Last December ten times as many came and on the stage were plenty of Europeans, including Marten Mickos of MySQL, a maker of databases now owned by Oracle, a software giant, Marc Simoncini, founder of meetic.com, Europe's largest dating site, and Niklas Zennstrom, who started Skype.

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People who know Salesforce well say that billionaire chief executive Marc Benioff's vision to sell software that reaches beyond salesforce automation (how the company began) is working.

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Marc Benioff, the tech entrepreneur who built software company Salesforce.com, has long said that companies and products should be as social as vacation updates on Facebook.

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Marc Benioff is the chief executive of this organization that provides software services on a global basis.

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Marc Benioff all but educated the market on the benefits of software-as-a-service, the advantages of using a lightweight, easily configurable hosted sales force application compared to the generally accepted status quo of the time: complex enterprise software typified by Siebel, now an Oracle acquisition.

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The truth of his latest claim matters to software history buffs and surely his protege-gone-rival Marc Benioff.

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Marc Benioff is making a bet on freemium with the newly-launched version of his collaboration software, called Chatter.

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One reason why Marc Benioff was able to grow Salesforce.com so quickly was because he could easily let customers try out the software, via the Web.

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