Salesforce

The company was founded on February 3, 1999 by former?Oracle?executive?Marc Benioff, together with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez as a?software as a service?(SaaS) company, and was launched publicly between September and November 1999.[4][5

In June 2004, the company had its?initial public offering?on the?New York Stock Exchange?under the stock symbol CRM and raised US$110?million.[6]?Early investors include?Larry Ellison, Magdalena Yesil,?Halsey Minor, Stewart Henderson, Mark Iscaro, and Igor Sill, a founding member of Geneva Venture Partners.

In October 2014, Salesforce announced the development of its Customer Success Platform to tie together Salesforce's services, including sales, service, marketing, analytics, community, and mobile apps.[7]?In October 2017, Salesforce launched a?Facebook?Analytics tool for?business-to-business marketers.[8][9]?In September 2018, Salesforce partnered with?Apple?intended on improving apps for businesses.[10]

In February 2020, co-chief executive officer Keith Block stepped down from his position in the company.?Marc Benioff?remained as chairman and chief executive officer.[11]

On December 1, 2020, it was announced that Salesforce would acquire?Slack?for $27.7 billion.[12]?The acquisition closed on July 21.[13]

In February 2021, Salesforce announced that CFO Mark Hawkins would be retiring from his position after six years of working for the company; however, retaining a position as?CFO emeritus?until October. Amy Weaver was selected as his replacement.[14][15]

Services[edit]

Salesforce.com's?customer relationship management?(CRM) service comprises several broad categories: Commerce Cloud, Sales Cloud,[16]?Service Cloud,[17]?Data Cloud[18]?(including?Jigsaw),?Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud[19]?(including Chatter), Manufacturing Cloud,[20]?Analytics Cloud,[21]?App Cloud, Vaccine Cloud,[22]?IoT and Work.com with over 100,000 customers.[23]

Main services[edit]

Salesforce's main services are tools for case, task and issue management. It also gives customers tracking abilities for their raised cases and conversation features for?social networking Web sites, provides analytical tools and other services including email alert, Google search, and access to customers' entitlement and contracts.[24]?They also partner with companies like?IBM,?Accenture, and Saggezza to help integrate Salesforce's cloud-based services into their businesses.[25][26]

Lightning Platform[edit]

Lightning Platform[27]?(also known as Force.com) is a?platform as a service?(PaaS) that allows developers to create add-on applications that integrate into the main Salesforce.com application.[28][failed verification]?These third-party applications are hosted on Salesforce.com's infrastructure.[29]

Force.com applications are built using declarative tools, backed by Lightning[further explanation needed]?and Apex (Application Express), a proprietary?Java-like programming language for Force.com,[30]?as well as Visualforce, a framework[31]?including an XML[32]?syntax typically used to generate?HTML. The Force.com platform typically receives three complete releases a year.[33]?As the platform is provided as a service to its developers, every single development instance also receives all these updates.

In 2015, a new framework for building user interfaces – Lightning Components – was introduced in beta.[34]?Lightning components are built using the open-source Aura Framework[35]?but with support for Apex as the server-side language instead of Aura's?JavaScript?dependency. This has been described as an alternative to, not necessarily a replacement for, Visualforce pages.[36]

As of 2013, the Force.com platform has 1.4 million registered developers.[37]

Lightning Base Components is the component library built on top of Lightning Web Components.[38]

Experience Cloud[edit]

Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud)[39]?provides Salesforce customers the ability to create online web properties for external collaboration, customer service, channel sales, and other custom portals in their instance of Salesforce. Tightly integrated to Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and App Cloud, Experience Cloud can be quickly customized to provide a wide variety of web properties. Experience Cloud combines the functionality of the former Salesforce Customer and Partner Portals with some additional features.[40]

Work.com[edit]

Work.com, previously?Rypple, is a social performance management platform for managers and employees. It allows continuous coaching, real-time feedback, and recognition.[41]?It is aimed at?sales management,?customer service,?marketing, and can be utilised by?human resource departments.

