Salesforce hits its stride - Feb. 17, 2009
Tuesday, February 17, 2009 at 5:34AM A decade ago Marc Benioff declared that software was dead. In 1999, while on leave from his job at Oracle, he convened a group of developers in his downtown San Francisco apartment building to build Salesforce.com. Soon thereafter he paid the quirky rockers the B-52's $250,000 to perform at a bash where he distributed buttons with the word "software" crossed out, Ghostbusters-style. And that was all before he had signed up a single customer.
Benioff's audacious goal: to take down enterprise software's stalwarts (including Benioff's employer) with a new business that let companies rent the software they use instead of buying it.
It was outrageous! It was brazen! And it worked. Salesforce (CRM), now a public company with a market capitalization of about $3.5 billion, generates revenue of more than $1 billion a year - a 60% five-year annual growth rate - all from providing software subscriptions to businesses. "We've always believed everything's going into the cloud," Benioff says triumphantly.
A great article through Fortune Magazine at CNNMoney.com about how Salesforce is not only a great product (with the SaaS model) but also how quickly it is rising through the ranks of small, mid-sized and Fortune 100 companies.
Not only do they talk about Salesforce but also the SaaS (renting software in the "cloud") model and why many companies are jumping ship from the big guys (at over $1mil for licensing alone) to companies like Salesforce, Google and other great SaaS products.
While SaaS has a long way to go before it's trusted everywhere, it's definitely a trend on the rise and I foresee it continuing to grow very quickly over the next 5-10 years.
Reader Comments