Benioff touts big numbers for Salesforce and Force’s Cloud movement, but will developers fawn over or flag what some call just one more proprietary code?

SAN FRANCISCO—After outlining his company’s concept of exactly what software as a service means to Salesforce.com—a multitenant architecture and subscription-based services—CEO Marc Benioff dazzled the audience of mostly developers at the company’s Tour de Force campaign kickoff Jan. 17 with a dizzying array of statistics.

Throughout his keynote address Benioff ticked off Salesforce.com milestones—impressive by any standard for a 9-year-old company:

• 24 major releases in the last eight years; in excess of a billion dollars in revenue by the next fiscal year
• 38,000 customers; one million subscribers
• 130 million transactions a day at the average speed of 2.5 milliseconds
• 160,000 SQL statements every second
• 24 billion API calls (that’s customer’s computers accessing Salesforce.com’s computers 1.6 billion times a month)
• 79,000 workflow rules written
• 1.6 million lines of Apex code written. And it’s only been in production for six months.

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