce is adding social to the Service Cloud and other applications, including Service Cloud With Chatter Service. In all, Salesforce will be announcing 350 new features to the company’s applications.