| Target market: |
Midmarket and enterprise organizations; often global |
| Company locations: |
San Francisco, California (headquarters)
Switzerland,
England, Japan and other worldwide locations
|
| Awards: |
InfoWorld (2004, 2005, 2006)
PC Magazine Editors Choice Award (2002, 2003, 2004)
Visionary Award (SDforum, 2004)
Best of the Web (Forbes 2003)
CRM Excellence Award (2003-2006)
Top 100 Innovators Award (Businessweek 2006)
Innovation Award (AMR Research 2005)
Codie Award for Best CRM (2002-2006) |
| Partners: |
Google
IBM
Microsoft
BEA Systems
Sun
TIBCO
PricewaterhouseCoopers |
| Partner programs: |
Yes, channel partner program |
| Subscription pricing |
Group Edition - $1,200 USD per year for 5 users (replaces the Team Edition)
Professional Edition - $65 USD per user per month.
Enterprise Edition - $125 USD per user per month.
Unlimited - $100 USD per user per month
Platform Edition - $100 USD per user per month (no CRM software included) |
| Service Level Agreement (SLA): |
Sometimes yes, many times no |
| SLA guarantee |
Sometimes yes, most times no |
| SLA financial guarantee |
Sometimes yes, most times no |
| Support Programs: |
24/7 help desk, self service portal, partner network |
Salesforce.com was founded in March 1999 by Marc Benioff who was formerly with Oracle for 13 years and worked with Tom Siebel and directly for Larry Ellison. The company started by combining $6M of Benioff's own money (which he largely made from the success of Siebel) along with $2M from Larry Ellison. Salesforce.com later acquired approximately $150M from other venture capitalists and investors before going public in June 2004.
Things we like about Salesforce.com:
- Good ease of use; Salesforce makes repeated references to user interfaces from Amazon and eBay
- Unquestionable market share leader
- APEX platform breathes new development life into a product starting to get stale
- Marc Benioff's constant entertainment value
Things we don't like about Salesforce.com:
- We believe the product is clearly built for small businesses; While Salesforce.com has several of the largest SaaS customers, those customers seem to demonstrate a theme of buying the SaaS model (normally after having incurred a disastrous prior CRM implementation experience) rather than buying a CRM product with more mature enterprise level functionality
- Salesforce.com's foray into the development world (via APEX and other advancements) seem to come at the cost of advancing the core CRM product - which we believe hasn't advanced much for a few years
- We believe Salesforce.com's core CRM product is losing ground to both powerhouses such as Microsoft and Oracle as well as some of the much smaller and more nimble CRM pure-plays
For additional Salesforce.com reviews and readers posts, see:
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