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.

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.

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?

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.