Salesforce

Behind the cloud: the untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company--and revolutionized an industry

by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler  · 19 Nov 2009  · 307pp  · 17,123 words

. Benioff is the recipient of many awards for pioneering innovation, including the 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2000, Benioff launched the Salesforce.com Foundation—now a multimillion-dollar global organization. He lives in San Francisco. “In Behind the Cloud, Marc Benioff takes us through the ups and

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think differently, align your organization—and transform your business and your life.” —Anthony Robbins, author, Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power Behind the Cloud “Salesforce.com and Google share a vision for how the cloud will revolutionize computing. Behind the Cloud gives us a rare glimpse at the development of

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Benioff shares the strategies that have inspired employees, turned customers into evangelists, leveraged an ecosystem of partners, and allowed innovation to flourish. Benioff shows how salesforce.com pioneered a simple idea (delivering business applications as a service over the Internet) to change the way all businesses use software applications and, ultimately

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, change the way the software industry works. With Marc Benioff ’s candid, unconventional advice and unusual call-out lessons from the Salesforce.com Playbook—including Benioff’s proprietary management tool, V2MOM— any business can go against the grain, rapidly change the game, and learn how to achieve

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may be marks of their respective holders. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benioff, Marc R., 1964Behind the cloud : the untold story of how Salesforce.com went from idea to billion-dollar company—and revolutionized an industry / Marc R. Benioff, Carlye Adler. –1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references

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247 249 252 255 Play #111: Make Everyone Successful 255 Notes Acknowledgments About the Authors Index 261 265 269 271 ix For Lynne and the salesforce.com employees, customers, and investors—without whose unconditional support we would not be successful Foreword In 2001, in the midst of our previous economic

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crystal ball (though that certainly would be convenient), but because there was a need for change in the software industry and an audience ripening for salesforce.com’s ‘‘End of Software’’ xi FOREWORD revolution. I had seen similar issues with affordability and accessibility plague the hardware industry when I started

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distinction as the first dot-com listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and today it generates more than $1 billion in annual revenue. Salesforce.com changed corporate xiii FOREWORD philanthropy by integrating giving into its business model—and sharing that model so that myriad companies have collectively flooded talent

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simple Web connection, anyone can build applications and deploy them to users everywhere. By igniting the SaaS industry and then offering its Platformas-a-Service, salesforce.com has spawned an ecosystem of countless new companies. It has offered large companies (such as Dell) and smaller companies just starting out valuable insights

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journalists already saw Siebel as the villain. At user conferences, Siebel irked reporters by separating them from everyone else and leading them around like sheep. Salesforce.com, in contrast, welcomed journalists, encouraged them to mix with customers at events, and eagerly introduced them to customers for interviews. ‘‘Talk to whomever

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an evangelical system to sales. We continued to encourage customers to speak out and share their stories. Rather than address an audience and preach about salesforce.com (prospective customers didn’t believe what we said; they believed what customers were experiencing), I began to call on someone from the audience

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on-premise software vendors are seeing. Leveraging that success has become a key part of our marketing plan. Play #29: Sell to the End User Salesforce.com customers are mostly sales, marketing, or customer support people, the people who use traditional enterprise software products. Yet traditional enterprise software companies had never

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existing customers, and our nascent sales team was landing new customers, and then something extraordinary happened that accelerated everything. In December 1999, an article titled ‘‘Salesforce.com Takes the Lead in Latest Software Revolution’’ appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The story was written by Don Clark, a journalist I had

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sites and intranets in the cloud. By enabling developers to create and deliver any kind of business application, entirely on-demand and without software, salesforce.com has catapulted beyond its CRM roots and expanded into a multicategory company. New 124 The Technology Playbook functionality has been built by our users

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like-minded people. The upshot of this exchange was an incredible customer base for the developers who uploaded their applications—and a fantastic opportunity for salesforce.com. We don’t collect any royalties when companies buy applications on AppExchange, but as customers adopt additional applications running on our service, they

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background had given her the skills necessary to bridge both the nonprofit and for-profit worlds. Suzanne officially joined as the executive director of the Salesforce Foundation in 2000. Over the next few months, we researched established corporate foundations and personally met with dozens of foundation directors, including those at

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stock to offer grants and monetary assistance to those in need, especially to support youth and technology programs • 1 percent time: finding meaningful activities for salesforce.com employees during their six paid days off a year devoted to volunteerism, and promoting a culture of caring • 1 percent product: facilitating the donation

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of salesforce.com subscriptions to nonprofits, helping them increase their operating effectiveness and focus more resources on their core mission The 1-1-1 Model in Action

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Business Value of Corporate Philanthropy,’’ May 2002. **2007 Deloitte Volunteer IMPACT Survey Play #69: Build a Great Program by Listening to the Constituents The first salesforce.com-sponsored technology centers aimed at bridging the digital divide were a great idea in theory, and the centers were welcome additions to communities, but

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and learning about finances, to manufacturing a product of their own creation (picture frames, clocks, potted plants), to marketing and selling their product using the salesforce.com application. Our third year into sponsoring the program, we changed the focus from selling a product to selling a service—something that dovetailed nicely

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The students were charged with selling ‘‘green consulting’’ services, and they were responsible for researching, analyzing, and offering suggestions on how to solve each of salesforce.com departments’ environmental challenges. It’s been incredible to witness how the students run their own businesses. During one of the recent programs, something extraordinary

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application and operating more efficiently. 157 BEHIND THE CLOUD It’s been amazing to see what these organizations have been able to achieve with the salesforce.com platform. The Children’s Aid Society Carrera Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program, which educates teens about the consequences of sexual activity, was able to convert

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from a paper-based environment to an electronic one through salesforce.com, which reduced turnaround times, improved data integrity, and helped save countless trees. The Google Foundation has used the application to track every facet

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and for us to harness the potential power of our entire ecosystem. It’s working. CRM Fusion, for example, built an application that allows salesforce.com to work with PayPal, which allowed organizations like Rainforest2Reef to receive donations automatically—eliminating the need to pay anyone to input any data manually

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. Theikos (now part of Astadia), one of salesforce.com’s implementation partners, got the system for the UN World Food Programme up and running, customized, and ready to service its operations across Asia

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information. They built a searchable database called the PeopleFinder project, purchased the URL katrinalist.net, and created a Web site that accessed the database. The salesforce.com employees conceived of the project on Friday, September 2, and the initial data entry was completed with more than ninety thousand entries by Tuesday

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step beyond and whose work builds an exceptional company. How to Build an Employee-Inspired Foundation Start from the Very Beginning All new hires at salesforce.com learn about the foundation—and participate in a volunteer activity—during their new-hire orientation. Canvass Employees About Their Interests We ask employees

