Salesforce.com’s Benioff joins Cisco board

Cisco has added venerable and outspoken cloud computing executive Marc Benioff, founder and chairman of Salesforce.com, to its board of directors, the company announced today.

Benioff spent 13 years at Oracle before leaving to found Salesforcein 1999. Since then, the company has in many ways defined the SaaS (software as a service) cloud computing market, and continues to be a leader in both its CRM service and, increasingly in the PaaS (platform as a service) and social collaboration areas. The company's Force.com and Heroku services allow users to create applications that link in with the CRM application, while the company's Chatter feature is meant to be a social media-like platform for enterprise use. In addition to Benioff, Cisco also added Kristina Johnson, CEO of hydroelectric company Enduring Hydro and a former U.S. Department of Energy undersecretary. Read more...