Salesforce Is a Cloud Computing King
February 15, 2013
Grazed from Bloomberg. Author: Aaron Ricadela.
Salesforce.com (CRM), No. 2 in this year’s Bloomberg Businessweek 50 ranking, has been outpacing rivals Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT), and SAP (SAP) in the business software market by exploiting companies’ desire to stop managing programs for thousands of their employees and outsource the job instead. The company’s stock has climbed more than 170 percent in the past three years and Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff is expanding his portfolio of cloud computing software for sales, customer service, and online marketing by branching into new areas like human resources. Benioff spoke with Bloomberg News reporter Aaron Ricadela from his home in San Francisco about the competitive landscape and his plans for the coming year.
Why are competitors like Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP having a hard time catching you in cloud computing?
Well, they’re not really in cloud computing. We’ve defined a market and we’ve executed it. What we have continued to focus on is defining our space within that market. You don’t buy hardware and software and hook it all up—you use our preconfigured services over the Internet. We picked our place in that market for sales force automation, then customer service and support, now marketing. Each of those product lines had been growing very aggressively. We also only do business in eight countries in the world. By focusing on that, we have had our growth trajectory…
Salesforce was known as a supplier to smaller companies. Now you’re landing very large deals. How important are they to future growth?
We really have relationships now with almost all the largest SAP customers. We have a huge relationship with Philips for example. We’re not a big customer story, we’re not a small customer story. We have a full portfolio of customers. And that’s been very important, because where enterprise software companies have traditionally gotten themselves into trouble is, big deals can be lumpy—you hear that on these [analyst] calls all the time. And that’s not what you hear on our calls. We have had a much more even performance…
Read more from the source @ http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-14/salesforce-is-a-cloud-computing-king