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, please see www.sharethemodel.org. 165 BEHIND THE CLOUD Play #74: Have Your Foundation Mimic Your Business In areas all over the globe, the salesforce.com application and platform have affected how nonprofits, including Habitat for Humanity and Susan G. Komen for the Cure, run their organizations. The demand for

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I liked his passionate attitude. The right mind-set makes all the difference between succeeding and failing in an international market. Kitamura-san initially helped salesforce.com gain customer traction by relying on the personal relationships he had built over many years in the industry. In fact, some customers simply bought

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Research, and we leveraged that relationship and the success Mizuho had experienced with our service. After Japan Post completed an exhaustive and prudent research process, salesforce.com won the open bidding and secured a deal for five thousand subscriptions. (It later grew to more than seventy thousand subscriptions.) This was

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to board a plane as our first missionary in Australia, we received an ominous letter from the legal department of a large Australian company—called SalesForce. SalesForce Australia claimed we were infringing on its registered trademark, and it raised concerns about brand confusion and potential damages. The threatening letter demanded we cease

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operating under the salesforce name. This was a gigantic problem. Trademark infringement is a notoriously sticky subject in Australia—and one that can cost companies huge sums of money

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. Additionally, SalesForce Australia was an intimidating company to have as an adversary. It had been in the market running outsourced call centers since 1994 and had established

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this time, two companies were being hyped as being able to re-ignite the high-tech IPO market. One was Google; the other was salesforce.com. The salesforce.com IPO was viewed as a litmus test for a new business model, so everyone became interested in the deal. Both the NASDAQ and

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our platform technology, we gained increased opportunities to communicate with—and seek advice from—our employees. We now collaborate on the corporate V2MOM with all salesforce.com employees through IdeaExchange, a social networking tool that employees use to contribute their ideas as well as promote and comment on others’ ideas. Most

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as a meaningful place to work and made us more committed to the success of our employees and our customers. The final play from our salesforce.com playbook—#111—acknowledges that through making all our stakeholders successful, we ignited our own success. In all industries, especially the technology industry, people

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Schellhase, Graham Smith, Clarence So, Jim Steele, Susan St. Ledger, Polly Sumner, John Taschek, Eiji Uda, Frank van Veenendaal, Craig Weissman, and Kirsten Wolberg. Additionally, salesforce.com is fortunate to have an amazing board of directors: Craig Conway, Alan Hassenfeld, Craig Ramsey, Sanford Robertson, Stratton Sclavos, Larry Tomlinson, Maynard Webb, and

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Isabel Kelly, Charles Nikiel, Elizabeth Pinkham, Joseph Schmidt, Rich Sheridan, Julie Trell, and Mayuwa Yamakawa. I am most grateful to my extraordinary friends who supported salesforce.com and me from the very beginning and who continue to amaze me with their wise counsel and generous spirit: Adam Bosworth, Gigi Brisson, Katrina

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2005, overseeing the publishing of critical reports on health care information technology, cybersecurity, and computational sciences. 269 ABOUT THE AUTHORS In 2000, Benioff launched the Salesforce.com Foundation—now a multimillion-dollar global organization— establishing the ‘‘1-1-1 model,’’ whereby the company contributes one percent of profits, one percent of

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award-winning journalist whose articles have appeared in BusinessWeek, Condé Nast Portfolio, Fast Company, Fortune, Time, Wired, and many other publications. She co-wrote, with salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff, The Business of Changing the World: Twenty Great Leaders on Strategic Corporate Philanthropy. She has been twice named one

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148 Critical Metrics, 250 Criticism, 9–11 CRM (customer relationship management): developing international divisions for, 169–170, 173; Microsoft’s venture into, 42; origins of salesforce.com, 11–12; positioning End of Software mission, 24–25; potential sales via telephone, 77–78; potentials for SaaS online products, 6; scalability challenge for

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. Benioff is the recipient of many awards for pioneering innovation, including the 2007 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2000, Benioff launched the Salesforce.com Foundation—now a multimillion-dollar global organization. He lives in San Francisco. “In Behind the Cloud, Marc Benioff takes us through the ups and

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think differently, align your organization—and transform your business and your life.” —Anthony Robbins, author, Awaken the Giant Within and Unlimited Power Behind the Cloud “Salesforce.com and Google share a vision for how the cloud will revolutionize computing. Behind the Cloud gives us a rare glimpse at the development of

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Benioff shares the strategies that have inspired employees, turned customers into evangelists, leveraged an ecosystem of partners, and allowed innovation to flourish. Benioff shows how salesforce.com pioneered a simple idea (delivering business applications as a service over the Internet) to change the way all businesses use software applications and, ultimately

…

, change the way the software industry works. With Marc Benioff ’s candid, unconventional advice and unusual call-out lessons from the Salesforce.com Playbook—including Benioff’s proprietary management tool, V2MOM— any business can go against the grain, rapidly change the game, and learn how to achieve

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman  · 9 Oct 2025  · 312pp  · 103,645 words

was hardly a major tech company that wasn’t drinking from the spigot of government contracts. The FBI used a facial-recognition tool from Amazon. Salesforce provided cloud services for the Border Patrol. Microsoft was building mixed-reality goggles for the US Army, though that just scratched the surface of its

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Hawaiian land. After Benioff’s large land purchases—which were conducted through anonymous shell corporations7—generated discontent among locals worried about rising housing prices, the Salesforce founder donated $150 million to two Hawaiian hospitals.8 Investing in charter city startups, promoting cryptocurrency and borderless digital money transfers, and agitating for the

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encampment, said that he wanted to use AI to tackle homelessness. The 2024 Super Bowl was festooned with expensively produced AI ads from Google, OpenAI, Salesforce, Meta, GoDaddy, and even water bottle company Cirkul, recalling the 2022 Super Bowl’s half-dozen crypto ads.1 (After the 2022 crypto bubble popped

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-page-wants-a-place-for-experiments-2013-5 7 https://www.npr.org/2024/02/28/1232564250/billionaire-benioff-buys-hawaii-land-salesforce 8 https://www.wsj.com/tech/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-makes-150-million-donation-to-hawaii-hospitals-7b09ef59 9 https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff  · 23 May 2011  · 344pp  · 96,690 words

your company. In this chapter we see surprising customer collaboration stories from Del Monte Pet Products, the Canadian grocery retailer Loblaw, the sales application company salesforce.com, and the French bank Crédit Mutuel. Chapter 10: Tapping the Groundswell with Twitter explains how to turn the short-messaging service Twitter into a

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that SNS members can post on their own profiles and share with friends. Some companies with enthusiastic communities have created their own networks—for example, salesforce.com created its own social network so that customers can connect with people in similar industries or departments. Webkinz (a site from the plush toy

