Cisco Gets Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff On Board

Marc Benioff, the social-obsessed CEO and co-founder of Salesforce.com, has joined the board of directors at networking giant Cisco.

Benioff joins a board of big names from the IT world, including two former Yahoo chiefs in the form of Jerry Yang and Carol Bartz, who was fired as Yahoo CEO last year. Former Vodafone chief Arun Sarin also sits on the board.

“Marc has changed the face of technology through his bold ideas around cloud computing and the social enterprise,” said John Chambers, Cisco chairman and CEO.

An Oracle incoming?

Benioff, who also spent 13 years at Oracle, is most likely being brought into the Cisco fold for cloudy reasons, given Salesforce.com was one of the pioneers of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) revolution. Cisco is pushing to be the networking leader for cloud environments and the segment is a major area of focus for Chambers, as he looks to fix a company that was in something of a morass in 2011.

Chambers admitted in April last year that Cisco needed radical changes if it was to restore its credibility, after repeatedly failing to meet expectations in its financial results. In a leaked email to staff, he warned that job losses were coming, which they subsequently did.

They have continued into 2012 and last month, it emerged 1300 more staff were to lose their jobs. Since the middle of 2011, nine percent of Cisco’s workforce has been laid off.

Benioff should also help the company focus on the enterprise market, away from dalliances in the consumer space, which analysts believed hit the firm hard. It has ditched a number of consumer-focused products over the last year, including the Flip camera range.

The Salesforce.com chief was joined by Kristina Johnson, CEO of Enduring Hydro and former under secretary of energy at the US Department of Energy, in becoming part of the board.

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