2009-12-24 20:56:57 -

The San Francisco Business Times has named Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce.com Inc., its 2009 Executive of the Year.

Benioff is being recognized as the executive who had the greatest impact on San Francisco Bay Area business in the past year — not only for defying the fierce economic downdraft, but also for taking the lead role in the creation of an industry.

“The brash and loquacious founder and CEO of Salesforce.com has been an extraordinarily effective evangelist for ‘cloud computing’ — the now super-hot technology trend of providing applications and services over the Internet rather than stored on a server,” writes Business Times technology reporter Patrick Hoge. “It has played straight into the ‘software-as-a-service’ business model that Benioff and

Salesforce pioneered a decade ago.”

Revenue at San Francisco-based Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) is projected to grow 30 percent to $1.3 billion in the fiscal year that ends next month.
From January to Oct. 31, the company added the largest number of customers and subscribers in its history, picking up 12,500 new customers with 500,000 new “seats” (employees at customer companies who are licensed to use its software). Its employee roll has mushroomed from 2,000 four years ago to the current 3,800 plus, 300 of them added in the last year.

“Salesforce.com is one of the finest technology companies in the Bay Area, and it is still growing like a weed, with the same founder leading the charge year after year,” said Ron Conway, a longtime investor in early-stage tech firms. “Marc Benioff has become an icon of Silicon Valley and a great representative of the values of Silicon Valley and entrepreneurship.”

Read the full inside story behind the rise of Salesforce.com in the Dec.

25 issue of the San Francisco Business Times. To view the article (available Dec. 25), visit sanfrancisco.bizjournals.com : and click on “News,” then on “Exclusive Subscriber Content.”

San Francisco Business TimesSteve Symanovich, 415-288-4947Editor ssymanovich@bizjournals.com : mailto:ssymanovich@bizjournals.com