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asking questions in a survey, conducting an engineering study, or having executives review every suggestion. In this chapter we’ll look at three cases: how salesforce.com uses an innovation community to involve customers in the design of new products, how a French credit union made customer suggestions a part of

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products. In each case these companies are moving faster than they ever did before, which saves money and makes life difficult for competitors. CASE STUDY salesforce.com: embracing through an innovation community Speed is important to Steve Fisher. Steve is the VP in charge of the platform—basically, the foundation of

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the product and its development environment—at salesforce.com. Saleforce.com makes customer relationship management applications. If you’re a salesperson, you open up salesforce.com on your PC and use it to manage the opportunities and leads you’re working on

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. Salesforce.com also fills a similar role in service and marketing departments. But salesforce.com itself isn’t software. It’s an on-demand service

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, delivered through the Internet. That means salesforce.com can deliver updated and improved capabilities far more quickly. And

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that’s why speed is important to Steve. Salesforce.com evolves rapidly. The company used to put out three new releases per year. But the process had developed some frustrating snarls. Developers—the tech

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people often disagreed about what made sense to add next. The obvious answer was to see what the customers wanted. The problem wasn’t that salesforce.com wasn’t listening—it was the blizzard of requests. Ten thousand customer requests had piled up. Some of those were great ideas; others weren

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’t. The problem was telling which was which. In 2006, one of the product managers at salesforce.com came across an application called Crispy News and saw what could be a solution to the problem. Crispy News works much like Digg, allowing

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like.5 But unlike Digg, Crispy News was an application that any company could license. “We were looking at doing this ourselves,” said John Taschek, salesforce.com’s VP of strategy. “But Crispy had the technology to find out the kinds of things people wanted to know.” So

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launched a site with Crispy News (and, eventually, bought the company). In the fall of 2006, salesforce.com launched the salesforce.com IdeaExchange (ideas.salesforce.com) and invited customers to itemize their development priorities. Before this, customers’ ideas had fallen like snowflakes, enveloping the development process in an undifferentiated blanket

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of suggestions. Now the ideas were channeled and directed by the groundswell of Salesforce.com’s own customers. In one year, over five thousand ideas arrived; now the best ones bubbled to the top. The customers were organizing their

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priorities for salesforce.com. Not all of them were easy for Salesforce.com to swallow. One of the first and most popular suggestions addressed the “sawbanner,” a text ad that popped up every

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time a customer logged in to salesforce.com. The sawbanner was beloved in Salesforce.com’s marketing department, since it enabled the company to communicate directly with everyone using the software about new releases, conferences, and

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up and see if we can’t get some relief from these annoying banners that show up on our screens every time we log into Salesforce. … [If] you would like to try and remedy the issue please vote YES on [this] idea to stop the insanity! This was rapidly followed by

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over six thousand votes and hundreds of impassioned comments in favor of the idea of scrapping the sawbanners. And that caused a conflict at salesforce.com. On the one side were Steve and many of the developers, who wanted to maximize the application’s usability. On the other were

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salesforce.com’s marketers, who had grown dependent on the sawbanner to connect with their customers. Who won? The customers did. On this issue, both sides

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had compelling arguments. But in the end salesforce.com was trying to satisfy its customers, which added heft to Steve’s side of the discussion. In the nine months it took to settle

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’ other suggestions were excellent and had begun to integrate those suggestions into its products. So when the time finally came to tackle the sawbanner issue, salesforce.com decided to trust its customers. And as fifedog had requested, it was “begone” to the sawbanner. IdeaExchange has revolutionized the way

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salesforce.com develops products. Steve, who likes speed, got what he liked. In 2007, salesforce.com pumped out four new releases, in contrast to only two in 2006. New releases now include three hundred

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in a company that moves briskly, that’s worth a lot. idea exchanges work if you can engage your customers It’s interesting to compare salesforce.com’s experience embracing customers with Dell’s. Dell’s IdeaStorm (www.dellideastorm.com) uses the same system that

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, Dell has a high level of participation: seven thousand ideas and five hundred thousand votes cast by 2007. And like salesforce.com, Dell has taken advantage of the ideas coming from the community. As a company that sells to consumers, Dell naturally has a harder time

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connecting with customers in an idea exchange. Most of Dell’s customers aren’t interested enough in its products to contribute (in contrast to salesforce.com, which had convinced nearly 10 percent of its customers—in businesses—to join IdeaExchange). But even so, Dell has been able to get thousands

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and let people vote on them. And it’s already implemented many of these suggestions. If this sounds a lot like salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange, it is. But unlike salesforce.com’s customers, the bank’s aren’t likely to spend a lot of time coming back to a site whose only

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save a few bucks on ad production—but you won’t have to do the hard work of changing the way you interact with customers. Salesforce.com has permanently changed how it innovates. Del Monte thinks very differently about creating new products now. And Crédit Mutuel, if it keeps going in

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restaurant chain—you can ask for suggestions, like Crédit Mutuel, or set up a private community, like Del Monte. If you sell to businesses, as salesforce.com does, your customers may have suggestions on how to improve your processes, your pricing, your billing, or your services. The key is, you need

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of CEO. Michael wasted no time getting his executives lined up with the groundswell. He took an idea from his friend Mark Benioff, CEO of salesforce.com, to create IdeaStorm, the idea community described in chapter 9. He felt that the time was ripe to do this at Dell because of

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with a combination of urgent requests, irrelevant “cc’s” and offers of free kittens. If Dell can get its customers to support each other and salesforce.com can get its customers to prioritize feature suggestions, why can’t your employees work together in the same way? They can. Throughout corporations around

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created ID-ah!, which allows anyone in the company to submit an idea and then have the employees vote on it. (It’s similar to salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange, which we described in chapter 9.) In the first year and a half that ID-ah! was in place, employees submitted more

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the successful groundswell thinkers in this book—Memorial Sloan-Kettering’s Ellen Sonet with her research community, Procter & Gamble’s Bob Arnold with beinggirl.com, salesforce.com’s Steve Fisher with his IdeaExchange, and all the rest. These people took a different approach. They have all learned something, and they have

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set up as a destination site, not a platform. But since it’s not a platform, others are copying it for their own purposes. (The salesforce.com IdeaExchange and Dell IdeaStorm innovation communities we describe in chapter 9 use a mechanism much like digg.com, for example). A list of over

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the community and log in to see this information. chapter 9 Gala Amoroso left Del Monte for Giant Eagle. Salesforce.com acquired Crispy News and now sells the same service to others as Salesforce Ideas. Jim Osborne left Loblaw and is now at Home Depot. Sijetaisbanquier.com is no longer live for

