New Prez at Salesforce.com

By DAVID SIMS
TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist

On-demand CRM vendor Salesforce.com announced on Thursday that John Freeland, managing director in charge of CRM at Accenture, is joining salesforce.com's senior management team as President, Worldwide Operations.

Freeland is the one who, four months ago, told a salesforce.com event that he, originally a self-confessed "skeptic" on salesforce.com, "continues to be astounded" by how popular Salesforce.com is with the big companies Accenture serves, according to industry observer Amey Stone.

At the time Accenture said it was making a "a strategic bet" on Salesforce.com in emphasizing the company to their clients.

Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com is luring Freeland, the man who a few months ago told an interviewer that " most clients don't want to sign on for a single monolithic architecture that makes them beholden to a single vendor," out of retirement from 25 years at Accenture.

"The CRM landscape is going through seismic changes, and John's unparalleled depth of experience will be a critical asset to our customers, partners, employees, and shareholders," Benioff said in a statement.

Freeland, author of The Ultimate CRM Handbook, will report directly to Benioff, who has tasked him with the Successforce portfolio of services and business alliances. 

The other members of the executive committee include Jim Steele, President, Worldwide Sales and Distribution; Steve Cakebread,  Chief Financial Officer; Parker Harris, Executive Vice President, Technology; and Kenneth Juster, Executive Vice President, Law, Policy, and Corporate Strategy.

Jim Steele, the other guy to hold the title of "President" at salesforce.com (who told this reporter at Dreamforce last week that titles "don't mean a lot" to him) said "there is not a more respected authority in enterprise CRM today than John Freeland.

In a recent interview posted on Siebel Observer, Freeland said "Most of the larger corporations are especially reluctant to run all the risk and incur all the cost of a full scale transition away from their legacy systems toward a single software package. They are much more interested in best of breed. They are also interested in buying components that complement what they have internally as opposed to implementing a single company's products across the board."

Brand is "very important" when it comes to buying decisions, Freeland told Siebel Observer, adding that "Most organizations want to know there is some stability in the vendors they are dealing with, and the big vendors, the Siebels, the SAPs and increasingly the salesforce.coms have that advantage over new entrants."

Freeland will assume his post at salesforce.com by the end of October. "Increasingly, large enterprises are embracing on-demand computing, and salesforce.com has the platform that can meet their demands," Freeland said in a statement released to the press. "I believe salesforce.com is in a unique position to be the market leader as this trend accelerates, and I'm excited to be part of the team making this happen."

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David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles by David Sims, please visit:
http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100005&nm=David%20Sims

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