Origins
Salesforce.com was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff. In June 2004, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol CRM. Initial investors in salesforce.com were Marc Benioff, Larry Ellison, Halsey Minor, Magdalena Yesil and Igor Sill, Geneva Venture Partners.
Current status
Salesforce.com is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with regional headquarters in Dublin (covering Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Singapore (covering Asia Pacific less Japan), and Tokyo (covering Japan). Other major offices are in Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, and San Mateo, California. Salesforce.com has its services translated into 15[3] different languages and currently has 43,600[4] customers and over 1,000,000[5] subscribers. In 2008, Salesforce.com ranked 43rd on the list of largest software companies in the world.[6]
Following the Federal takeover of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in September 2008, the S&P 500 removed the two mortgage giants after Wednesday, September 10, 2008, and added Fastenal and Salesforce.com to the index, effective after Friday, September 12, 2008.[7]
Acquisitions
The following is a complete list of acquisitions by salesforce.com:
- Sendia[8] (April 2006) for US$15 million in cash[9] – now Force.com Mobile
- Kieden[10] (August 2006) – now Salesforce for Google AdWords
- Kenlet[11] (January 2007) – Original product CrispyNews used at Salesforce IdeaExchange[12] and Dell IdeaStorm [13]. Now relaunched as Salesforce Ideas.
- Koral (March 2007) – now Salesforce Content
- Instranet (August 2008) – now rebranded to Salesforce Knowledge
Security issues
In November 2007, a successful phishing attack compromised contact information on a number of salesforce.com customers, which was then used to send highly-targeted phishing emails to Salesforce users. [14]
Products and Services
Customer Relationship Management
Salesforce.com's CRM solution is broken down into several applications: Sales, Service & Support, Partner Relationship Management, Marketing, Content, Ideas and Analytics.
Force.com Platform
Salesforce.com's Platform-as-a-Service product is known as the Force.com Platform. The platform allows external developers to create add-on applications that integrate into the main Salesforce application and are hosted on salesforce.com's infrastructure.
These applications are built using Apex (a proprietary Java-like programming language for the Force.com Platform) and Visualforce (an XML-like syntax for building user interfaces in HTML, AJAX or Flex).
AppExchange
Launched in 2005, AppExchange is a directory of applications built for Salesforce by third-party developers which users can purchase and add to their Salesforce environment. As of September 2008, there are over 800[15] applications available from over 450 ISVs.
Customization
Salesforce users can customize their CRM application. In the system, there are tabs such as "Contacts", "Reports", and "Accounts". Each tab contains associated information. For example, "Contacts" has fields like First Name, Last Name, Email, etc.
Customization can be done on each tab, by adding user-defined custom fields. [16]
Customization can also be done at the "platform" level by adding customized applications to a Salesforce.com instance, that is adding sets of customized / novel tabs for specific vertical- or function-level (Finance, Human Resources, etc) features.
Web Services
In addition to the web interface, Salesforce offers a Web Services API that enables integration with other systems.
Languages
English, Dutch, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Russian, Thai, Danish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
Other
Other technologies in use at salesforce.com are Resin Application Server, and the in-house technologies Apex (a Java-like programming language and programming platform) and S-controls (Salesforce widgets - these are predominantly based on JavaScript).
See also
Notes
External links
This article uses content from Wikipedia