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available at www.wikinomics.com. 5. Crispy News works much like Digg, allowing visitors to vote entries up or down based on what they like: Salesforce.com subsequently acquired Crispy News and will be selling the IdeaExchange application to other companies that want to deploy it. 6. Here’s what a

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customer known as “fifedog” posted on the IdeaExchange: You can see this post on salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange http://forr.com/gsw9-6. You’ll notice we’ve corrected the customer’s spelling, which is awful. 7. One was a

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World

by Timothy Ferriss  · 14 Jun 2017  · 579pp  · 183,063 words

didn’t entirely clean out, leaving behind some 40 copies of The Mythical Man-Month.” Marc Benioff TW: @Benioff salesforce.com MARC BENIOFF is a philanthropist and chairman and CEO of Salesforce. A pioneer of cloud computing, Marc founded the company in 1999 with a vision to create an enterprise software company

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new technology model based in the cloud, a new pay-as-you-go business model, and a new integrated corporate philanthropy model. Under his leadership, Salesforce has grown from an idea into a Fortune 500 company, the fastest-growing top five software company in the world, and the global leader in

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World Economic Forum Board of Trustees. Marc is the author of three books, including the national bestseller Behind the Cloud, which details how he grew Salesforce from zero to $1 billion in annual sales. ­Currently, he is one of only four entrepreneurs in history to have built an enterprise software company

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to business. He’s old school, and his book is a chronicle of his regime at ITT. A lot of the things we do at Salesforce are based on his techniques, such as our quarterly operations reviews, which we’re religious about. The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr

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software, do it in small teams; having 100 or 1,000 or 2,000 developers won’t make it happen. Ironically, when we first started Salesforce and started to have some success, I remember that Oracle, now a competitor, had 2,000 CRM developers and asked, in essence, “How would

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Salesforce ever beat us?” I would say it’s because of The Mythical Man-Month. Small teams will always outperform large teams in software. It was

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office, next to the Imperial Palace and Tokyo Central Station in a very special part of Japan called Marunouchi. He told me that he loved Salesforce and wanted us in this tower, and he offered us a naming opportunity. Honored and flattered, I went up and down the elevator with the

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tenants in office buildings all over the world—in London, New York, San Francisco, Munich, and Paris. Each of these buildings is not only named Salesforce Tower, but we also took the top floor along with some lower floors. I learned from that experience in Japan to leverage a real estate

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strategy for Salesforce. It’s an example of how I learned that if I’m upset about something, I should spend time asking myself, “What could I learn

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probably going to come in the future, and I will be better able to re-execute it. We are keeping the top floors of the Salesforce Towers open space—we call them “Ohana” floors. Ohana is the Hawaiian word for “family,” and for us, this includes employees, customers, partners, and the

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to use the space. When the company is not using the Ohana floor, its use will be offered to NGOs and nonprofits. The top of Salesforce Tower San Francisco will be the highest floor in the city. It’s a sight to see! In the last five years, what new belief

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only going to get that if every one of us pitches in and adopts a school. Since 2013, Salesforce has partnered with Bay Area school districts to improve computer science education. To date, Salesforce.org has donated $22.5 million to the San Francisco and Oakland school districts and also provided technology

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gone wrong in my life. When there are life challenges—whether it was my father’s death, health challenges with family members, extreme stress in Salesforce, or worry about the state of the world—I could always find refuge and strength in my meditation and prayer practice. This is an investment

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, Rabbi Lord Jonathan, 157–62 Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, 343 Saigyō, 513 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 235 Saint John, Bozoma, 37–38 Salcedo, Javier Pascual, 205 Salesforce, 445, 448–50 Salzberg, Sharon, 272–74 Samatha meditation, 271 San Francisco Writers Grotto, 396 SAP, 446 Sapling Foundation, 407 Saunders, George, 57 Saving money

Getting Started With OAuth 2.0

by Ryan Boyd  · 29 Feb 2012  · 91pp  · 18,831 words

in their online filesystem of choice Integrating business applications with one another to drive smarter decisions by mashing up multiple data sources such as a Salesforce CRM and TripIt travel plan In order to access or update private data via each of these APIs, an application needs to be delegated access

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will be immediately redirected back to the application with an authorization code, as described below in Step 2: Exchange authorization code for an access token. Salesforce provides this option as “no user approval required” on their control panel page to define Remote Access Applications. Error handling If all request parameters are

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app. Programmatic revocation is defined in a draft extension to the OAuth 2.0 specification and is implemented by popular OAuth providers such as Salesforce and Google. Salesforce allows for revocation of both refresh tokens and access tokens, while Google only enables revocation of refresh tokens. Here’s an example revocation request

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://accounts.google.com/o/oauth2/revoke?token=ya29.AHES6ZSzF" The extension also defines a JSONP “callback” query parameter that OAuth providers can optionally support. Both Salesforce and Google support this parameter. A 200 response code indicates successful revocation. Chapter 3. Client-Side Web Applications Flow The Implicit Grant flow for browser

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with an error message indicating the failure. This allows the app to gracefully prompt the user as needed for renewed authorization. For the Google and Salesforce OAuth authorization endpoints, you can provide an additional query parameter value immediate=true to enable immediate mode. How Can Access Be Revoked? See the description

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, this defeats some of the benefit of this flow. Step-by-Step To demonstrate this flow, we’ll use an example built on top of Salesforce’s REST-based APIs. Our example will retrieve and output all contacts accessible to the resource owner in the

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Salesforce CRM system. We’ll assume the example application is a native mobile application written by Acme Corporation and distributed to its employees through a corporate

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user for their credentials The first step is asking the user to provide their credentials to the application. In addition to a username and password, Salesforce requires that a user enter their security token when logging into an app from an untrusted network, such as the networks used by popular mobile

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the authorization server, providing the credentials and client information. You can find the authorization server URL in the API provider’s documentation. For Salesforce, the URL is https://login.salesforce.com/services/oauth2/token Here are the required POST parameters: grant_type Specified as “password” for this flow. scope The data your

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application is requesting access to. It is not required for Salesforce and is optional for other APIs. The Winter ’12 version of Salesforce introduces optional values for this parameter. client_id The value provided to you when you registered your application. Although optional

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in the spec, this value is required by Salesforce. Registration of the app is achieved using the App Setup→Develop→Remote Access menu. client_secret The value provided to you when you registered your

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. username The username provided by the resource owner, encoded as UTF-8. password The password provided by the resource owner, encoded as UTF-8. For Salesforce, you need to concatenate the security token entered by the user at the end of the entered password and pass the combined value as the

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_type=password" \ -d "client_id=3MVG9QDx8IKCsXTFM0o9aE3KfEwsZLvRt" \ -d "client_secret=4826278391389087694" \ -d "username=ryan%40ryguy.com" \ -d "password=_userspassword__userssecuritytoken_" \ https://login.salesforce.com/services/oauth2/token If the user-provided credentials are successfully authenticated, the Salesforce OAuth authorization server will return an application/json response containing an access_token: { "id":"https://login

