UPDATED 17:06 EDT / OCTOBER 12 2011

NEWS

Benchmark, Yammer Poach Executives from Salesforce.com

Today TechCrunch reported that former Salesforce.com CTO Craig Weissman is joining Benchmark Capital as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence. Meanwhile, Yammer announced that former Salesforce.com VP of Vertical Sales David Obrand is joining Yammer as VP of Global Sales.

Obrand is a big score for Yammer, which is trying to sell into companies of all sizes and Obrand spent nearly 10 years selling Salesforce.coms’ software-as-a-service. He has a strong background in enterprise sales, having worked for Promptu Corporation, Sagent Technology and Siebel Systems before Salesforce.com.

Weissman worked on engineering many major initiatives at Salesforce.com, including Force.com, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Database.com and Chatter. He is said to be focusing on big data for the enterprise at Benchmark. In addition to assisting Benchmark’s portfolio of companies use data more strategically, it sounds as though Weissman is expected to found a new company of his own.

The announcement of Weissman and Obrand’s new positions follows the announcement that former Salesforce.com Chatter creator Chuck Ganapathi joined Accel Partners as an Executive-in-Residence in August.

Services Angle

As Salesforce.com continues to grow it’s only natural to expect many of its staffers to seek positions at growing companies like Yammer, start new companies and/or get into the VC game. It shouldn’t reflect poorly on Salesforce.com – it’s just a logical outcome of growth.


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