Work.com, then known as "Rypple", was founded by Daniel Debow and David Stein, to create a simple way of asking for feedback anonymously at work.[42]?The company was formed in May 2008 and their client list included?Mozilla,?Facebook,?LinkedIn?and the?Gilt Groupe. Rypple aims to get employees to build and manage their own coaching networks.[43]

In September 2011, Rypple announced that they had hired Bohdan Zabawskyj as its Chief Technology Officer.[44]?In 2011, Rypple developed a more formalized management methodology called?OKR?("Objectives and Key Results") for?Spotify.[45]?Rypple also partnered with Facebook to create "Loops", short for "feedback loops", which gathers feedback from co-workers, including praise, progress against goals, and coaching from supervisors into one channel.[46]

In December 2011, Salesforce.com announced that they would acquire Rypple. The transaction was completed in 2012 and Rypple was rebranded as Work.com in September 2012.[47]

AppExchange[edit]

Launched in 2005, the Salesforce AppExchange is an online?application marketplace?for third-party applications that run on the Force.com platform.[48]?Applications are available for free, as well as via yearly or monthly subscription models. Applications available range from integrations with?SharePoint?to mobile approval management.[49]?As of June 2016, it features 2,948 applications which have driven 3+ million installs.[50]?The "AppExchange" is also a place customers can search for cloud consulting partners to help them implement the technology in their own organization. Cloud consulting partners for Salesforce include large companies like?IBM's "Bluewolf" and?Accenture?as well as smaller ones like?Cloudreach.[51]

myTrailhead[edit]

Launched in 2019, Salesforce's myTrailhead is an online training platform that can be customized for the specific needs of its customers.[52]?The platform extends functionality to provide users with training content specific to their usage of Salesforce and enables them to create and publish their own training content and programs.[53]

Blockchain platform[edit]

In May 2019 Salesforce launched a blockchain platform[54]?based on?Hyperledger Sawtooth, to facilitate building blockchain network and apps integrated with CRM.[55][56][57][58]

Retired or end-of-life[edit]
Data.com[edit]

Data.com, previously known as Jigsaw, was a cloud-based system for acquiring and managing CRM records within a user's Salesforce.com account.[59]?It was also an online business directory of companies and business professionals that is built, maintained and accessed by a worldwide community of over a million subscribers.,[60]?The information consisted of what is commonly found on a?business card.

Competitors included services such as?Dun & Bradstreet/Avention and?ZoomInfo.

Data.com was made up of three products: Data.com Connect, Data.com Clean and Data.com Prospector.[61]?In April 2018, Salesforce announced it would retire Data.com Connect on May 4, 2019.[62]?Salesforce also announced it will wind down Data.com Clean and Data.com Prospector, and these services will close on July 31, 2020.[63]

Desk.com[edit]

Desk.com is a?SaaS?help desk?and?customer support?product accessible through the cloud. Desk.com is owned by Salesforce.com and was previously known as Assistly. Desk.com is headquartered in?San Francisco, California.

After being acquired by Salesforce.com for $50 million in 2011[64]?Assistly was re-branded as Desk.com in 2012[65]?as a?customer support?software.[66]?Desk.com is a SaaS customer service application. The product differentiates itself from Salesforce's other service platform by specifically targets small businesses.[67]?It integrates with a variety of products and third-party applications including Salesforce CRM, Salesforce IQ,[68]?Atlassian JIRA, Mailchimp[69]?and other apps. Desk.com also supports up to 50 languages.[70]

Salesforce announced the retirement of Desk.com, replacing it with Service Cloud Lightning. After March 13, 2018 no new desk.com licenses were sold, and the retirement date was announced as March 13, 2020.[71]

Do.com[edit]

Do.com was a cloud-based?task management?system for small groups and businesses, introduced in 2011 and discontinued in 2014.[72][73][74]?Salesforce did not offer any reason for shutting down the service, however, it provided an Export tool to save data entered within the Do.com interface. The Do.com domain was sold to a startup in 2014.[75]

Configuration[edit]

Salesforce users can configure their CRM application. In the system, there are tabs such as "Contacts," "Reports," and "Accounts." Each tab contains associated information. Configuration can be done on each tab by adding user-defined custom fields.[76]

Configuration can also be done at the "platform" level by adding configured applications to a Salesforce instance, that is adding sets of customized / novel tabs for specific vertical- or function-level (Finance, Human Resources, etc.) features.

