Salesforce
The company that sells, as an online subscription, the software to manage customers.
Salesforce is an American company founded in 1999 in San Francisco by Marc Benioff and partners. It sells CRM (customer relationship management) software: the system where a company keeps everything about its customers, such as who they are, what they bought, every call and email, which deals are in progress and which complaints are open. Sales, support and marketing teams all work from the same record.
What made it famous was how it sold it. Business software used to come on discs, installed on the company's own servers after long projects. Salesforce ran everything on its own servers and customers just logged in through the browser, paying a monthly fee per user. It was one of the pioneers of SaaS (software as a service), the model most business software follows today.
Over time it added products, often by buying companies: tools for customer service, marketing and online stores, Slack for team chat, Tableau for charts and dashboards, and MuleSoft for connecting systems together. Companies also build their own apps on top of its platform, and a whole profession of administrators and consultants works on it. It makes money mainly from those subscriptions, priced per user and per product, and lately from AI assistants that work inside the CRM.
Keep in mind
- Founded in 1999; its core product is CRM, software to manage customer relationships.
- A SaaS pioneer: software in the browser, paid by subscription per user.
- Owns Slack, Tableau and MuleSoft, among other products.
- Many companies build custom apps on its platform.
