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.

Comments

Re:Privacy concerns

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

era of the web application

[Random Web Developer]

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