Cloud Computing and Salesforce.com

The crown achievement for that would have to go to Mark Benioff’s Salesforce.com. Benioff, who was a former Oracle executive and therefore no stranger to database software, started the company in 1999 and it now has over 2,600 employees servicing over one million salespeople in fifteen different languages.

Today, Salesforce’s motto is “Success on Demand”, which follows their strategy of software as a service, which is marketing lingo for offering up the possibilities and flexibility that sales organizations now have. The reason that Salesforce.com has been so successful was they were one of the first to recognize the niche needed for sales organizations, and also because unlike Insightful, they tend to target larger businesses with their proprietary software model as opposed to open source.

Salesforce.com has also just recently taken off of the SaaS pathway and has launched Force.com, which is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) service that lets organizations develop their own software with the underlying Salesforce.com engine. This is an example of the company having the vision to understand what their customers’ need – which is ultimate flexibility and scalability with cloud technology.

The idea of software as a service is a different model from the concept that once prevailed in Silicon Valley circles as software being a product. The thought was that once the software product shipped it was something final, with patches for bug fixes forthcoming. Now, with cloud computing and open source technologies, a software platform can be more like a living and breathing entity that can be fully adaptable to business needs unlike proprietary packages.