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iForce™ Heroes Program Delivering Software as a Service |
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Click below to see: The Human Side of the Internet Delivering Software as a Service A Mobile Sales Infrastructurre Turning Shipping Ports into Data Ports |
Marc Benioff, chairman of Internet pioneer Salesforce.com, is a paradox. A veteran of the software industry, he makes his name—and living—predicting the demise of computer software. When
Benioff speaks about the end of software, he’s talking about traditional
packaged software, with its labor-intensive mechanics of burning applications
onto CD-ROMs, distributing them, installing them, and maintaining them—an
inordinately expensive and time-consuming process. Using the power of
the Internet, Benioff believes, most of this cost and complexity can
be eliminated in a single stroke. Before founding Salesforce,
Benioff shepherded Oracle’s new technology development, reporting
directly to Oracle chairman Larry Ellison. “My job was to look
at how to make possible what previously wasn’t possible,”
says Benioff. “I felt that the biggest new opportunity was to use
the Internet as a distribution vehicle for enterprise services, enabling
customers to quickly sign on to a web site and get all the features
they’d get from a traditional application, but with much greater
ease of use.” After 13 years at Oracle,
Benioff was ready to put his theory to the test. He and a dozen colleagues
from other companies set out on their own, committed to Benioff’s
vision of revolutionizing the delivery of software. The new venture,
Salesforce.com, was launched in March 1999, and its enterprise subscription
service went live with its first users in the fall of the same year. As its name suggests,
Salesforce initially focused on sales force automation, but has since
branched out into customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing
automation. The company now offers nine integrated modules—all
designed for delivery directly over the Internet. The pricing model
is simple: a subscription to the service costs $65 per month per user.
For that, customers receive not only powerful enterprise applications,
but also freedom from the burden of having to maintain the applications’
IT infrastructure in-house. The offer has been persuasive.
So far, more than 3,000 companies, representing some 50,000 users, have
subscribed—making Salesforce one of the fastest growing CRM companies
in the world. But Benioff believes this is just the beginning. The Internet, he says, will truly revolutionize the software industry over the next few years. And Salesforce is proof. The company, he predicts, will “change the world by showing you don’t have to buy software to build and run your company.” |
