Benioff: Denial of the cloud has destroyed SAP

By not embracing cloud computing, SAP has destroyed its business.

This was the view of Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive of Salesforce.com, who gave a frank and brutal review of the software company.

During a press session at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week, Benioff said: “ I think SAP are in a lot of trouble... I would say that their religious and fanatical denial of the cloud may have destroyed their company.”

He listed attempts made by the company to join in with cloud computing, but said they never materialised.

“SAP remains an innovation-less company,”he added, “but they are very nice people.”

Benioff was slightly kinder to other rivals including Microsoft and Oracle – the latter being Benioff's former employer - who have made stronger moves into cloud solutions, saying they were “doing a better job with the cloud than a year ago.”

But he concluded: “I think we are still very much the leader of this movement of new companies who are trying to redefine what enterprise software is... and are working to do that every single day.”

Click here for our Q&A with Marc Benioff.

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