Software as a Service - Part II

Filed in archive Technology on March 22, 2005

Marc Benioff Keynote Session

Highlights:

- Marc highlights the main trends of where salesforce.com thrives on (and many others as well):
- Internet
- Mobile Communications
- Utility Communication

- 227,000 subscribers, 13,900 customers are at salesforce.com
- main differentiation - customization that is easy enough
- SaaS helps to democratize technology now small companies and big company rely on the same software (i.e. salesforce.com)
- Marketing is very focused on word-of-mouth (well besides many ads)
- salesforce.com tries to establish a new on-demand architecture based on proprietary tools (i.e. an on-demand database) in order to make customers stick
- customers shall be customizers (salesforce.com effectively outsources product development)
- besides CRM there should be more applications that salesforce.com wants to move in based on the on-demand infrastructure

Conclusion: Marc had a great success with salesforce.com so far. He is now betting on a wider architecture based on the tools he developed during salesforce.com. It will be interesting if this ambitious new way succeeds.

See a video footage here (17MB, avi).