Customers are the lifeblood a business and Salesforce touches just about every nook of software that has anything to do with finding, acquiring, and supporting them. The grandaddy of SaaS, Salesforce pioneered a cloud-hosted subscription model that altered not only when software vendors realize revenue but how they create value. With one-and-done license sales replaced by recurring payments, Salesforce, more so than on-premise vendors like Siebel and Oracle, emphasized “customer success” over the lifetime of a contract.
Salesforce opened with salesforce automation (SFA), an application that salespeople used to track and manage leads. In the early 2000s, they exposed their infrastructure and APIs to third party developers (Veeva famously built the leading life sciences CRM on Salesforce’s force.com platform), and launched an online store, AppExchange, for those developers to sell their apps to Salesforce customers. In 2009, they automated customer service with Service Cloud before then expanding into marketing and commerce clouds, and layering on technology to connect and extract value across them.
Most of the clouds and connective technology were built on acquisition. Of the 80 companies acquired since acquisition, I’m sure many have flopped. But the big ones seem to have worked out fine: