About Salesforce.com

We have been writing a lot about SalesForce.com, and probably will continue doing it. Nevertheless, there still might be some reader that does not know who SalesForce is. So, for the ones that would like to have an overview or just more details, we have prepared this post about SalesForce history, with our personal interpretation.

Salesforce.com was born in 1999, when few persons were thinking that on-demand was really worth something and most of them would laugh about the idea of having a hosted CRM system. Still, some pioneers believed in the on-demand CRM advantages: immediate benefits at reduced risks and costs. Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez grounded this innovative venture in spring 1999.
Marc Benioff, a former Oracle and Apple employee, takes charge as CEO. He started quite early with implementing his ideas about philanthropy: in 2000 the SalesForce Foundation and the 1/1/1 model (one percent of profits, one percent of equity, and one percent of employee hours dedicated to philanthropy) were founded.
The first years were crucial for developing partnerships and strengthening relationships (AOL, Dell, TIBCO, IBM are some actors to be named). Google is one of the early partners that SalesForce.com has on its side, and we are going to see in the following why this is important.
It is interesting to notice that some of the ideas that SalesForce managed to develop lately were already there in the beginning: Force.com is based on an initial project in the early years of SalesForce: Sforce.
2003 is the year when SalesForce’s revenues doubled (for the first time), while it is becoming a recognized figure in the business with various awards. This is also the year of the first Dreamforce event, a yearly tradition continuing today (see Dreamforce 08).
The growth continues in 2004 with new partnerships, clients and employees that chose SalesForce over its competition. Integration and customization developments are brought in to improve the application that is now expanding to various businesses. This is also the year SalesFroce went public (the ticker is CRM!) with an IPO that raised from the proposed 8-9 $ a share to 11$ a share because of the requests. Is this a sign for its future development?
2005 marks the basis for extending the SalesForce platform beyond CRM and encourage the customers to develop applications on this new web platform. Leadership in the CRM on-demand sector becomes clear as SalesForce has nearly eight times as many subscribers as its rival Siebel on-demand. AppExchange – a show case for various applications complementing or going beyond the CRM one - is launched offering new grounds for application customization and extension for SalesForce.com customers. In the beginning, there are 70 new launch applications available for immediate preview (in 2008 it has over 700!). The Salesforce Sandbox is also introduced with the aim of providing customers a replica of their existing Salesforce deployment for streamlining the process of customizing, building and deploying new on-demand applications to enable them to manage and share information on-demand across their entire enterprise.
In 2006 SalesForce.com demonstrates its engagement for transparency and openness with the new trust.salesforce.com - a systems status website giving salesforce.com customers and community access to real-time and historical system performance information and updates, incident reports and maintenance schedules across all its key system components. There is also a new tool for Apex development in Eclipse that provides developers with tools to customize, integrate and build on-demand applications on the platform, while being offline. PartnerForce is also introduced in 2006, a partner relationship management totally integrated with the classic CRM application. Moreover, Salesforce for Google AdWords is launched - it delivers for the first time, an end-to-end, on-demand service that allows companies to create, manage, and measure search engine marketing campaigns, all from directly within Salesforce. By this new functionality, a support for the much market-desired control over marketing spending is provided.
This last step underlines the relationship between SalesForce and Google, not only as business partners but as allies with common interests and strategies, in fact, in 2007 they sign a strategic global alliance. In June 2007, Salesforce.com and Google launched Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords™, which has become a valuable tool for thousands of businesses by encapsulating every element of the customer life-cycle - advertising, lead generation, sales, and customer support - in one solution.
SalesForce carries on the development of its various applications and offers, and awards continue to rain on it. Force.com, the SalesForce platform, now offers global infrastructure and services for database, logic, workflow, integration, user interface, and application exchange. Winter 08 introduces Ideas (customers’ feedback and requirements gathering portal) and Content (content management integrated with the CRM application) as new functionalities.
With almost 5000 clients in 2001, the company reaches 40.000 clients and over 1 million end users in 2008. Moreover, the idea is now evolving: it is not just CRM on-demand in a multi-tenant web-platform, SalesFroce.com is the leader of Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Google and SalesForce.com bring their relationship one step further with the integration of GoogleApps and SalesForce putting the foundations for cloud computing in the business environment.
One observation about SalesForce philanthropy is needed: their 1/1/1 model is growing as SalesForce is thinking of incorporating a “1” for ecology…although we wonder what that means and how they are going to do it.
With this rich, although short, history at its back, we are still guessing where SalesForce.com could eventually arrive.

Here are some of the awards and recognitions Salesforce.com has received:
• Technology of the Year (InfoWorld, 2004, 2005, 2006)
• Editors' Choice Award (PC Magazine, 2002, 2003, 2004)
• Visionary Award (SDForum, 2004)
• Best of the Web (Forbes, 2003)
• CRM Excellence Award (Customer Inter@ction Solutions, 2003, 2004, 2005,
2006)
• Top 100 Innovators Award (BusinessWeek, 2006)
• Innovation Award (AMR Research, 2005)
• CODIE Award for Best CRM (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006)