In 2006, IDC estimated the content management software market at $3.6 billion.
A problem that I see is that Salesforce customers will have to move their "unstructured" documents to the San Francisco company's servers to really take advantage of the new online service. A move that I'm sure most of Fortune 500 are highly reluctant to make for obvious reasons. "Our goal is to move our customers data in our database. So that's what we do in the unstructured world of course. And that's also true for the [structured] content", boast the chief executive.
During his talk, Benioff also mentioned that Merrill Lynch is now Salesforce.com largest customer with 25,000 subscribers out of a total of 646,000 users. "On-demand CRM is now the fastest growing segment of any enterprise software category with 31% growth annually", said Benioff citing IDC numbers again.
Salesforce co-founder insisted that companies should not waste their time and money on building their own infrastructure when others, like Salesforce, and rather focus on software and services innovation. To prove his point he quoted a Gartner study saying that "on average, $8 out of every $10 spent in IT is "dead money" [the infrastructure]- not contributing directly to business change and growth".
As always, during his presentation and a Q&A session, Marc Benioff who is never at a loss for words when it comes to competitors did let out some nice "pearl quotes". See for yourself:
What keeps Mark Benioff awake at night?

Nothing makes us more upset than seeing people buying software that's not used. Of course, that's how we went after Siebel's market and that's how we are going after Documentum now.

All this is, is a big database sitting out on the Internet. That's what Salesforce really is. And then you have lot of interfaces to that database. The power of the announcement today is that you can have not just our traditional structured information in that database but the unstructured information as well. Once that data is inside the database then it is sendable through the Internet to any device, any user interface.

50% of the access to Salesforce is actually through our API. That means that other computers calling us, or even telephony systems, ERP systems, non PC devices...

We don't have an NIH (not invented here) syndrome at Salesforce. We are looking for innovations from our customers and partners. And with the case where customers are driving us to acquisition, we'll make that acquisition. That was true with Sendia which was the hart of AppExchange mobile technology, customers really wanted to see a mobile platform delivered from Salesforce. That was also true with our Kieden acquisition: customers wanted us more deeply integrated into Google's infrastructure. And you see that again with Koral acquisition [...] We make these acquisitions very carefully and strategically that's why we only made a few [...] We will in most cases try to stay away from acquiring a company that is in a crowded area in the Appexchange.