Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce.com, has a knack for trend-spotting. He's also a born marketer, with an uncanny ability to draw attention to subjects near and dear to him, of which there are many. He was among the first to foresee large software programs moving to the "cloud"-a concept he played a large role in popularizing-referring to inexpensively rented software sitting remotely on a network rather than on its owner's computer. He was a heavy user of social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter well before other executives recognized their business potential. And from the founding days of Salesforce.com 16 years ago, Benioff, 50, committed himself, his company, and his employees to charitable work, making him a role model for other businesspeople. In two interviews conducted in January-first at a dinner hosted by Fortune during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and then a few days later at his San Francisco home-Benioff opened up about a variety of topics, including how data science will affect everyone's business, where his ideas come from, why security should be companies' top priority (above even customer-service software), and how he is working with Microsoft's new CEO, Satya Nadella. Edited excerpts.
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