Story of Salesforce

Salesforce began in a small apartment in Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. Marc Benioff decided to leave a lucrative sales career at Oracle in order to pursue a vision.

Marc Benioff wanted to get out of the routine job and wanted to pursue his dream. He left Oracle to start with a cloud based CRM software “Salesforce” which was first of its kind during the time when software was delivered only through local installation processes. Salesforce was the first software solution to be delivered over the browser through a multitenant cloud infrastructure.

Soon Salesforce came to notice as Benioff hired paid actors to display “Anti-software” movement. This gained attention but none thought that this would take upon giant software companies. There were challenges to be overcome in terms of data security over the browser, and Benioff had to build trust that their data would be safe with Salesforce.

Back then CRM softwares turned complicated because of heavy features provided by software companies like SAP and Oracle. On the other hand what Salesforce introduced was easy to use and anyone could just login and use the system, first 5 users for free.

This was a revolution in the software industry and this model of business “SAAS” – Software as a Service came into existence and grew fast and more and more businesses adopted this methodology to deliver services to their clients worldwide.

In 2003, Salesforce introduced its first annual Dreamforce conference, which eventually turned out to be one of the greatest software events.

Soon, Salesforce started acquiring softwares to grow their footprint in the software industry. Salesforce successfully completed its first acquisition by buying ExactTarget and renaming it as Marketing Cloud. Later, Salesforce bought giants like Tableau.

From 2005 to 2014, Salesforce transformed from being a Software as a Service to Platform as a Service. It introduced its first on the cloud programming language APEX.

Salesforce later introduced AppExchange which is a platform to allow developers to create and sell their applications built on top of Salesforce Platform.

On 2008, Salesforce officially launched Force.com, which was the worlds first platform-as-a-service delivered over the cloud.

Salesforce acquired Tableau, Radian6, Jigsaw, Exacttarget and many other software solutions inorder to expand its business globally.

Salesforce turned out to be the worlds number 1 CRM software solution delivered over the cloud and the company continues to improve and grow.

Reference
https://www.j2interactive.com/blog/brief-history-salesforce/
https://usefyi.com/salesforce-history/