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.salesforce.com/id/00DU0000000Io8rMAC/005U0000000hMDCIA2", "issued_at":"1316990706988", "instance_url":"https://na12.salesforce.com", "signature":"Q2KTt8Ez5dwJ4Adu6QttAhCxbEP3HyfaTUXoNI=", "access_token":"00DU0000000Io8r!AQcKbNiJPt0OCSAvxU2SBjVGP6hW0mfmKH07QiPEGIX" } What do each of these response parameters mean? access_token The access token used to access the

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API on behalf of the user who provided their credentials. This is the only required item in the response. id (Salesforce-specific value) The unique identity of the user. This URL can also be accessed as any other OAuth-protected resource to obtain more information about

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header sent in the request. instance_url The URL prefix the client application should use to access the API. This response parameter is specific to Salesforce’s implementation. signature A signature used to validate that the identity URL hasn’t been modified since being sent from the server. Although

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isn’t strictly necessary; instead, the application can use the built-in protections of HTTPS to ensure communication with Salesforce’s servers. This response parameter is specific to Salesforce’s implementation. issued_at (Salesforce-specific value) The time the signature was generated, used for validating it. Step 3: Call the API Since the

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curl request: curl -d "q=SELECT+name+FROM+Account"\ -H 'Authorization: Bearer 00DU0000000Io8r!AQcAQKJ.Cg1dCBCVHmx2.Iu3lroPQBV2P65_jXk' "https://na12.salesforce.com/services/data/v20query" Step 4: Refresh the access token Although Salesforce does not support refreshing the access token when using this flow, the spec does accommodate it using the method described

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is to use Google’s APIs and OAuth endpoints, the tool does enable you to specify a custom client ID, client secret, and custom endpoints. Salesforce has blogged about how to use the tool with their APIs. Figure 8-1. Google’s OAuth Playground Note This tool is made available by

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an ID token as the id_token parameter. Apigee’s Console The Apigee Console enables exploring APIs from 20+ API providers, such as Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, and SoundCloud. For those APIs supporting OAuth, it performs a typical OAuth flow, though without exposing the protocol-level details of the OAuth exchange. After

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) OAuth 2.0: Token revocation Vendor Documentation Facebook Authentication Facebook Graph API Digging Deeper into OAuth 2.0 on Force.com Authenticating Remote Access with Salesforce Google OAuth 2.0 Google’s Internet Identity Research Google’s OAuth 2.0 Controllers for iOS OAuth 2.0 on Android OAuth 2.0

The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to build better products, reach new audiences, and sell more stuff

by Clara Shih  · 30 Apr 2009  · 255pp  · 76,495 words

Conventional wisdom said that “innovation was dead.” I did not agree. I realized massive changes needed to be made in our industry, so I started salesforce.com with one simple idea: Make the software applications people use for business as easy to use as a Web site like Amazon.com. Innovation

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an Internet connection can create even very complex and robust Web applications without any of the onerous infrastructure investment once required. Just look at the salesforce.com developer community, which now has over 450 independent software vendor (ISV) partners and 100,000 developers from around the world. Together, they have

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a few days she developed Faceconnector (formerly Faceforce), the first enterprise social networking mashup that pulls Facebook profile and friend data in real time into Salesforce CRM. Clara had the vision that the next generation of enterprise software won’t be about software at all. It will be about people

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Clara. Force.com for Facebook makes it easy for Facebook developers to build enterprise social apps on Force.com’s global, trusted enterprise infrastructure. At salesforce.com, we’ve spent the last ten years building out enterprise-grade functionality like workflow, security, multilanguage and multicurrency, and integration services “in the

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service reps and sales reps to tap the knowledge of customer conversations taking place on social networks, are proof that social CRM is real. At salesforce.com, we have witnessed firsthand the power of connecting on Facebook. Early on, I encouraged everyone in our organization to sign up and required

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looked to social networking as an opportunity to become relevant in our customers’ conversations, in their communities, where they want to be. We have a salesforce.com page to increase brand presence through sharing information about our company, posting photos from events, and uploading videos, such as a “trailer” to

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best part is the strength we have in numbers. Our employees update their profile with work-related information, and even mentioning that they work at salesforce.com magnifies our footprint. Another real benefit has been in recruiting. The very best way to source new talent has always come from leveraging

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-level employee—must do to best prepare to compete, survive, and win in this revolutionary new era. —Marc R. Benioff Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com From the Library of Kerri Ross xii Th e Fa ce b o o k E ra Acknowledgments I first need to thank my

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innovative companies of our time, and have kept this manuscript honest. I owe this manuscript largely to the inspiration and support of my mentors at salesforce.com for whom I have tremendous admiration both professionally and personally: Marc Benioff, George Hu, Steve Fisher, Kendall Collins, Steve Lucas, Ariel Kelman, and

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have changed my life and changed an entire industry. I am grateful for the many lessons I learn each day from my AppExchange team at salesforce.com—Ryan Ellis, Ed Park, Sara Bright (Varni), Marie Laxague Rosecrans, Leyla Seka, and Eugene Feldman. I couldn’t have asked for a better

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Shih is the creator of Faceconnector (formerly Faceforce), the first business application on Facebook. In addition, Clara is the product line director of AppExchange, salesforce.com’s online marketplace for business Software-as-a-service applications built by third-party developers and ISVs. (Editor’s note: Upon completing this book

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, Clara has created a new role and team at salesforce.com focused on enterprise social networking alliances and product strategy.) Previously, Clara worked in strategy and business operations at Google, and before that as a

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was missing. Photos and SuperPoking are fun, but where were the business applications? I was working (and still work) at an enterprise computing company, salesforce.com, which made its name From the Library of Kerri Ross 2 Th e Fa ce b o o k E ra developing customer relationship

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“consumer” social media. New companies emerged, like Telligent, Socialcast, and Small World Labs, to build enterprise social technology from the ground up. My employer, salesforce.com, brought voting, tagging, profiles, feeds, and other Web 2.0 capabilities into its IT platform and CRM applications. Oracle announced a strategy around “social

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people always overestimate what you can do in one year and underestimate what you can do in one decade.” —Marc Benioff, Founder and CEO, salesforce.com The Fourth Revolution pproximately once a decade, a radical new technology emerges that fundamentally changes the business landscape. In every case, regardless of prior

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Data-mined biographical and contact data are being sold to salespeople and recruiters. For instance, Massachusetts-based company ZoomInfo has developed a product that allows Salesforce CRM users to access business information about sales prospects from its database of tens of millions of people and companies. Instead of selling data about

