Salesforce.com

History

The company was founded in 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 consulting firm Left Coast Software, were introduced to Benioff through friend and former Oracle colleague Bobby Yazdani. Harris and team wrote the initial sales automation software, which launched to its first customers in the fall of 1999.

In June 2004 the company's initial public offering was listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol CRM and raised US$110 million. Early investors include Magdalena Yesil, Larry Ellison, Halsey Minor, Stewart Henderson, Mark Iscaro, and Igor Sill of Geneva Venture Partners, as well as Nancy Pelosi.

In October 2014, Salesforce announced the development of its Customer Success Platform to tie together Salesforce's services, including sales, service, marketing, analytics, community, and mobile apps.

Services

Salesforce.com's customer relationship management (CRM) service is broken down into several broad categories: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud (including Jigsaw), Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud (including Chatter), Analytics Cloud, App Cloud, and IoT with over 100,000 customers.

Salesforce

Salesforce is the primary enterprise offering within the Salesforce1 Platform. It provides companies with an interface for case management and task management, and a system for automatically routing and escalating important events. The Salesforce 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 alert, Google search, and access to customers' entitlement and contracts.

Force.com

Force.com is a platform as a service (PaaS) that allows developers to create multitenant (single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants) add-on applications that integrate into the main Salesforce.com application. Force.com applications are hosted on Salesforce.com's infrastructure.

Force.com applications are built using Apex (a proprietary Java-like programming language for Force.com) and Visualforce (an XML syntax typically used to generate HTML). The Force.com platform receives three complete releases a year. As the platform is provided as a service to its developers, every single development instance also receives all these updates.

In the Spring 2015 release a new framework for building user interfaces - Lightning Components - was introduced in beta. Lightning components are built using the open-source Aura Framework but with support for Apex as the server-side language instead of Aura's Javascript dependency. This has been described as an alternative to, not necessarily a replacement for, Visualforce pages.

According to a September, 2009 Gartner Group report, Force.com had over 1,000 customer accounts. As of 2013, the Force.com platform has 1.4 million registered developers.

Work.com

Work.com, previously Rypple, is a social performance management platform that helps managers and employees improve work performance through continuous coaching, real-time feedback, and recognition. It is marketed as a solution for sales performance, customer service, marketing, and as a service that can be employed by human resource departments.

History

Work.com, then known as "Rypple", was founded by Daniel Debow and David Stein, who wanted to create a simple way of asking for feedback anonymously at work. The company was formed in May 2008 and their client list included Mozilla, Facebook, LinkedIn and the Gilt Groupe. Rypple "'reverses the onus on the demand for more feedback' by getting employees to build and manage their own coaching networks".

In September 2011, Rypple announced that they had hired Bohdan Zabawskyj as its Chief Technology Officer.

In 2011, Rypple developed a more formalized management methodology called OKR ("Objectives and Key Results") for Spotify. Rypple also partnered with Facebook to create "Loops", short for "feedback loops", which gathers feedback from co-workers, "thank you's", progress against goals, and coaching from supervisors into one channel for a "rich, robust, continuous performance review".

In December 2011, Salesforce.com announced that they would acquire Rypple. The transaction was completed in 2012 and Rypple was rebranded as Work.com in September 2012.

Data.com

Data.com, previously known as Jigsaw, is a cloud-based automated system for acquiring and managing CRM records within a user's Salesforce.com account.

Data.com is also an online business directory of companies and business professionals that is built, maintained and accessed by a worldwide community of over a million subscribers. A large database allows members to exchange and share the business information of more than 29 million contacts from over 4 million companies. This information consists of what is commonly found on a business card.

Data.com utilizes a user-generated database that's continually updated by its members. Data.com's contacts act as a virtual business card, offering name, title, postal and email addresses and direct-dial phone numbers for individual contacts.

Desk.com

Desk.com, previously known as Assistly, is a cloud-based helpdesk system for interacting with customers and solving customer issues. Desk.com includes the following features:

Do.com

Do.com was a cloud-based task management system for small groups and businesses, introduced in 2011 and discontinued in 2014. Salesforce did not offer any reason for shutting down the service, however it provided an Export tool to save data entered within the Do.com interface. The Do.com domain was sold to a startup in 2014.

AppExchange

Launched in 2005, the Salesforce AppExchange is an online application marketplace for third-party applications that run on the Force.com platform. Applications are available for free, as well as yearly or monthly subscription models. Applications available range from integrations with Sharepoint to mobile approval management. As of February 2015, it features 2,658 applications which have driven a total of over 2.8 million installs. The "AppExchange" is also a place customers can search for cloud consulting partners to help them implement the technology in their own organisation. Cloud consulting parters for Salesforce include large companies like IBM's "Bluewolf" and Accenture as well as smaller ones like Cloudreach.

