Salesforce.com's CEO Benioff Gets Bumped Off from Oracle Open World KeyNote, Goes Social

By Guest Blogger Kalpanik S. 

Salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff - whose keynote at Oracle Open World was rescheduled from a conference prime time slot  on Wednesday to Thursday early morning with less than 24 hour notice - decided to go rogue. Salesforce.com rented a large conference room at a hotel blocks away from the Oracle Open World Conference Center and delivered the prepared keynote speech at the originally scheduled time anyway. 

In a press release, Salesforce.com announced that "Oracle cancelled salesforce.com's keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2011. Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff will now speak on Wednesday, Oct. 5, 2011 at 10:30 a.m. PT at Ame Restaurant in the St. Regis Hotel, San Francisco, CA." 

Benioff said during his talk at St Regis that they viewed rescheduling his keynote address to Thursday early morning when there was the big OOW party the night before amounted to a cancellation. He also mentioned that they are expecting a million dollar refund from Oracle. Calling Larry Ellison's techniques as old fashioned command and control ways of running business and belittling Oracle's Exabyte as "mainframe", he made several references to world's dictators who failed to realized the power of Social Media. 

Indeed, Salesforce.com troops, and more importantly, Marc's fans were able to used the power of Social networking to draw attendees to his live webcast. As per the statistics scrolling on the screen, close to 8000 people at least partially attended Benioff's talk. Thus, in an effort to stop Marc from stealing his thunder, Larry ended up helping Marc get even a bigger audience.