Salesforce Offerings

What is Salesforce? What does it offer? Why have close to a hundred thousand organizations cutting across industries chosen it? How does it add value to the biggest businesses and the smallest players around the world at the same time? What has earned it a mile long Awards list  which just keeps growing year after year? How does Salesforce do it? What lies behind all this?

Vision and innovation. (Or, if I may say, innovision!)

From its humble beginning about a decade ago in an industry dominated by big players, Salesforce has evolved through its disruptive innovations to be an industry leader. Its innovation DNA is pushing the frontiers of Social CRM today leading towards a place no one has ever gone before, like it did during its pioneering Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) days.

Here in a nutshell are Salesforce.com’s product dimensions and offerings which have defined and are  redefining the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Cloud Computing landscapes.

 

 

Salesforce Offerings

 

Sales:

• Sales Cloud: Salesforce.com’s flagship product and the world’s #1 sales application. Gartner positions Salesforce as #1 in Sales Force Automation (SFA) in its 2010 Magic Quadrant for SFA.
• Jigsaw: The largest contact database in the cloud (with 26 million highly accurate B2B contacts) and a data-cleaning specialist.

Service:

• Service Cloud: A modern customer service platform, packs in features to provide faster, more responsive service across all channels (call center, social channels, etc).
• Remedyforce: Cloud-based, streamlined, fast IT help desk support. At lower costs without sacrificing quality.

Social:

• Chatter: Your company’s own private and secure social network for more efficiency and closer collaboration. Included Free for all Salesforce customers.
• Radian6: A "complete platform to listen, measure and engage with your customers across the entire social web." This is the future!

Apps:

• Force.com: 100% cloud-based application development platform (requires no hardware or software) for business apps. New apps are getting built every day (200,000+ apps at last count).
• Database.com: The enterprise cloud database open to any developer on any platform. The same database used by Salesforce.com and its more than 97,700 customer businesses.
• Heroku: Immensely popular online Ruby on Rails cloud Platform as a Service.

In addition to the above, Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, the world’s first and largest cloud computing marketplace for business applications offers access to a wealth of cloud apps developed by a thriving community of Force.com developers and an opportunity to showcase your own.

 

Who is Using Salesforce?

Salesforce.com is the acknowledged market leader in cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. Salesforce.com’s net paying customer base rose to 97,700 according to the latest Salesforce.com Q1FY12 Financial Results.

The beauty of Salesforce.com’s SaaS CRM is that it caters to businesses of all sizes: enterprise, medium, and small.

Salesforce Enterprise Customers

Google, Dell, Toyota, Canon, Lenovo, Siemens, Qualcomm, Starbucks, Cisco, ... Enterprise customers of Salesforce.com include many of the biggest names in world business. Here is a small sample of Salesforce.com’s enterprise clientele: 

Salesforce Mid-sized Customers

LinkedIn, LogMeIn, Nikon, Karl Strauss, WebTrends, ADT,  etc are some of the mid-sized customers of Salesforce.com:

Salesforce Small-Business Customers

The cloud-based, on-demand CRM solutions model has resulted in levelling of the playing field for  small businesses, which was historically skewed in favour of big players. Many small businesses are relishing the flexibility offered by the cloud model and Salesforce.com’s small business clientele include many names including Travelex, Mashable, DemandBase, ScholarBuys, OneLogin, etc:

For a comprehensive list of Salesforce.com customers, you may want to visit: Salesforce.com Customer Index & Salesforce.com Customer Showcase. In a future post, we would take a look at the rate at which Salesforce.com’s customer base has grown over its 12-year history and the forecast for the road ahead.

Gartner’s “Sales Force Automation” Report 2010: Salesforce.com in “Leaders” Quadrant

Gartner, Inc. is one of the most popular information technology research and advisory firms in the world. Gartner’s Magic Quadrants provide positioning information about technology players within a specific market and are used by many customers as a first step to understanding the market landscape before making decisions on technology investments.

Salesforce.com is positioned in the “Leaders” quadrant in Gartners’s 2010 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation. Gartner rates vendors along “Completeness of Vision” and “Ability to Execute” parameters which themselves are composites of various other evaluation criteria. Salesforce.com Sales Force Automation is seen to be ahead of the competition along both the parameters.

 

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation 2010

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report explains “Leaders” in Sales Force Automation context thus:

Leaders demonstrate a market-defining vision of how technology can help the top sales executives achieve business objectives. Leaders have the ability to execute against that vision through products, services and demonstrated solid business results in the form of revenue and earnings. Leaders have significant successful customer deployments in North America, EMEA and Asia/Pacific in a wide variety of vertical industries with multiple proof points above 500 users.

Please note that Sales Force Automation is one of the forms (the core) of operational CRM, though it is frequently used interchangeably with CRM itself.

 

About Salesforce.com

Long long ago -- well, actually, in 1999, but ain’t a digital decade like aeons? -- a company was born: Salesforce.com! In an innovative tour de force, Salesforce.com has grown into a $1.6 billion business and captured more than half of the market for software-as-a-service CRM applications. 

Salesforce.com: Software as a Service

Here are some key facts about Salesforce.com:

• Founded: March 1999 , California.
• Founders:  Marc Benioff (Chairman &CEO) Parker Harris (Exec.VP, Technology).
• Type of business entity:  Public (NYSE: CRM).
• Website: http://www.salesforce.com/
• #1 Web CRM provider.
• #1 in Sales Force Automation. (Gartner: Magic Quadrant for SFA, 2010).
• #4 fastest-growing company (Fortune Magazine, 2010).
• #10 in "Best Places to Work" in IT (Computerworld, 2010).
• 50%+ market for enterprise cloud computing applications.
• Revenue:  1st enterprise cloud computing company to exceed $2.0 billion annual revenue run rate (Salesforce.com Q1FY12 Financial Results).
• Employees:  Approx. 6000.
• Customers: 97,700+
• Force.com Developers: 310,000+
• Custom apps built on Force.com platform: 200,000+
• Caters to: Businesses of all sizes (small, medium, enterprise).
• Awards: Galore!
• CRM Magazine’s 2010 Market Awards:
• Enterprise Suite CRM (2009, 2010)
• Midmarket Suite CRM (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010)
• Small Business Suite CRM (2007, 2009, 2010)
• Sales Force Automation (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010)

By the way, 1999 was also the year in which my company, Mindfire Solutions, was born :-)