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

1%?

[hanssprudel]

That's what - two and a half work days a year? I spend more paid time then that reading slashdot - per week! (And that isn't exactly making the world a better place.)

Re:1%?

[Anonymous Coward]

"One percent of Salesforce's profits are diverted to a foundation that Mr. Benioff created when founding his company, and employees get six extra days off a year to volunteer in any community program."

It would help if the submitter read the article first...

Privacy concerns

[Inigo Soto]

If Gmail has caused so much concern about privacy, I wonder what salesforce.com won't do! Externalising IT services, or even CRM software support is one thing, having all your customers information stored outside and out of your control may be another....

I'm not saying externalising is bad. It's the trend in the industry but still I find customer relations are among the most sensitive information a company handles

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.

Interesting idea...

[tttonyyy]

the company should allow their employees to dedicate 1% of paid time to volunteer projects in the community.

It would be nice to see other employers adopt this - especially if the company uses any OSS applications. Trouble is, it looks too much like doing free work for someone else to be widely adopted - and it'd cost in management time to ensure that the 1% isn't exceeded (it's easy to get carried away on a train of thought while coding!)

Re:24 minutes

[HeghmoH]

Yep, that figures. The top ranked post in this article is some moron criticizing this idea because it's not enough. Yes, this is so much worse than the 99.9% of companies that do absolutely nothing.

Re:24 minutes

[kartiknarayan]

Wait a minute - assuming you earn, say $60000, that's $5000 per month, or $50 worth of time the company is donating per month per employee. Multiply that by maybe 100 (?) employees, and that's $5000 per month. Not a small amount.

Even if it's 40 hours, you're not going to spend 24 mins every week doing charity - you may spend 3 hours on company time every 2 months.

I guess this allows the company to organise charity programs that it feels suits its own philosophy and knows where its $$ are going.

Not a bad idea, imho.

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

Re:era of the web application

[D4MO]

Agreed. Example, with html forms you do not, and never will, have the richness of native widets. Maybe xforms, but not completely. Server loop back for validation and all that crap.

Now where web applications are going is different... It's the whole XAML / Avalon / .Net thing will solve these problems. The borders between rich applications and internet services will dissapear. What Salesforce.com will do, as will amazon etc, is create a rich, internet delivered client. So you will have all the advantages of deployment, manageability and what not, and richness / responsiveness.

Other slashdot readers: now you see why mono project is so important?

Re:era of the web application

[D4MO]

As an example of my rant, take a look at iTunes. Why isn't it a pure browser based software? Well it need all this other functionality and richness so it has to run on a computer. Now look at how it is distributed, must download and install. In the future I see it as an app that is simply launched from a url. And that is the way everyone wants it. (.Net CAS takes care of the security, assuming the developer does).

Re:One Percent

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone seems to be complaining about 1% being "merely" 30 minutes a week. That's still loads better than... gasp!... NOTHING!

I don't know how things operate there, but I get this feeling that you don't just do 30 minutes a week, but rather do 4 hours every other month, which would be like half a day off. And to be honest, paid or not, people that do community projects do it for free anyhow. It's nice to get a little compensation, but more importantly, it's nice to have someone say "we support the work you didn't have to do."

There's a lot more to community projects than just coding for OSS. I'm actively involved in a community project, and spend a lot of my private time. It's actually voluntary community service, but hey, that counts too doesn't it?

So, 1% or not, that's still 2 free hours of pay every month. Not bad, not bad. It sure as hell beats zilch, and more importantly I get this feeling that the company would say "well, we can't pay you for more than 1%, but you are certainly welcome to work for free for yourself." That's loads better than my employer, who seems to think that I'm slacking if I work any less than 11 hours a day, and is sure to increase my work load which makes my voluntary work very difficult.

Re:responsible

[kill-9-0]

Great example, and what an excellent attitude!! Kudos to you. Capitalism is NOT evil. This country was built on capitalism. People often confuse capitalism with greed, they are NOT synonymous. I live a very nice lifestyle, due to the fact that the wife and I work VERY hard, and make very good money. We do it to make life better for our kids, but an added fringe benfit is that we are able to help charities. We donate a fairly large amount of money every year to various charites we support (won't name them for fear of being flamed) as well as our weekly church donations. We also donate time to various organizations. I have been an assistant scoutmaster with an underpriveleged troop in the area for 9 years, even though I have no child in scouts. I was a scout as a kid, and got a lot out of it, and this is a chance to give back a bit. Many people would consider me wealthy or rich, but that doesn't make me greedy. As I earn more, I donate more.

What sales-force automation software really does

[AndroidCat]

In part, Mr. Benioff said, he has no choice. He sells the kind of product that only a sales executive could love: a simple, efficient way of tracking a company's customers and prospective clients.

Actually sales executives love it because it tracks their own sales people: Do they keep busy, are they hustling for new business, do they keep their sales funnel loaded, .. do they have all their information in the system so that we can fire them next week?

Tracking customers is a nice spin-off.