Marc Benioff went on a multitenant rant at Cloudforce San Jose last week. He warned: Beware of the False Cloud.
But hasn’t the multenancy debate for SaaS applications and platform been decided? I’ve written about the importance of mulitenancy to a cloud integration service in the past, as well as highlighted the challenges of integration appliances, but I think that some of the confusion here stems from the differences between software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Are the lines blurring? The public vs. private cloud debate seems to be getting all of the attention in enterprise IT organizations these days. What role does multitenancy have to play in this discussion? And how will salesforce.com respond to the notion of private and hybrid clouds? Are they all really false clouds?
Benioff also had a few choice words for Microsoft’s attempted protest. (BTW, check out this TechCrunch post decoding Microsoft’s numbers.) As he set up the shift to the cloud in the enterprise, he referred to tablets as “cloud viewers” and asked, “why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” (And I don’t think he’s referring to the criticisms outlined here). You can watch the entire Salesforce presentation here:
In(tegrate) the Clouds 
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