Is Salesforce a Platform?

Marc Benioff is the founder of Salesforce.com, in 1999. Now, Salesforce has started to look less revolutionary as larger, but more established companies have adopted its leasing model.
Benioff declared (few years ago) that Salesforce would be “the Microsoft of the 21st century”. It sounds very optimistic.
He’s company earned over the previous year what Microsoft earn in one bad morning.
Salesforce wanted to revolutionize the way business buy software, and to a large extent it has accomplished that in one market niche: customer tracking.

The innovation was in turning software into a service which is leased over the Internet, instead of something bought and installed on company computers.

For Benioff, that is not enough, because he wants to turn Salesforce into a platform for Microsoft Windows Operating System, a very popular product for software developers.
“In our industry,” said Benioff, the company’s chief executive, “the only companies that really make it big move from being a ‘killer app’ to being a platform.”

Salesforce

Few software companies successfully make the leap to platform status, so making that jump is critical to Salesforce and to its long-term success.
It seems that investors are counting on success beyond the market for customer- tracking software, that’s why its share price is three times more.

Many consider that it is normal for Benioff to try to use its beachhead in managing customer information to establish itself as a platform, a kind of Holy Grail of the Software World.
Salesforce increased competition in its core market at a time when it is focusing on selling itself as a platform. But, there is the competition from smaller companies (like NetSuite), which uses the same leasing model to offer full suite of applications it has built (billing, accounting, critical business tools, etc.).

Peter Goldmacher, which is an investment analyst for Cowen declared: “My concern is that this is a company letting itself get distracted”.
At its beginning, Salesforce was one of a group of start-ups exploring ways to capture a share of the lucrative business software market, using the leasing model, called “software as a service” of “on-demand computing”.

In the battle for a share of business software dollars, Benioff chose to focus on CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, a very small corner of the market.
“CRM seemed a perfect place to start and prove our concept,” he said.
We will see what is going to be next.

Tags: Salesforce, platform, Bienoff, Microsoft, NetSuite, software, CRM News, open source CRM