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study is a good example of social filtering at work in online communities. MyStarbucksIdea for Facebook MyStarbucksIdea is an online ideation community (powered by the Salesforce Ideas application) for Starbucks Coffee Company customers to post, vote, and comment on suggestions for how Starbucks could be improved. Less than a year

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of thousands of ideas, comments, and users. As part of the Force.com for Facebook platform partnership between Facebook and salesforce.com, a prototype was built that takes the original Salesforce Ideas application and brings it inside Facebook. This new application, called MyStarbucksIdea for Facebook, applies social filtering to how each

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a popular Facebook application that allows users to promote their favorite charities on their profile page. With Force.com for Facebook, its platform partnership with salesforce.com, Facebook hopes to take social platform applications even further into the realm of business and productivity applications. For example, application developer Appirio used

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on other sites. For example, Faceconnector (originally called Faceforce) is a mashup I developed that pulls Facebook profile information and friend data into the Salesforce CRM application. Depending on the individual’s privacy settings and degrees of separation, a sales rep viewing a lead or contact record in

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of possibility to CRM by enriching critical sales practices with contextual information and relationship-building tools. Figure 4.1 CRM systems like this one from salesforce.com offer business visibility for managers, improved rep productivity, and effective selling processes. This chapter is divided into three parts. First, it walks through

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. They might even ask mutual friends for introductions. Figure 4.5 Faceconnector (originally Faceforce) pulls real-time Facebook profile and social graph data into Salesforce CRM account, contact, and lead records so that sales reps can tap into the insights of the online social graph to make their pitch more

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provide deal information on public social networking sites. Rather, this informal deal collaboration is happening within enterprise systems like CRM, wikis, and intranet sites. Salesforce.com is investing heavily in this area with new sales collaboration features in its sales force automation application that allow reps working on one sales

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way. Most cited a passion for the product and a desire to demonstrate their knowledge and be viewed as an expert in the community. Recently, salesforce.com unveiled its Service Cloud offering, connecting product conversations across different information silos such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook with internal knowledge bases that

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allows vendors to monitor, aggregate, and search conversations customers are having about their products, and to incorporate crowdsourced solutions into their centralized knowledge based in Salesforce CRM. In addition, Get Satisfaction, Lithium, and FixYa are popular startups that specialize in crowdsourced support tools. Get Satisfaction is used by companies like

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see Figure 4.11). Figure 4.11 Get Satisfaction helps alleviate companies’ support volume by tapping into customers to help answer each other’s questions. Salesforce.com hopes to tackle all three dimensions with Service Cloud, a set of technologies that augment traditional knowledge base solution data with crowdsourced knowledge. Service

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to find out what everyone on Twitter has said about something. For example, because I’m in charge of product management for the AppExchange at salesforce.com, I looked up “AppExchange” on http://search.twitter.com. There were hundreds of tweets (see Figure 6.2). Figure 6.2 Twitter search

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that allows employees of the same company to answer and view colleagues’ answers to a simple question: “What are you working on?” This is salesforce.com’s Yammer page. From the Library of Kerri Ross C h a p te r 6 S o c i a l I n

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a haystack. Tools are being developed to help product managers aggregate, summarize, analyze, and prioritize community feedback. The MyStarbucksIdea for Facebook application (built with Salesforce Ideas) profiled in Chapter 2,“The Evolution of Digital Media,” is one example. Instead of having customers post free-form ideas, Starbucks community managers have

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so that product managers can close the loop if and when the idea becomes implemented. By providing categories and tying participation back to CRM, Salesforce Ideas attempts to bring structure and analytics to traditionally unstructured user-generated content, making it easier for product managers to sort through the best ideas

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, take action on them, and even continue to track them through product development, marketing, and sales. Dell Computer is also using the Salesforce Ideas application to crowdsource ideation. In its first year, Dell’s ideation community, IdeaStorm, generated over 10,000 new ideas and half a million votes

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the Dell product management team, which has been able to accommodate the request and provide a better experience for customers. Dell is also using Salesforce Ideas internally to get suggestions from employees on how to make the company a better place to work and advance their careers. From the Library

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. Doostang positions itself as a private, exclusive network. I, for one, have Doostang to thank for helping place me in my current role at salesforce.com. Ryze Ryze was founded in 2001 by former engineer Adrian Scott. Like Doostang, it has half a million members. A lot of Ryze members

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this book). Here are the lists I use: • Family • Grade School Friends • High School Friends • Stanford Friends • Mayfield Fellows • Oxford Friends • Former Google Coworkers • Salesforce.com Colleagues • Faceforce User • Met at a Conference • Soccer Team • Never Met It’s not that you are being secretive or two-faced by exposing

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workplace, school, or region. Workplace or school (high school, college, or university) networks require e-mail addresses from that domain. For example, to join the salesforce.com network on Facebook, I need to provide my work e-mail address. Facebook will send me a verification e-mail to that address, and

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once I click on the link inside the e-mail, then Facebook takes it as proof that I, in fact, work at salesforce.com and allows me access to the other members in the network. This can be a good way of quickly finding people you know so

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governance. Social networking providers will need to continue rising to the challenge with more and better features that address enterprise requirements. Facebook’s partnership with salesforce.com is a good example of this starting to take place. By bringing a trusted corporate standard around security, privacy, reliability, availability, and compliance

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make employees more productive. As mentioned earlier in this book, Facebook is also making a big push for the enterprise. It has partnered with salesforce.com to create Force.com for Facebook, a set of developer tools that makes it easy to build Facebook applications on Force.com’s enterprise

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and productivity. The MyStarbucksIdea application and Appirio’s Jobs4MyFriends recruiting application previously profiled were both built using Force.com for Facebook. And of course salesforce.com itself is investing in making its Web applications more socially aware and better integrated with the various social graphs, such as our Service Cloud

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e s s 209 Greater Collaboration Across Organizations As organizational boundaries become less rigid, we will see greater collaboration take place across different organizations. Salesforce to Salesforce is a prime example of how this might play out. It’s a neat idea: Instead of a social network of people

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, Salesforce to Salesforce is a social network of companies. It allows companies to easily share data such as leads, opportunities, accounts, contacts, and tasks with their suppliers,

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vendors, partners, and customers that also use Salesforce. In a social network of people, the primary interactions might be exchanging messages, writing on someone’s wall, or referring a friend for an open

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easily collaborate with one another without the traditional headache of integration and manual back-and-forth coordination. Here’s an example: Company X uses Salesforce to Salesforce to share leads with its indirect channel partners and introduce approvals around any joint selling opportunities. Company X also automates workflow to adjust orders

