Salesforce Success Story
Salesforce Success story is a provider of enterprise software, delivered through the cloud, with a focus on customer relationship management that helps businesses connect with and get more information about their customer base. The Company focuses on cloud, mobile, social, Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence technologies.
Salesforce – Company Highlights
- Startup Name-Salesforce
- Headquarters-Salesforce Tower, San Francisco, California, U.S.
- Industry-Cloud Computing, Software
- Founded-February 3, 1999
- Founders-Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez
- Area Served-Worldwide
- Website-www.salesforce.com
Salesforce – About and How it Works?
Salesforce.com, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management service that helps businesses connect with and get more information about their customer base.
The company is a service as a software (SaaS) – which means it uses a cloud-computing, software distribution model that hosts applications and makes them available online. Salesforce hosts numerous different cloud platforms that allow companies to interact with different data and service their customers in various capacities.
Salesforce – Recent News
As of December 2020, Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, announced that they will collaborate to help Gavi manage critical information to equitably distribute approximately two billion COVID-19 vaccines to 190 countries by the end of 2021.
Fair, rapid and equitable access to vaccines is critical to ending the global pandemic. Public-private partnerships, such as Gavi, which are focused on getting vaccines to some of the world’s poorest countries, need to be armed with data and technology to facilitate distribution at scale.
Salesforce – Logo and its Meaning
The Salesforce logotype is based on a metaphor: the cloud symbolizes the cloud architecture on which the service is built.
Salesforce – Founder and History
The Salesforce founding date goes back to February 3, 1999 when former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, together with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez as a software as a service (SaaS) company, and was launched publicly between September and November 1999.
In June 2004, the company had its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol CRM and raised US$110 million. Early investors include Larry Ellison, Magdalena Yesil, Halsey Minor, Stewart Henderson, Mark Iscaro, and Igor Sill, a founding member of Geneva Venture Partners.
Salesforce – Mission
Salesforce’s mission statement says, “Our mission is to help our customers transform themselves into customer companies by empowering them to connect with their customers in entirely new ways. To deliver our customers a carbon neutral cloud we went even further offsetting emissions throughout our data center supply chain.”
Salesforce – Business Model
Salesforce is a leading provider of enterprise software, delivered through the cloud, with a focus on customer relationship management, or CRM. Salesforce introduced a first CRM solution in 2000.
The key to the successful Salesforce business model is based on the fact that service offerings can be deployed rapidly, configured easily and integrated with other platforms and enterprise applications, or apps. While this might seem trivial today, it wasn’t back in the 2000s. CRM services often required high upfront costs together with expensive services hard to run and maintain. Salesforce changed all that.
Salesforce – Revenue and Growth
The Salesforce revenue generation strategy is based on a subscription-based cloud service. Over 92% of Salesforce revenues come from four categories of cloud Customer Relationship Management services, that span from the sales cloud to marketing cloud.
The remaining revenues are primarily driven by professional services. In 2017 the company generated $8.39 billion in revenues. Salesforce, Inc revenue for the twelve months ending October 31, 2020 was $20.286B, a 27.99% increase year-over-year.
Salesforce – Funding and Investors
Salesforce has raised a total of $65.4M in funding over 6 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Jan 1, 2003 from a Venture – Series Unknown round. Salesforce is funded by 21 investors. Emergence and New Enterprise Associates are the most recent investors.
Salesforce – Investments
The number of Salesforce investments stands at 38. Their most recent investment was on Feb 20, 2020, when Resily raised ¥500M.
Salesforce – Acquisitions
Salesforce has acquired 66 organizations. Their most recent acquisition was Slack on Dec 1, 2020. They acquired Slack for $27.7B.
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Salesforce – Competitors
Salesforce’s competitors are: Zendesk, Pega Systems, Oracle, Microsoft Dyamics, SAP, Appian, ServiceNow, Jira Software etc.
Salesforce – Challenges Faced
Subject to a phishing attack – In November 2007 a successful phishing attack on a Salesforce employee compromised contact information on a number of Salesforce customers, which was then used to send highly targeted phishing emails.
Tax avoidance- In December 2019, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that Salesforce was one of 91 companies who “paid an effective federal tax rate of 0% or less” in 2018, as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. Their findings were published in a report based on the 379 Fortune 500 companies that declared a profit in 2018.
Salesforce – Future Plans
CRM market potential is projected to grow annually at 12% to reach $82B by the year 2025.
Salesforce recently announced a goal of reaching $60B in revenue by the year 2034.
Salesforce is expected to increase its workforce from around 30000employeesto around 45000 by the year 2022.
Salesforce – FAQs
What does Salesforce do?
Salesforce is a provider of enterprise software, delivered through the cloud, with a focus on customer relationship management that helps businesses connect with and get more information about their customer base.
What companies do Salesforce compete with ?
Salesforce’s competitors areZendesk, Pega Systems, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, Appian, ServiceNow, Jira Software etc.
How does Salesforce make money?
Salesforce main revenue generation strategy is based on a subscription-based cloud service. Over 92% of Salesforce revenues come from four categories of cloud CRM (Customer Relationship Management) services, that span from the sales cloud to marketing cloud