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 :-)