Web services[edit]

In addition to the web interface, Salesforce offers a?SOAP/REST?Web service?application programming interface?(API) that enables integration with other systems.[77][78]

Technologies[edit]

Salesforce is powered by the?Model–view–controller?architecture.

Apex[edit]

Apex is a proprietary programming language provided by the Force.com platform to developers similar to?Java?and?C#. It is a strongly typed, object-oriented, case-insensitive programming language, following a dot-notation and curly-brackets syntax. Apex can be used to execute programmed functions during most processes on the Force.com platform including custom buttons and links, event handlers on record insertion, update, or deletion, via scheduling, or via the custom controllers of Visualforce or Lightning Experience pages.

Due to the multitenant nature of the platform, the language has strictly imposed governor limitations[79]?to guard against any code monopolizing shared resources. Salesforce provides a series of?asynchronous processing?methods for Apex to allow developers to produce longer-running and more complex Apex code.[80]

Lightning[edit]

In 2014, Salesforce made public the?front end?of its platform, called Lightning.[81]?This component-based framework is what the Salesforce mobile app is built on. Salesforce built on this framework in 2015 by releasing the Lightning Design System,[82]?an HTML style framework with default CSS styling built in. This framework allows customers to build their own components to either use in their internal instances or sell on the AppExchange.

The Salesforce Lightning App Builder is a tool for?rapid application development?of responsive web interfaces. This interface allows for different screens to be put together based on Lightning components. This can be used as layouts for records or specific applications.

Lightning Experience, released in 2016, is the new redesigned interface in Salesforce for processes enhancement. Since then all the apps available on AppExchange need to be Lightning and those built on Classic have to migrate to Lightning as Classic is not to be updated any more by Salesforce. The platform offers an option for developers to employ migration techniques to enable the new user friendly interface and switch to Lightning.[83]

Operations[edit]
A discussion panel at Salesforce's?Customer Company Tour?event that focused on customer relationship management

Salesforce is headquartered in San Francisco, with regional headquarters in?Morges,?Switzerland?(covering Europe, the?Middle East, and Africa,?Singapore), India (covering Asia Pacific minus Japan), and?Tokyo?(covering Japan). Other major offices are in?Toronto,?Chicago,?New York City,?London,?Sydney,?Dublin,?Hyderabad,?Vancouver,?San Mateo, California,?Indianapolis,[84]?and?Hillsboro, Oregon.[85]?Salesforce.com has its services translated into 16[86]?different languages and as of July 31, 2011, had 104,000[87]?customers and over 2.1 million subscribers.[88]?Salesforce moved its Midwest Regional headquarters to Indianapolis in 2017.

Salesforce Tower in New York City.

Standard & Poor's?included Salesforce, at the same time as?Fastenal, into the?S&P 500 Index?in September 2008, following the?federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?and their removal from the index.[89]

Leadership[edit]
Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO, co-founder of the company (1999– )[90]
Parker Harris, Co-Founder, oversees product strategy (1999– )[91]
Bret Taylor, President, Chief Product Officer (2017– )[92]
Suzanne DiBianca, Executive Vice President, Corporate Relations and Chief Philanthropy Officer (2000– )[93]?Chief Communications Officer (2017– )[94]
Mark Hawkins, President and Chief Financial Officer (2014– )[95]
Elizabeth Pinkham, Executive Vice President, Global Real Estate (2000–)[96]
Tony Prophet, Chief Equality Officer (2016– )[97]
Stephanie Buscemi, Chief Marketing Officer (2018– )
Cindy Robbins, President and Chief People Officer (2006–2019)[98]
Amy Weaver, President, Legal and General Counsel (2013– )[99]
Culture[edit]

Salesforce corporate culture is supposedly based on the concept of?Ohana, a deep-rooted support system nurtured inside the company.[100][dead link]

In the aftermath of a 2021 world-wide outage of all their services, Salesforce chief availability officer Darryn Dieken placed the blame on an individual engineer stating, "We have taken action with that particular employee."[101]?The same year, another executive, Cynthia Perry, resigned over?discrimination in the workplace.[102]

On September 10, 2021, Benioff tweeted that the company is prepared to help any employee who wishes to move out of the state of?Texas, following the?abortion in Texas?legislation announced on September 1, 2021]