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ability to log customer support cases. Just as the people-centric social networking discussed throughout this manuscript helps facilitate interactions and transactions between individuals, Salesforce to Salesforce makes interactions and transactions between companies easier and more efficient with this innovative new conception of an online social network. From the Library of

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e to Us i n g Fa ce b o o k fo r B u s i n e s s Figure 12.2 Salesforce to Salesforce is an online social networking service for companies. A company, such as Liberty Resellers in this case, maintains a set of connections with

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suppliers, channel partners, and customers. Companies can make and accept connection requests just like an individual would on LinkedIn or Facebook. Figure 12.3 With Salesforce to Salesforce, companies can choose to share certain data and workflow, such as accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, tasks, or custom data, by publishing these to

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support, 77-78 prospecting for customers, 65-67 sales team collaboration, 72-73 social capital in, 71 233 sales leads, obtaining, 65-67 Salesforce CRM, 41 Salesforce Ideas, 112 Salesforce to Salesforce, 209-210 salesmen (in social epidemics), 101 Sanrio, unsanctioned communities related to, 149-150 Schatzer, Jeff, 140 Scott, Adrian, 125 search

Vassal State

by Angus Hanton  · 25 Mar 2024  · 277pp  · 81,718 words

centre of the City of London. To proclaim their power and wealth, the owners, Salesforce (of San Francisco), also renamed the building ‘Salesforce Tower’, having bought the rights from the developer, a Massachusetts company, Boston Properties, Inc. Salesforce.com are leaders in ‘big data’ as well as having the biggest private aquarium in

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Europe. One of the many applications of Salesforce’s software is for managing savers’ funds – another industry being shaped by the American model. Until recently, investors entrusted their funds to money managers, who

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). UK banks have been sidelined by these corporations, who process documents more efficiently and whose fortress-like balance sheets inspire savers’ confidence. Not far from Salesforce Tower is Lloyd’s of London, which once dominated the insurance market, with wealthy individuals acting as ‘names’ standing behind the underwriters, but it all

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of cross-border takeovers in the world – and this flow is in addition to the organic growth of the US companies.21 Moving away from Salesforce Tower to the heart of the City, we reach the offices of New York lawyers Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins and White & Case: there are 16

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, and represent just one of dozens of competitive partnerships dominating their markets – such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Burger King and McDonald’s, Oracle and Salesforce, Android and IOS, Intel and AMD, Visa and Mastercard. Lastly, when the farms we drive past need fertilisers, they will very likely be buying from

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coordinated, along with the protestors, by a man called Marc Benioff.2 Benioff was an unknown businessman who would, in two decades, grow his company, Salesforce, into one of the biggest in America. He did it by smashing the business model of firms like Siebel. At that firm’s annual conference

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in Cannes, Benioff hired every cab in the city, and placed salesmen in them who subjected each Siebel delegate to the full force of Salesforce’s pitch. The pitch was not complicated: instead of buying expensive software outright, businesses could rent what they needed when they needed it online. Benioff

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was aggressively persuading buyers that ‘Software-as-a-Service’ (SaaS) was a better proposition than purchasing single-user licences. By 2003, Salesforce had grown its annual sales to $100 million, and since then it has multiplied them by 300, making it one of America’s largest tech

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told a conference that every kind of business would soon become an SaaS business.4 The SaaS revolution spread to include Adobe, Intuit and HubSpot. Salesforce is now ranked as the number-one customer relationship manager in the UK, and its UK sales alone exceed £160 million every month. What drives

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prices. Erik Bullard, from the market experts UpperEdge, has observed that much of the software business happens in the dark: ‘The lack of transparency that Salesforce provides to the market is astounding when you consider the millions of dollars that are simply taken as “the cost of doing business with

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Salesforce” by many organizations.’5 Once they have signed up, customers are extremely sticky: inertia kicks in and the costs of switching suppliers can be crippling.

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he co-founded Flickr, and later built up Slack, the platform for programmers and other professionals to talk to each other. Slack was sold to Salesforce for $28 billion, giving Henderson a personal payday of £500 million in 2020, but, he laments: ‘It probably would have been impossible to start Slack

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://quote.org/author/trip-adler-49853. 2 For more on Benioff, see Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler, Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company – and Revolutionized an Industry (San Francisco: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 3 Marilyn Much, ‘How

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Marc Benioff revolutionized the software industry’, Investor’s Business Daily [website] (11 February 2019), https://www.investors.com/news/management/leaders-and-success/how-salesforces-marc-benioff-revolutionized-the-software-industry/. 4 Phil Wainewright, ‘Microsoft CEO to business: your future as a SaaS provider’, Diginomica [website] (16 March 2015), https://

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diginomica.com/microsoft-ceo-business-future-saas-provider. 5 Erik Bullard, ‘The escalating costs buried in your Salesforce agreement’, UpperEdge [website] (26 February 2020), https://upperedge.com/salesforce/the-escalating-costs-buried-in-your-salesforce-agreement/. 6 Mario Grunitz, ‘Everything-as-a-service: a look into the subscription-based model’, WeAreBrain [website

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies

by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh  · 14 Apr 2018  · 286pp  · 87,401 words

heavily defended niches to exploit breakout opportunities. For example, Slack’s rapid growth after its launch blindsided a host of entrenched competitors like Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Second, you can leverage your lead to build long-term competitive advantages before other players are able to respond. We’ll explore this concept

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thus dealing in bits rather than atoms), online marketplaces avoid many of the growth limits of human or infrastructure scalability. PROVEN PATTERN #5: SUBSCRIPTIONS When Salesforce.com first launched its on-demand customer relationship management product, there were many legitimate questions about this new software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Selling

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enterprise software. The cash flow disadvantages and required personnel shifts were real concerns, but mainly for existing players in the market. New SaaS businesses like Salesforce.com and Workday were designed and built around the new model, giving them a major advantage over existing players who tried to convert their on

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seven-figure range simply to make the model work. This meant that software vendors focused on the needs of only the largest customers. In contrast, Salesforce.com and other SaaS vendors can sell software licenses in any quantity, not only to Fortune 500 companies, but also to midmarket and small to

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work on two largely separate products, but that’s precisely what we did, despite the inefficiency and messiness. Second, we had to rapidly scale a salesforce while we were still developing the product they were selling. This took a lot of hard work on the part of LinkedIn’s CEOs, Dan

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an app to a platform so that you can attract people to build on and to your platform (thereby leveraging the network effect of compatibility). Salesforce.com’s Force.com ecosystem is a great example of this. By offering the ability to build third-party applications on top of the

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from a “force multiplier.” There are over 2,800 apps on the Salesforce AppExchange, and an International Data Corporation (IDC) study showed that the Salesforce ecosystem generates 2.8 times the revenues of Salesforce.com itself. That means that while Salesforce.com has revenues of “only” $8.4 billion, its platform gives it the

