salesforce.com

About salesforce.com

salesforce.com champions the power of the social enterprise. The company offers Internet-based applications that manage employee collaboration as well as customer information for sales, marketing, and customer support, providing clients with a rapidly deployable alternative to traditional, more time-consuming and user-maintained software installations. – more... Its customers come from a variety of industries, including financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, and entertainment. salesforce.com also provides the Force.com and Heroku platforms for clients and partners to build new applications and customize existing ones that are installed and sold through salesforce.com's AppExchange.

Force.com is part of its vision to not only be the leader in enterprise-targeted social applications, but also a platform for developing and offering such applications for its customers. Force.com provides the tools for application creation, customization, integration, deployment (through its AppExchange marketplace), and integration. The Heroku platform focuses on development of social and mobile applications for salesforce.com products. These platforms allow the use of many major programming languages, such as Java and Ruby, to improve usability and integration. Heroku was a San Francisco-based company, which was acquired in 2011 for about $210 million in cash, which operated a cloud application platform for Ruby.

As a pioneer in demonstrating the profitability and scalability of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model, salesforce.com's revenues and net income have grown substantially each year since fiscal 2007. Sales continued the streak, in both subscriptions and services, climbing nearly 40% for fiscal 2012. Profits finally took a hit, however, with operating losses of about $35 million in fiscal 2012 (compared to a profit of nearly $100 million the year prior) and net losses of nearly $12 million. Operating expenses increased in each area -- R&D, marketing and sales, general and administrative -- at a higher rate than in 2011. R&D, most notably, went from a 42% increase in 2011 to nearly 60% more spending in 2012, while sales and marketing increased nearly 50% compared to a 30% rise in 2011.

Revenue spread geographically has remained fairly consistent in recent years, with about 70% coming from customers in the Americas, nearly 20% from Europe, with only Asia/Pacific scooting up from 11% in 2010 to 14% in 2011 and 2012. Late in 2011 salesforce.com moved to bolster its infrastructure in Asia/Pacific with the launch of a new data center in Tokyo. Residing in an NTT Communications facility, it will support growth and services throughout the region.

In 2012 salesforce.com acquired long-time partner Model Metrics, which provides consulting services for mobile and cloud computing. The acquisition of Model Metrics provides salesforce.com with a workforce experienced in mobile and social design conception, business process alignment, and other mobile and cloud services. In another deal that year, salesforce.com acquired Rypple, which provides a cloud-based social performance management application. Additionally, the company paid about $690 million to acquire Buddy Media, a provider of social media marketing software. Buddy Media's technology complements salesforce.com's Salesforce Marketing Cloud product, and product used by businesses to target customers via marketing messages delivered over social networks.

Also that year it partnered with business information provider Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) to provide salesforce.com customers access to D&B's global company information database. The partnership not only offers access to one of the leading databases of company information in the world, but also to one of the most widely-recognized, proprietary business entity identifiers, the D-U-N-S number. In a similar move the year prior, it bought business contact data provider Jigsaw for about $140 million. The deal expanded salesforce.com's cloud computing offerings and extended its reach into the business-to-business data service market.

Acquisitions and partnerships help drive growth, but salesforce.com also relies on internal development. The company expanded its social networking and collaboration capabilities through the launch of Chatter, which began as an enterprise instant messaging-style application for sharing updates and data within organizations on people, projects, groups, and documents. In 2011 it bolstered Chatter with the acquisition of Dimdim, which has created a real-time communication platform that is used to participate in online meetings, demos, and webinars. salesforce.com combined Dimdim's cloud-based communication capabilities with Chatter to provide an integrated social networking product, similar to Facebook, for the enterprise market. Also that year the company paid nearly $270 million in cash and $50 million in stock to buy Radian6, a developer of software used by corporate clients to manage and monitor social networking efforts for customer service and sales purposes.

Previous acquisitions include the 2008 purchase of InStranet, a provider of call center software; salesforce.com integrated InStranet's software into its SaaS platform. The deal was part of a broader strategic move by salesforce.com to extend its product set past core CRM applications to encompass areas such as call center management, partner relationship management, and more. – less

salesforce.com Employer Reviews

salesforce.com Photos

salesforce.com Jobs

Working at salesforce.com