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. 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.

Apex

Apex is a proprietary programming language provided by the Force.com platform to developers similar to Java and C#. It is a strongly typed, object-oriented, case-insensitive programming language, following a dot-notation and curly-brackets syntax. Apex can be used to execute programmed functions during most processes on the Force.com platform including custom buttons and links, event handlers on record insertion, update, or deletion, via scheduling, or via the custom controllers of Visualforce pages.

Due to the multitenant nature of the platform, the language has strictly imposed governor limitations to guard against any code monopolizing shared resources. Salesforce provides a series of asynchronous processing methods for Apex to allow developers to produce longer running and more complex Apex code.

Visualforce

Visualforce is the view control technology on the Force.com platform. It is an open/close tag based library with structure and markup very similar to HTML. Visualforce can be used to create entire custom pages inside a Salesforce organisation in conjunction with many other front end technologies, such as HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. One of the key benefits of Visualforce is tight coupling to native features of the platform, such as controller methods and data access, that would not typically be available to other front end technologies.

Lightning

In 2014, Salesforce made public the frontend of its platform, called Lightning. This component based framework is what the Salesforce1 mobile app is built on and customers are now able to build on it as well. Salesforce built on this framework in 2015 by releasing the Lightning Design System, an HTML style framework with default CSS styling built in. This framework allows customers to build their own components to either use in their internal instances or sell on the AppExchange.

One of the new tools released is known as the Salesforce Lightning App Builder for rapid application development of responsive web interfaces. This interface allows for different screens to be put together based on Lightning components. This can be used as layouts for records or specific applications.

Operations

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, Chicago, New York City, London, Sydney, Dublin, Hyderabad, San Mateo, California and Hillsboro, Oregon. Salesforce.com has its services translated into 16 different languages and as of July 31, 2011, had 104,000 customers and over 2.1 million subscribers. Salesforce will be moving its Midwest Regional headquarters to Indianapolis in 2017.

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.

Venture capital fund

The company announced in September 2014 that it had set up a venture capital arm to fund start-ups creating apps primarily for mobile phones.

IT infrastructure

Salesforce.com migrated to Dell servers with AMD processors running Linux from Sun Fire E25K servers with SPARC processors running Solaris in 2008. The company uses the Momentum platform from Message Systems to allow its customers to send large amounts of email without encountering deliverability problems.

In 2012, Salesforce.com announced plans to build a data center in the UK to handle European citizens' personal data.

In 2013, Salesforce.com and Oracle announced a nine year partnership in which Salesforce.com will use Oracle Linux, Oracle Exadata, Oracle Database, and the Java platform to power salesforce.com's applications and SaaS platform.

Salesforce.org (Salesforce Foundation)

Salesforce.org (formerly known as the Salesforce Foundation) is the philanthropic arm of Salesforce.com. Salesforce.org 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. As of March 2014, Salesforce.org supports 20,000+ higher education and non-profit customers, and has donated $53+ million in grants. In addition, as of July 2015, Salesforce employees have collectively donated more than 1,000,000 hours in volunteer labour to thousands of charitable organizations worldwide.

In addition to providing discounted software to non-profits, Salesforce.org also makes Salesforce products available to qualified non-profit / not-for-profit institutions of higher education. The Salesforce Foundation remains a 501(c)(3), now focused on disaster relief.

Salesforce for Outlook

Salesforce.com provides an add-in for Microsoft Outlook called Salesforce for Outlook (SFO). This tool provides an interface for adding both incoming and outgoing emails to the Salesforce system. In 2014 the company issued v2.5 which dropped support for non-Microsoft Exchange Server based email systems. This left the product unusable for customers with non-Microsoft systems such as Post Office Protocol and Gmail. This led to a ferocious online discussion with some users suggesting this was due to a strategic relationship with Microsoft.

Salesforce.com

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

Force.com

Several criticisms of Force.com's integrated development environment and developer friendliness have been made, including lack of support for multiple developers, revision control, speed problems with developing on the cloud, and a failure to properly separate Salesforce.com from Force.com.

Data.com

While the crowd-sourced method of building business contacts has proven popular with recruiters, marketers and sales professionals, it has also raised questions of privacy as most of the site's database is entered without permission from the person being listed. Data.com does, however, make it easy to remove business information on request as noted in December 2009 by TechCrunch. However, recipients of these messages regard it as spam and at least one complaint about receiving more spam after attempting to remove one's address have been noted.

Acquisitions

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

Financials

Dollars in millions