# Salesforce

> The company that sells, as an online subscription, the software to manage customers.

- Level: Basic
- Topics: Tech companies, Cloud
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/salesforce/
- In Spanish: [Salesforce](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/salesforce/)

**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.

## An analogy

A shared address book and diary for a whole company, kept in the cloud, where every salesperson, support agent and marketer writes down what happened with each customer, and the company pays a monthly fee per person who uses it.

## 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.

## Go deeper

- [About Salesforce (official site)](https://www.salesforce.com/company/about-us/)
- [What is CRM? (Salesforce)](https://www.salesforce.com/crm/what-is-crm/)
- [Salesforce on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce)

## Related terms

- [Server](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/server/): A computer whose job is to answer requests from other computers, all day, every day.
- [Web browser](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/web-browser/): The app that fetches web pages from the internet and draws them on your screen.
- [SaaS, PaaS and IaaS](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/saas-paas-iaas/): Three ways to rent computing, depending on how much of the work you hand over.
- [Artificial intelligence](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/artificial-intelligence/): Getting computers to do things that, until recently, only people could do.
- [Cloud computing](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/cloud-computing/): Renting computers over the internet instead of buying your own.
- [AI agent](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/ai-agent/): An LLM that can take actions, check the results and keep going until the job is done.