Salesforce.com
Encyclopedia
Salesforce.com is an enterprise cloud computing
company headquartered in San Francisco that distributes business software
on a subscription basis. Salesforce.com hosts
the applications off-site
. It is best known for its Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) products and, through acquisition, has expanded into the "social enterprise arena."
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
, Mark Iscaro, and Igor Sill of Geneva Venture Partners.
(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 16 different languages and currently has 82,400 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 Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and their removal from the index.
In January 2011, salesforce.com was recognized as one of Fortune's
100 best companies to work for in 2011, receiving the 52nd spot.
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
.
The Salesforce.com Foundation was officially launched at an event featuring former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, less than a year after the company’s formation.
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
).
Other activities can be done on the Salesforce cloud. These include using the Jigsaw business data to access over 20 million complete and current business contacts from right inside Salesforce CRM, and designing and automating any process in Salesforce CRM.
product is known as the Force.com platform. The 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 the Force.com platform) and Visualforce (an XML-like syntax for building user interfaces in HTML, Ajax
or Flex
).
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 October 2010, there are over 900 applications available from over 450 independent software vendors.
All salesforce.com partners can distribute applications and solutions on the AppExchange. Applications created on the Force.com platform are installed by salesforce.com customers.
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 service
API that enables integration with other systems.
, iPhone
, and Windows Mobile
devices. In January 2010, salesforce.com started to promote the use of 2D Barcodes (SPARQCode
) for exporting contact information to mobile handsets.
Also, end user languages available are Hungarian, Czech, Turkish, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian.
-like programming language and programming platform), VisualForce (a user interface library), and S-controls (Salesforce widgets – these are predominantly based on JavaScript
). S-controls are deprecated as of March 2010. It is possible to edit and use existing controls, but no new ones can be created.
. The last major event dreamforce was held from 30th August to 2 September 2011 in San Francisco.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....
company headquartered in San Francisco that distributes business software
Business software
This article is about software made for business, if you were looking for the business of selling software, see Software business.Business software is generally any software program that helps a business increase productivity or measure their productivity...
on a subscription basis. Salesforce.com hosts
Shared web hosting service
A shared web hosting service or virtual hosting service or derive host refers to a web hosting service where many websites reside on one web server connected to the Internet. Each site "sits" on its own partition, or section/place on the server, to keep it separate from other sites...
the applications off-site
Off-site Data Protection
In computing, off-site data protection, or vaulting, is the strategy of sending critical data out of the main location as part of a disaster recovery plan. Data is usually transported off-site using removable storage media such as magnetic tape or optical storage...
. It is best known for its Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management
Customer relationship management is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,...
(CRM) products and, through acquisition, has expanded into the "social enterprise arena."
Origins
Salesforce.com was founded in March 1999 by former OracleOracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation that specializes in developing and marketing hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly database management systems...
executive Marc Benioff
Marc Benioff
Marc Russell Benioff is Chairman & CEO of salesforce.com, a cloud computing company.Benioff started salesforce.com in March 1999 in a rented San Francisco apartment and defined its mission as The End of Software...
, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez as a company specializing in software as a service
Software as a Service
Software as a service , sometimes referred to as "on-demand software," is a software delivery model in which software and its associated data are hosted centrally and are typically accessed by users using a thin client, normally using a web browser over the Internet.SaaS has become a common...
(SaaS). Harris, Moellenhoff and Dominguez, three software developers previously at Clarify, wrote the initial sales automation software.
In June 2004, the company went public
Initial public offering
An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...
on the New York Stock Exchange
New York Stock Exchange
The New York Stock Exchange is a stock exchange located at 11 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City, USA. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed companies at 13.39 trillion as of Dec 2010...
under the stock symbol CRM, raising US$110 million. Marc Benioff
Marc Benioff
Marc Russell Benioff is Chairman & CEO of salesforce.com, a cloud computing company.Benioff started salesforce.com in March 1999 in a rented San Francisco apartment and defined its mission as The End of Software...
and Magdalena Yesil were the initial basic connection investors and board members. Other early investors include Larry Ellison
Larry Ellison
Lawrence Joseph "Larry" Ellison is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation, one of the world's leading enterprise software companies. As of 2011, he is the third wealthiest American citizen, with an estimated worth of $33 billion.- Early life :Larry Ellison was born in the...
