Saleforce.com founder Marc Benioff told the Structure 09 conference that technology was inevitably becoming real-time.

“Any concept of batch or delay in development or execution, I think, will not be tolerated by customers anymore. Even in development, customers are demanding now that they want to be able to build in that sandbox and deploy immediately, instantly, no delay.”

According to the Digital Beat blog Benioff warned that many companies hadn’t understood that this was where the web was heading.

“I think corporations have to step it up in terms of integrating with these real-time systems,” he said.

UPDATE: One of my colleagues pointed out to me Techcrunch’s analysis of the reporting around Michael Jackson’s sad death as another example of the real-time trend.