Its been 10 years and 3 months since salesforce launched its website kicking off the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) Revolution.
salesforce.com Wayback machine
I was reading Marc Benioff’s book Behind the Cloud and thought it was an appropriate beginning blog entry. In his book he gives some behind the scenes dialogue on how he and his team built salesforce.com with a playbook. As a SaaS enthusiast, I enjoyed the book and anxiously wait for the Unauthorized Version of Behind the Clouds to emerge to fill in some of the missing pieces.
I am starting with this post for a few reasons. Looking at this website to the left or any of the early pages, would you have bet that this company could achieve the Success and brand recognition that we know today?
- One of the 15 software companies in the past 30 years to achieve over $1 Billion in annual revenues.
- NYSE symbol CRM has achieved Market Capitalization of $7B+, Annual run rate revenues of $1.4 Billion
- As of February 24,2010, 72,000 companies with >2.0million licenses currently subscribe to salesforce.
To confess, I was a Goldmine user and financial advisor during salesforce.com’s early launch. I heard the media buzz that Marc Benioff created, so I tried one of the early versions of salesforce.com. I never thought that this product would make it and stayed with Sage’s Goldmine product until mid 2005, a year after the salesforce.com IPO. I was in disbelief that a software product’s functionality could change so dramatically in 5 years while the price remains constant – a 10X improvement. Compare that to the functionality improvements the end user sees between Microsoft Office 2003 and the 2007 version ( marginal improvements for a company that gets $19 Billion a year from Office) Welcome to the SaaS revolution!
So, I ask for your patience as I launch the SaaS Solutions website. We are a SaaS, customer-centric, value add start-up with the focus of combing People, Process, and Technology for Results.
I am currently doing salesforce.com contracting services for various Non-Profit organizations in Philadelphia, PA.
My previous experience includes :
- working for salesforce.com partner CRM-manager
- experience with Oracle CRM On Demand starting Biztech SaaS Practice
- 12+ years of Financial Services experience various roles and functions ( Sales, Service, Operations, Research Analyst)