, Halsey Minor
Halsey Minor
Halsey McLean Minor is a technology entrepreneur who founded CNET in 1993 . Minor ran CNET for 8 years during which time it became one of the Internet's first companies to achieve profitability. From 1999 to 2001, CNET was a member of the NASDAQ-100 index...
, Mark Iscaro, and Igor Sill of Geneva Venture Partners.
Current status
Salesforce.com is headquartered in San Francisco, with regional headquarters in Morges, Switzerland (covering Europe, Middle East, and Africa), SingaporeSingapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
(covering Asia Pacific less Japan), and Tokyo (covering Japan). Other major offices are in Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
, New York, London, Sydney, and San Mateo, California
San Mateo, California
San Mateo is a city in San Mateo County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a population of approximately 100,000 , it is one of the larger suburbs on the San Francisco Peninsula, located between Burlingame to the north, Foster City to the east, Belmont to the south,...
. Salesforce.com has its services translated into 16 different languages and currently has 82,400 customers and over 2,100,000 subscribers.
Standard & Poor's
Standard & Poor's
Standard & Poor's is a United States-based financial services company. It is a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies that publishes financial research and analysis on stocks and bonds. It is well known for its stock-market indices, the US-based S&P 500, the Australian S&P/ASX 200, the Canadian...
included Salesforce.com, at the same time as Fastenal
Fastenal
Fastenal Co is an American company based in Winona, Minnesota. Selling industrial and construction supplies and services including inventory management services, Fastenal refers to itself as an industrial supply company, but Reuters calls it an industrial distributor.-History:Founded in 1967 by...
, into the S&P 500
S&P 500
The S&P 500 is a free-float capitalization-weighted index published since 1957 of the prices of 500 large-cap common stocks actively traded in the United States. The stocks included in the S&P 500 are those of large publicly held companies that trade on either of the two largest American stock...
index in September 2008, following the federal takeover of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and their removal from the index.
In January 2011, salesforce.com was recognized as one of Fortune's
Fortune (magazine)
Fortune is a global business magazine published by Time Inc. Founded by Henry Luce in 1930, the publishing business, consisting of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, grew to become Time Warner. In turn, AOL grew as it acquired Time Warner in 2000 when Time Warner was the world's largest...
100 best companies to work for in 2011, receiving the 52nd spot.
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 IdeaStormDell IdeaStormDell IdeaStorm is a website launched by Dell on February 16, 2007 to allow Dell "to gauge which ideas are most important and most relevant to" the public....
. 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.Jigsaw (website)Jigsaw is 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...
(April 2010), - now known as Data.com - Sitemasher (June 2010)
- Navajo Security (August 2011)
- Activa Live Chat (September 2010)
- HerokuHerokuHeroku is a cloud Platform as a Service run by the San Francisco, California-based company with the same name. Heroku led the way for a multi-language PaaS, introducing the 'polyglot platform'. Heroku initially supported the Ruby programming language, with Rack and Ruby on Rails. Heroku PaaS now...
(December 2010) - Etacts (December 2010)
- DimdimDimdimDimdim was a software company that provided a web-based platform for realtime, rich-media collaboration and meetings. Dimdim provided free web conferencing service where users could share desktops, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam. It has been compared to the WebEx 2.0...
(January 2011) - Manymoon (February 2011)
- Radian 6 (March 2011)
- Model Metrics (November 2011)
Criticisms
In November 2007, a successful phishingPhishing
Phishing is a way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT...
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
Spam (electronic)
Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately...
.
Foundation
The Salesforce.com Foundation is based on an idea: donate 1% of salesforce.com’s resources to support organizations that are working to make our world a better place.The Salesforce.com Foundation was officially launched at an event featuring former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, less than a year after the company’s formation.
Customer Relationship Management
Salesforce.com's CRMCustomer relationship management
Customer relationship management is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,...
solution is broken down into several broad categories: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud (including Jigsaw
Jigsaw (website)
Jigsaw is 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...
