Salesforce.com Inc. is a global enterprise software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Though best known for its customer relationship management (CRM) product, Salesforce has also expanded into the "social enterprise arena" through acquisitions. It is currently ranked the most innovative company in America by Forbes magazine, as well as number 27 in Fortune's magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2012. As of April 2013, the company is ranked sixth in providing services in marketing and customer service automation.

 

It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the S&P 500 index.

 

History

Origins

The company was founded in March 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez as a company specializing in software as a service (SaaS). Harris, Moellenhoff and Dominguez, three software developers previously at Clarify, wrote the initial sales automation software.

In June 2004, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol CRM, raising US$110 million. Marc Benioff and Magdalena Yesil were the initial basic connection investors and board members. Other early investors include Larry Ellison, Halsey Minor, Stewart Henderson, Mark Iscaro, and Igor Sill of Geneva Venture Partners.

 

Acquisitions

The following is a list of acquisitions by salesforce.com:

• Sendia (April 2006) for US$15 million in cash – now Force.com Mobile

• Kieden (August 2006) – now Salesforce for Google AdWords

• Kenlet (January 2007) – Original product CrispyNews used at Salesforce IdeaExchange and Dell IdeaStorm. Now relaunched as Salesforce Ideas.

• Koral (March 2007) – now Salesforce Content

• Instranet (August 2008) – now re-branded to Salesforce Knowledge

• GroupSwim (December 2009) – now part of Salesforce Chatter

• Informavores (December 2009) – now re-branded to Visual Workflow

• Jigsaw Data Corp. (April 2010)  - now known as Data.com

• Sitemasher (June 2010) - now known as site.com

• Navajo Security (August 2011) 

• Activa Live Chat (September 2010) - Now known as Salesforce Live Agent 

• Heroku (December 2010) 

• Etacts (December 2010) 

• Dimdim (January 2011) 

• Manymoon (February 2011) - Now known as Do.com 

• Radian6 (March 2011) 

• Assistly (September 21, 2011) - now known as Desk.com 

• Model Metrics (November 2011) 

• Rypple (December 2011)  - Now known as Work.com

• Stypi (May 2012) 

• Buddy Media (May 2012) for US$689 million 

• ChoicePass (June 2012) 

• Thinkfuse (June 2012) 

• GoInstant (July 2012) for US$70 million 

 

Operations

Current status

Salesforce.com is headquartered in San Francisco, with regional headquarters in Morges, Switzerland (covering Europe, Middle East, and Africa, Singapore), India (covering Asia Pacific minus Japan), and Tokyo (covering Japan). Other major offices are in Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, Dublin, Hyderabad and San Mateo, California. Salesforce.com has its services translated into 16  different languages and as of July 31, 2011, has 104,000[32] customers and over 2,100,000 subscribers. 

Standard & Poor's included Salesforce.com, at the same time as Fastenal, into the S&P 500 index in September 2008, following the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their removal from the index. Salesforce.com was recognized as one of Fortune's 100 best companies to work for in 2012 at rank #27, up from the 52nd spot in 2011. 

 

Criticisms

In November 2007, a successful phishing attack compromised contact information on a number of salesforce.com customers, which was then used to send highly targeted phishing emails to salesforce.com users. The phishing breach was cited as an example of why the CRM industry needs greater security for users against such threats as spam.

 

Foundation

The Salesforce.com Foundation donates 1% of the company's resources (defined as profit, equity and employee time) to support organizations that are working to "make the world a better place." It was officially launched at an event featuring former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in 2000, less than a year after the company’s formation. Salesforce provides a full-featured ten-seat user license available to nearly all United States 501c3 non-profit organizations or overseas equivalents. Additional licenses are deeply discounted for public interest groups. Salesforce.com employs support personnel specific to their (mostly non-paying) non-profit users. Buying a comparable Salesforce.com license commercially would cost around $15,000 a year.

Products and services

Customer Relationship Management

Salesforce.com's CRM solution is broken down into several broad categories: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud (including Jigsaw), Collaboration Cloud (including Chatter) and Custom Cloud (including Force.com).

 

The Sales Cloud

The Sales Cloud includes a real-time sales collaborative tool called Chatter, provides sales representatives with a customer profile and account history, allows the user to manage marketing campaign spending and performance across a variety of channels from a single application, tracks opportunity-related data including milestones, decision makers, customer communications, and other information unique to the company's sales process. Automatic email reminders can be scheduled to keep teams up to date.

 

Other activities on the Salesforce cloud include using the Jigsaw business data to access business contacts, and designing and automating processes in Salesforce CRM.

 

The Service Cloud

The Service Cloud provides companies with a call center-like view that enables them to create and track cases coming in, and automatically route and escalate what’s important. The Salesforce CRM-powered customer portal provides customers the ability to track their own cases, includes a social networking plug-in that enables the user to join the conversation about their company on social networking websites, provides analytical tools and other services including email, chat, Google search, and access to customers' entitlement and contracts.

 

Force.com platform

Salesforce.com's platform as a service (PaaS) product is known as Force.com. The Force.com platform allows external developers to create add-on applications that integrate into the main salesforce.com application and are hosted on salesforce.com's infrastructure.

 

These applications are built using Apex (a proprietary Java-like programming language for Force.com) and Visualforce (an XML-like syntax for building user interfaces in HTML or Flex).

 

Chatter

Chatter, released in June 2010, is a real-time collaboration platform for users. The service sends information proactively via a real-time news stream. Users can follow coworkers and data to receive broadcast updates about project and customer status. Users can also form groups and post messages on each other's profiles to collaborate on projects.

 

Work.com

Work.com, previously Rypple, is a social performance management platform. It is marketed as a solution for sales performance, customer service, marketing, and as a service that can be employed by human resource departments for broad use across an organization. Work.com service facilitates collaboration and shared contribution to individual, team, and organizational goals, and facilitates the exchange of feedback anonymously and publicly between peers and managers. Rypple was acquired by salesforce.com in 2011 and was re-branded as Work.com in September 2012.

 

AppExchange

Launched in 2005, AppExchange is a marketplace for cloud computing Web application built for the Salesforce.com community and delivered by partners or by third-party developers, which users can purchase and add to their Salesforce.com environment. As of April 2012, there are over 1,400 applications available from over 450 independent software vendors. All salesforce.com partners can distribute applications and solutions on AppExchange. Applications created on the Force.com platform are installed by Salesforce.com customers.

 

Configuration

Salesforce users can configure their CRM application. In the system, there are tabs such as "Contacts," "Reports," and "Accounts." Each tab contains associated information. For example, "Contacts" has standard fields like First Name, Last Name, and Email. Configuration can be done on each tab by adding user-defined custom fields.

 

Configuration can also be done at the "platform" level by adding configured applications to a Salesforce instance, that is adding sets of customized / novel tabs for specific vertical- or function-level (Finance, Human Resources, etc.) features.

 

Web services

In addition to the web interface, salesforce.com offers a SOAP/REST Web service API that enables integration with other systems.

 

Certifications

Individuals who work with Salesforce.com can get certified in 4 main certification paths:

 

• Administrators - Administrators and Advanced Administrators

• Developers - Developers and Advanced Developers

• Implementation Experts - Sales Cloud Consultants and Service Cloud Consultants

• Architects - Technical Architects

In order to obtain Implementation Experts and Architects certifications the Administrators and Developers certifications are prerequisites, respectively.