Parker Harris

“Wearable technology is not just for consumers. It creates a tremendous opportunity for businesses, too.”

“I grew up in North Carolina. My father was a salesperson; he sold textiles.”

“Many people have said we just need to add more products. Look at Oracle, look at SAP. Add ERP and inventory or compensation. Add all this stuff. What we realized is we're the customer company. We're the front office solution, and our customers would be really upset if we just added a whole bunch of stuff and lost focus.”

“My favourite moments at Dreamforce are when people come up and thank me randomly. It's a selfish time for me, as I get lots of positive feedback.”

“We actually went public partly because we wanted companies to realise we were not going away.”

“Where I'm focused now is how I get more women leaders. We decided not to just look outside the company for great women to hire, but to help women rise up through the ranks internally.”

“All business leaders need to be technologists, as every industry now has a Netflix or an Uber on the horizon, threatening to upend business as usual. Apps are driving this disruption, and every enterprise needs to become an app company.”

“I've used the term 'Facebook for the enterprise,' and everyone goes, 'We don't want Facebook in the enterprise,' because it conjures up that it's not secure, and it's going to be a waste of time. All these things are true, which is why Facebook is not in the enterprise.”

“We're paying a lot of attention to the iPad. But we're expanding that to a tablet focus.”

“I grew up loving computers and math, actually. I also loved English literature and French, but I became obsessed with computers when the Apple II was coming out.”

“People think floating should be the easiest and happiest time for a company, but it's actually really hard. We were meant to think we'd won - we'd gone public and could go on to new things. But we were only just getting started.”

“One of our first jobs was at Saba Software. We were helping them build their products for the cloud. We wanted to build our own product and move away from consulting. We were looking for a change. The CEO of Saba introduced me to Marc Benioff.”

“I was lucky enough to go see Steve Jobs with Marc Benioff. We were talking about the iPad, and one of the things Jobs said - and it was a little self-serving - was go and build your iPad app, and that is going to change the way you think about your online app, and you will go back, and you will redo your online app. I believe that.”

“I still believe heavily that we have to be careful about having this ego and hubris as a successful corporation, that we should do it all. Because then I think we start to fail our customers and we're too focused on taking over the world.”

“Diving into data has never been more critical for businesses in order to make fast, accurate decisions about customer behaviors and needs and drive holistic business knowledge.”

“I think the legacy is really the company that we built. That's what makes me happy. I'm a very simple person, so that's all I really need.”

“Businesses can't afford to react to what their customers want; they need to anticipate their needs.”

“Social computing is doing what agile methodology is doing to our process - it's breaking down our visibility.”

“When we started, we thought about the scale of the Internet - if everyone was using the service at the same time, what would that look like?”

“I remember my school had some of the first Apple IIs in North Carolina. I remember, when I first started using them, we were using a cassette tape to store programs because we didn't have floppy disk drives.”