Salesforce.com

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Salesforce.com
Image:Salesforce_logo.gif
Type of Company Public
Founded California 1999
Headquarters San Francisco, California
Key people Marc Benioff
Revenue $309.857 million USD (2005)
Operating income $20.102 million USD (2005)
Net income $29.508 million USD (2005)
Employees 1300+
Website www.salesforce.com
*Figures as of January 2006.[1]

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) is an on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution vendor.

The company was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff. In June 2004, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Salesforce.com is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with regional headquarters in Dublin (covering Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Singapore (covering Asia Pacific less Japan), and Tokyo (covering Japan). Other major offices are in Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, and San Mateo, California. Salesforce.com has its services translated into 12 different languages and currently has 27,100 customers and 556,000 subscribers.

Contents

[edit] Awards

The company has received industry recognition for its application suite, including:

  • 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 Interaction Solutions, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006)
  • Top 100 Innovators Award (Business Week, 2006)
  • Innovation Award (AMR Research, 2005)
  • Webby Business Award (2003), and
  • CODIE Award for Best CRM (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006), others.

[edit] App Exchange

Launched in 2005, App Exchange is a way for external developers to create add-on applications that will link into the main Salesforce.com system. Typical applications would include things like email marketing tools, sales analysis tools, and finance tools. Currently there are over 400 applications available. Developers can sell/distribute their applications through the App Exchange website (http://www.appexchange.com).

The App Exchange platform also allows current Salesforce.com (Enterprise and Unlimited Edition) customers to develop their own in-house applications on top of Saleforce.com's hosted platform.

Strategically, App Exchange represents Salesforce.com's branching out from a position as a CRM only company to being a provider of an application platform for all types of on demand solutions, adding value as a platform company and leveraging the efforts of numerous partners in the App Exchange eco-system. Salesforce.com's latest move in the platform direction is through their proprietary platform, Apex (see below).

[edit] Apex

Launched in October 2006, Apex is an on demand programming language and platform, and represents a new tool for developers interested in building business applications. Apex application can be packaged and shared through the AppExchange directory. (http://www.salesforce.com/landing/apex.jsp)

Apex, although only announced, hopes to provide applications built for it with basic SaaS tenets, thereby empowering developers with the benefits of SaaS without requiring that they participate in defining those benefits. Although this is commendable, Apex has been met with apprehension by some because of its supposed highly proprietary design[2], even being met by a mock protest staged by SugarCRM employees at Apex's launch[3].

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ BBC News-Business, 24 February 2006.
  2. ^ Salesforce.com’s Apex: Benioff’s Handcuffs for On Demand, 16 October 2006
  3. ^ SugarCRM pickets Dreamforce 2006 at Apex Announcement, 16 October 2006

[edit] External links

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