salesforce.com shared with me an internal note CEO Marc Benioff circulated. Vinnie "Maintenance" Mirchandani could not have written it better.
Here it is unadulterated.
“For ten years, we've been driven by a simple vision: The End of Software. Now it's time to take on a new challenge: The End of Maintenance.
Let me tell you about a customer that I met on our Cloudforce tour. This customer currently uses Siebel software to run her call center. She pays more than $15 million a year for the privilege of having to implement the updates that Siebel sends her. That does not include backup. Or disaster recovery. And of course, it does not guarantee that she will be using the latest technology. The maintenance agreement only assures her that her outdated software will continue to work. She is paying tolls on a road to nowhere.
We can help her, and many other customers, and deliver much more for a fraction of what they currently pay in maintenance. It's time to open up a new front in "The End of Software"-- one that is long overdue.
It's time for The End of Maintenance.
Every year, companies spend billions on maintenance fees and get relatively little in return. Maintenance fees cover updates that are mostly patches and fixes, but they stop far short of the kind of innovation every that enterprise needs to survive. Companies pay to keep the past working and they end up doubling down on technology that can never keep up with their needs. The fees that companies pay have actually been rising, from something like 17% a few years ago to numbers more like 22% today. Every four or five years, companies are paying for their software all over again.
It's time to set these businesses free and make them successful in the Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and on our Force.com platform.
Our new mission begins at a critical time in the economy, when companies are questioning conventional wisdom as they never have before. That, of course, extends to their IT budgets as well. The CIO is in a tough spot right now. Corporate budgets are tightening. And our rivals in the legacy client-server world are using this opportunities to extract more money from their customers by raising maintenance fees. I call this phenomenon "the compression of IT" and it resonates with just about every CIO I speak with these days.
We have a better vision. We sell our customers a service and every customer is able to use the latest. Innovations are included. Upgrades are automatic and invisible. Customers' intellectual property of customizations and extensions is rigorously preserved, and carried forward without disruption.
The service gets better, not just less buggy. That's not what people are getting for all those fees that supposedly buy them "maintenance."
It's time to set these business people free: to give them the experience of being wildly successful in the Sales Cloud, the Service Cloud, and in their own unique applications that they can build on our Force.com platform. This is the time to do it, because this is when people need it: their IT budgets are tight, their business situations are critical, and their old-world software vendors are taking care of themselves instead of meeting the needs of their customers.
We've raised people's expectations for better alignment of business value with IT cost. We've earned our leadership position in enterprise cloud computing. It's time for us to set people free from paying more and more to get less and less. It's time for The End of Maintenance.
Aloha,
Marc”