), Collaboration Cloud (including Chatter) and Custom Cloud (including Force.com
Force.com
Force.com is a cloud computing platform as a service system from Salesforce.com, that developers use to build multi tenant applications hosted on their servers as a service. The company pushes the "development as a service" phrase, but it has not gained acceptance outside the context of their...
).
The Sales Cloud
This application runs in the cloud, so the user can access it anywhere through an Internet-enabled mobile device or a connected computer. The Sales Cloud includes a real-time sales collaborative tool called Chatter, provides sales representatives with a complete 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 all opportunity-related data including milestones, decision makers, customer communications, and any other information unique to the company's sales process. Automatic email reminders can be scheduled to keep teams up to date on the latest informationOther activities can be done on the Salesforce cloud. These include using the Jigsaw business data to access over 20 million complete and current business contacts from right inside Salesforce CRM, and designing and automating any process in Salesforce CRM.
The Service Cloud
The Service Cloud provides companies with a call center-like view that enables companies to create and track cases coming in from every channel, and automatically route and escalate what’s important. The Salesforce CRM-powered customer portal provides customers the ability to track their own cases 24 hours a day, 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 services, chatting tools, Google search, and access to customers' entitlement and contracts.Force.com platform
Salesforce.com's PaaSPlatform as a service
Platform as a service is a category of cloud computing services that provide a computing platform and a solution stack as a service...
product is known as the Force.com platform. The 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 the Force.com platform) and Visualforce (an XML-like syntax for building user interfaces in HTML, Ajax
Ajax (programming)
Ajax is a group of interrelated web development methods used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications...
or Flex
Adobe Flex
Adobe Flex is a software development kit released by Adobe Systems for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich Internet applications based on the Adobe Flash platform...
).
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.AppExchange
Launched in 2005, AppExchange is a marketplace for cloud computing applicationsApplication software
Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...
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 October 2010, there are over 900 applications available from over 450 independent software vendors.
All salesforce.com partners can distribute applications and solutions on the 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/RESTRest
Rest may refer to:* Leisure* Human relaxation* SleepRest may also refer to:* Rest , a pause in a piece of music* Rest , the relation between two observers* Rest , a 2008 album by Gregor Samsa...
Web service
Web service
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...
API that enables integration with other systems.
Mobile support
In April 2009, salesforce.com released a slimmed down version of their application for subscribers with BlackBerryBlackBerry
BlackBerry is a line of mobile email and smartphone devices developed and designed by Canadian company Research In Motion since 1999.BlackBerry devices are smartphones, designed to function as personal digital assistants, portable media players, internet browsers, gaming devices, and much more...
, iPhone
IPhone
The iPhone is a line of Internet and multimedia-enabled smartphones marketed by Apple Inc. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, on January 9, 2007, and released on June 29, 2007...
, and Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile is a mobile operating system developed by Microsoft that was used in smartphones and Pocket PCs, but by 2011 was rarely supplied on new phones. The last version is "Windows Mobile 6.5.5"; it is superseded by Windows Phone, which does not run Windows Mobile software.Windows Mobile is...
devices. In January 2010, salesforce.com started to promote the use of 2D Barcodes (SPARQCode
SPARQCode
A SPARQCode is a matrix code encoding standard that is based on the physical QR Code definition created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave.- Overview :...
) for exporting contact information to mobile handsets.
Languages
The Salesforce application, along with online help and training documentation, are available in sixteen languages: English, Dutch, Spanish, German, French, Finnish, Swedish, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Russian, Thai, Danish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.Also, end user languages available are Hungarian, Czech, Turkish, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian.
Other
Other technologies allowing more advanced customization of Salesforce interfaces are the in-house technologies Apex (a JavaJava (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
-like programming language and programming platform), VisualForce (a user interface library), and S-controls (Salesforce widgets – these are predominantly based on JavaScript
JavaScript
JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles....
). S-controls are deprecated as of March 2010. It is possible to edit and use existing controls, but no new ones can be created.
Events
The Salesforce.com company organizes worldwide events dedicated to cloud computingCloud computing
Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....
. The last major event dreamforce was held from 30th August to 2 September 2011 in San Francisco.
See also
- Customer Relationship ManagementCustomer relationship managementCustomer relationship management is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,...
- Web applicationWeb applicationA web application is an application that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is coded in a browser-supported language and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.Web applications are...