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your business. You’ll often have to do things that don’t scale when it comes to sales (e.g., founder Marc Benioff brought in Salesforce.com’s first customer, Blue Martini Software, by calling in a favor from its CEO Monte Zweben), operations (e.g., Paul English listed his personal

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—are known for their distinctive cultures, regardless of their era. The same can be said for more recent start-up market leaders like Airbnb and Salesforce.com. Typically, the credit for these cultures goes to the founders. Bill Hewlett and David Packard are synonymous with the HP Way. Bob Noyce, Gordon

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app, users can upload financial details and get a mortgage loan decision in minutes. Quicken Loans launched Rocket Mortgage in November 2015, Detroit, MI SALESFORCE.com Salesforce.com Salesforce.com provides cloud-based applications for sales, service, and marketing, as well as enabling partners to offer and run their own solutions on the

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Salesforce Platform. Founded February 1999, San Francisco, CA SLACK Slack.com Slack provides cloud-based collaboration tools and services that connect teams with the apps, services,

People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams

by Jono Bacon  · 12 Nov 2019  · 302pp  · 73,946 words

LOUDER REVOLUTION These five trends have been the foundation behind some impressive communities in recent years, many of which are from recognized brands such as Salesforce, Lego, Procter & Gamble, and Nintendo. These communities include users coming together to share information and guidance for others using a product, champions who actively create

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contribute additional value, and see this value being consumed by other members. This builds goodwill. It creates trust. It builds brand loyalty. One example is Salesforce. Their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is big business, providing a central database platform where businesses track customers, clients, partners, and more. As I scribble

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arguably the most popular CRM system in the world. Boasting 150,000 customers and an estimated 3.75 million subscribers, Salesforce has an enormous customer base across a broad range of industries.22 The product itself is very comprehensive (some may argue a little too comprehensive),

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, and making it work for the customer can be a steep hill to climb. To address this, in 2005 the Salesforce Success Community was formed (which was later renamed the Salesforce Trailblazer Community). Initially it provided access to documentation and guidance, but it started steadily mixing a broader range of features into

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that almost brings San Francisco to a standstill due to its size). The community hit its one-million-members mark in 2014. Since then the Salesforce Trailblazer Community, as it is now known, has provided additional structured methods of tapping into existing expertise as well as engaging with the community around

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new topics. There is little doubt that the community has played a significant role in the success of Salesforce. 2. Awareness, Marketing, and Customer/User Success “Eyeballs.” That was the answer a friend of mine gave when I asked about her number one goal

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world; it applies to technology too. Apple, Samsung, and Google have perfected setting up and teaching you about your new cell phone; services such as Salesforce and QuickBooks simplify getting your account set up and learning the tools; and video games such as Battlefield, Final Fantasy, and Metal Gear Solid teach

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.com/talks/dan_ariely_what_makes_us_feel_good_about_our_work. 22. “Salesforce Customers List,” Sales Inside, accessed May 2, 2018, https://www.salesinsideinc.com/services-details/salesforce-customers-list. 23. “Salesforce Trailblazer Community,” Salesforce, accessed February 25, 2019, https://success.salesforce.com/. 24. “Firefox Crop Circle,” FirefoxCropCircle.com, accessed November 30, 2018, https

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–55 with community strategy, 29–32 Rock, David, 104 role models, 186 round-table discussions, 246 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 137 Salesforce, 9, 21–22 Salesforce Success Community, 21–22 Salesforce Trailblazer Community, 21–22 sales leads, community members as, 120–21 sales team, interactions of community and, 29, 87, 120–21 Samsung

The Future of Technology

by Tom Standage  · 31 Aug 2005

benioff (not a grey hair in sight) is not afraid to mix religion and business. In February 2003, the practising Buddhist and chief executive of salesforce.com, a San Francisco start-up, invited 200 customers and friends to a benefit concert featuring David Bowie, with proceeds going to the Tibet House

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,300 customers in 110 countries have already signed up for it, generating $52m in the 2002/03 fiscal year, says Mr Benioff. Sceptics maintain that salesforce.com is not so much the leader of a new trend as a lone survivor of better times. Hundreds of application service providers (asps) were

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future, technology itself could lead to a better balance in the sector as a whole. The internet made it possible to run asps such as salesforce.com, but it also enabled hardware-makers to monitor servers and bill customers remotely on the basis of the average use per month. This is

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has to happen: there has to be wide deployment of web services. These are not, as the term might suggest, web-based offerings such as salesforce.com, but a standard way for software applications to work together over the internet. Google, for instance, also offers its search engine as a web

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essentially pieces of software that offer all the ingredients necessary to cook up and deliver a web service or a web-based service such as salesforce.com. Just as with management software for data centres, vendors are already engaged in a battle for dominance. Ranged on one side is Microsoft with

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have to push all the complexity to the back end in order to make the front end very simple,” says Marc Benioff, the boss of Salesforce.com, a software firm (see page 91). This migration of complexity, says Mr Benioff, echoes the process of civilisation. Thus, every house initially has its

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called “application service providers”, or asps. These companies build huge datacentres so that other companies do not have to. The best-known asp today is Salesforce.com, a San Francisco firm that made its debut on the stockmarket in June 2004. As the name suggests

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, Salesforce.com specialises in software that salespeople use to keep track of their marketing leads and client information. Traditionally, firms buy this kind of software from

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vendors such as Siebel Systems, then try to integrate it into their own datacentres. With Salesforce.com, however, firms simply pay a monthly fee, from $65 per user, and go to Salesforce.com’s website, just as they go to Amazon’s when they want to shop for books, or

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FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY browser – is already familiar to them. “I can train the average customer in under 45 minutes on the phone,” claims Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s boss, adding that traditional software packages often take weeks to learn. The it staff of the firm using

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also have less work to do. They do not have to install any new software on the firm’s own computers, and can leave Salesforce.com to worry about integrating its software with the client’s other systems. Even upgrading the software becomes much easier. Instead of shipping boxes of

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cds to its customers, Salesforce.com simply shuts down its system for a few hours on a weekend night, and when clients log on again on Monday morning they see

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of customers, bills, inventories and so forth is to rent such services for a monthly fee. This suggests that application service providers (asps) such as Salesforce.com, in their business models as well as in their technologies, could become disruptive simplifiers at the expense of today’s enterprise-software giants. For

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Roy, Raman 125–8 Russia 115, 130, 140, 142, 145, 319 Ryan, John 312 S S700 mobile phone 171 Saffo, Paul 83–4, 103, 182 Salesforce.com 19, 20, 84, 91–2, 109 Samsung 158–60, 181, 208, 217, 231, 277 Santa Fe Institute 39 SAP 22, 38, 86, 119, 126

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