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Salesforce.com: Another Valley IPO
prostoalex writes "It's a young company led by charismatic executive, it shows impressive growth, is located in Silicon Valley and recently filed for Initial Public Offering. Nope, it's not another Google story - New York Times profiles Marc Benioff and Salesforce.com, the company that said No to software applications (mostly Siebel and Oracle apps) and said Yes to hosted CRM solutions (which it hosts on its own servers). Benioff's personal philosophy is interesting as well, as he calls himself compassionate capitalist, believing that corporate philantropy and check-writing should end, but instead the company should allow their employees to dedicate 1% of paid time to volunteer projects in the community." I've used SalesForce for a while now - it's pretty slick. The era of the web-based software package has come.
i do more community work than these employees without getting paid. will i be eligible as a employee? p.s. i work on sundays too
I worked for a company for six weeks, helping them migrate data from Salesforce.com into Siebel.
They made the mistake of telling Salesforce.com that they were moving to Siebel (for performance reasons). After that, Salesforce would not let them extend their service for anything except two full years. Their current contract was scheduled to end in six weeks.
So they had to scramble to implement Siebel and load all their historic account, contact, and opportunity data in six weeks or pay for two more years. They sorta felt like Salesforce was holding their data hostage and were happy to leave.
Also, if I remember correctly, they had to pay 50 dollars every time they requested a *.CSV export of their data!
There's something to be said for having control of your own data.
Cost-wise, if you employ 100 people then that would cost the company the same as having one person working full time on community projects. This is better than nothing, even with the reduced productivity involved in spreading this time over 100 employees.
It would be interesting to work out how much a company would save using free OSS over existing solutions (think OpenOffice vs. MS Office) and how much employee time that would equate to that could then be donated back to the community.
It's a great idea to donate something back, even if this particular implementation isn't the best way.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
I (obviously, see nick) am pretty convinced that web applications have loads of advantages as deployment, manageability and what not, but for a CRM application I have serious reservations. Applications that users interact with constantly need to be above all, responsive. An accountant wants to play piano on his numpad without waiting for the application. When an administrative employee is holding the phone and looking something up, every delay is very very annoying
Artists against online scams http://www.aa419.org/
I really don't think that the prospect of in-browser toolbars killing the application is a major cause for concern given today's client-side options.
First, any organization making serious use of this sort of application ought to have paid some attention to locking down their workstations. Yes, I *do* understand that "Mom and Pop" shops are usally running XP Home boxes they picked up at CompUSA, but that's simply not the case for midsize and enterprise clients. Heck, even our small business customers know better, mostly because we provide them with LAN solutions alongside programming services.
Second, a great deal of browser-based misery can be alleviated by using a better browser such as Mozilla to navigate through the web app. To address those who would worry about non-IE browsers breaking web application functionality, remember: there's no reason not to target your app to Mozilla if you know your sales people will be running it on their laptops/desktops.
All in all, web-based application solutions represent a much better way of managing most companies' data when compared to "traditional" client-server solutions, at least in many key respects. 100% of our new development is web applications built on Perl/PostgreSQL/Oracle foundations, and we're definitely not hurting for new businesss.
Incidentally, most privacy concerns can be addressed by simply providing a dedicated (whether in-house or public access via secure authentication) server to host the applications in question. One box per client, and so forth.
personally I think that he does it for the publicity. Charities tend to get a lot of free press which would cost him a lot more if it were paid advertising ( alot more then 1%).
Adam Boalt
SmoothStart.com
Yeah, but what if all companies did this?
1% of 100 medium sized companies would be like an entire medium sized company doing nothing but charitable works. Every % counts.
Jeremy