Salesforce.com's New Database Venture Featured as One of ''The Next Disruptors''—11 Innovations That Could Reorder Entire Industries—in October Issue of Business 2.0

Business Wire, Sept 20, 2006

NEW YORK -- Business 2.0:

--"Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff: "We will destroy Oracle and SAP because they won't be able to respond to the innovation we are about to unleash."

--Disruptive technologies profiled in Business 2.0 include a ceramic power source for electric cars, a satellite-based device to combat traffic congestion, and a database application threatening to shake up the enterprise software market, among others.

Thanks to the Web and the sheer speed of technological innovation, there has rarely been a better time for the creation of disruptors. In its October cover story, "The Next Disruptors," Business 2.0, sparked by some of history's greatest disruptive technologies--such as the telephone and the Internet--explores technologies, bubbling below the surface today, that are likely to erupt with such seismic force that they'll reshape our world.

The magazine features 11 businesses with the potential to become tomorrow's disruptors. They include a company working on a radically new way to power electric cars, an engineer who wants to fight the multibillion-dollar scourge of traffic congestion, and even would-be repeat disruptors like Marc Benioff, whose Salesforce.com is about to unleash a new assault--reported for the first time--on the enterprise software market it has already transformed by pioneering the sale of applications over the Web.

"We will destroy Oracle and SAP because they won't be able to respond to the innovation we are about to unleash," Benioff says.

Benioff has already built Salesforce.com into the world's most successful Web-based customer-relationship management software, which currently boasts 25,000 customers and more than half a million individual subscribers, the magazine writes. Benioff has launched a service called AppExchange as a way to attract software developers to build their own Web-based enterprise applications atop Salesforce.com's infrastructure. However, the types of applications that can be built and fully hosted on AppExchange today are still no match for traditional enterprise software built on an Oracle or Microsoft database.

With AppExchange 2.0, which Benioff plans to unveil in October, Salesforce.com's engineers have enabled AppExchange to host both the data and the logic. "We are going to show you why you don't need to buy a database," Benioff vows. AppExchange, he explains, will be the database and the tools all rolled into one, and will go a long way toward becoming a fully formed Web operating system.

Other companies and technologies that are featured in "The Next Disruptors," in the October issue of Business 2.0 (on newsstands Monday, Sept. 25), include:

--THE DISRUPTOR: EESTOR

THE INNOVATION: A ceramic power source for electric cars that could blow away the combustion engine

THE DISRUPTED: Oil companies and carmakers that don't climb aboard

EEStor, a stealth company in Cedar Park, Texas, is working on an "energy storage" device that could finally give the internal combustion engine a run for its money--and begin saving us from our oil addiction. "To call it a battery discredits it," says Ian Clifford, the CEO of Toronto-based electric car company Feel Good Cars, which plans to incorporate EEStor's technology in vehicles by 2008. If it works as it's supposed to, it will charge up in five minutes and provide enough energy to drive 500 miles on about $9 worth of electricity. At today's gas prices, covering that distance can cost $60 or more; the EEStor device would power a car for the equivalent of about 45 cents a gallon.

EEStor is tight-lipped about its device and how it manages to pack such a punch. According to a patent issued in April, the device is made of a ceramic powder coated with aluminum oxide and glass. A bank of these ceramic batteries could be used at "electrical energy stations" where people on the road could charge up.

--THE DISRUPTOR: APPLIED LOCATION

THE INNOVATION: A satellite-based system for toll collection, traffic congestion management, and pay-as-you-drive insurance

THE DISRUPTED: Traffic congestion, toll collectors, parking meters, and RFID-based systems like E-ZPass

Traffic congestion sucks an estimated $63 billion a year out of the U.S. economy in the form of wasted fuel and time stuck in traffic. Bern Grush, the founder of Toronto-based Applied Location, thinks his system, called Skymeter, could open up all sorts of new possibilities--from congestion management and meterless parking to pay-as-you-drive insurance. Grush is still almost a year away from a finished product, but he has $250,000 in seed money from family and a government grant, and traffic directors from Toronto to London have expressed interest in testing Skymeter as soon as it's ready.

--THE DISRUPTOR: CLEARWIRE

THE INNOVATION: National Wi-Max broadband wireless service

THE DISRUPTED: Telecom and cable companies

Clearwire's initial goal is to create a nationwide broadband wireless network based on Wi-Max, a more powerful relative of Wi-Fi technology. Because Wi-Max infrastructure is much cheaper to build and maintain than traditional networks, some analysts think Clearwire will be able to seriously undercut the broadband prices of Comcast, Verizon, and their ilk. But the threat posed by founder Craig McCaw's strategy could be much greater than just price pressure. Clearwire's approach could put in jeopardy the billions of dollars that telecoms and cable operators are pouring into upgrading their existing broadband networks.