Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff says hiring former Oracle executive Keith Block moved the corporate “to the subsequent level” in selling to special companies.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff had three goals for his company going into 2013, and on a type of goals — closing more deals with large customers and dealing more closely with systems integrators — Benioff says success could be attributed to the hiring of Keith Block, the previous executive VP of Oracle’s North America sales and consulting organization.

Benioff worked with Block when he, too, was at Oracle, and he had tried to recruit him for no less than 10 years. “But i could not get him until [Oracle President] Mark Hurd relieved him of his duties,” Benioff told a handful of journalists following Wednesday’s Salesforce1 event in Manhattan. “i feel the largest mistake Mark Hurd ever made was letting Keith Block leave Oracle, because he’s probably the highest sales executive the enterprise software industry has ever seen.”

Oracle fired Block in June 2012 after derogatory remarks by the manager emerged within the California trial tied to Oracle’s decision to prevent making software for HP servers using Intel Itanium chips (a call later overturned by court order). In instant messages shared as evidence in the course of the trial, Block said Oracle “bought a dog” when it acquired Sun Microsystems for $7.3 billion and, in another exchange, he slighted Oracle president Mark Hurd for generating “a lot of noise, not much results.”

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Oracle has experienced uneven results since parting ways with Block, missing Wall Street expectations in at the very least three of its last six quarters, though it exceeded expectations in its newest quarter.

Salesforce hired Block in June 2013 as president and vp (with an instantaneous jump to the board of directors). Describing Block as trusted by systems integrators, Benioff said the manager has since “brought in a global-class management team” that has helped Salesforce.com execute on large projects.

One recent direct attract large organizations was Salesforce Superpods, that have been announced in partnership with HP at Dreamforce in November. Superpods are dedicated instances of Salesforce.com application services now available to the company’s largest customers. “It’s in our datacenter, it’s our same software, and it is the same stack, but it’s just that there is just one [large] customer running on that pod,” said Benioff.

Just how big should you be to qualify for a Superpod?

“You must spend greater than $50 million a year with us,” Benioff said. “That’s a tremendous number for many companies, however it seems that various of our customers are in that zone now.”

Thus far HP, which gives the hardware for Superpods, is the only real known customer using the approach. But Benioff said several other customers have an interest in specifying datacenter locations, networks, and the “four or five” other configuration options available.

Benioff’s two other goals for 2013 were to enable customers to run Salesforce entirely using mobile devices and to ramp up Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities. The mobile goal ended in Salesforce1, the company’s “feed-first,” API-rich mobile platform introduced seven weeks ago on the company’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco. Wednesday’s event in Manhattan largely recapitulated the Salesforce1 presentations from Dreamforce.

The marketing goal was fulfilled throughout the $2.5 billion acquisition of ExactTarget, Benioff said. It’s clearly a degree of pride for the administrative that Salesforce has retained many (though not all, he admitted) of the entrepreneurs who founded acquired companies.

“ExactTarget is strategic for us, and [CEO] Scott Dorsey is on my management team and we’re meeting constantly,” Benioff said. “When Oracle bought RightNow, it was not a successful execution because they buried them, they don’t seem to be reporting on the right level, and no-one takes it seriously. We’ll see a similar thing with [Responsys] because it is not strategic to Oracle.”

Benioff’s remarks also ranged over Microsoft — of which he said the pending CEO change can be too little, too late — and his own leadership approach, during which he says he tries to blend happiness, success, and giving back to the sector in the course of the Salesforce Foundation and during personal charities.

But Benioff’s most passionate remarks inevitably got back to his “multidimensional” relationship with Oracle, with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison being an extended-time mentor and friend, and with Salesforce being a “impressive customer” for Oracle because of the ten-year agreement it signed last summer to make use of Oracle’s database and middleware. These warm words aside, Benioff’s more heated remarks make it clear that both companies also remain fierce competitors.

Doug Henschen is executive editor of InformationWeek, where he covers the intersection of enterprise applications with information management, business intelligence, big data, and analytics. He previously served as editor-in-chief of Intelligent Enterprise, editor-in-chief of Transform magazine, and executive editor at DM News.

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