As Salesforce.com continues its inexorable rise, moving from sixth-largest to fourth-largest software company by next year (according to CEO Marc Benioff), customers and competitors alike might wonder at its secret to success.
Perhaps it’s the fact Salesforce runs in the cloud. Salesforce essentially invented software-as-a-service – but today, many companies play in this space, and first-mover advantage counts for little. Just ask search engines AltaVista and Excite.
Or maybe it’s the Salesforce1 Platform. More than a suite of sales, marketing, and other customer relationship applications, Salesforce provides the underlying infrastructure for a host of third-party apps and services.
But we’ve seen many platform plays as well, from Microsoft to IBM. And while these incumbent vendors are unquestionably successful, neither they nor any other platform provider has the growth trajectory of Salesforce.
Then there’s the ecosystem of partners and other participants in the broad customer-focused story that Salesforce has been telling for over a decade. And while other vendors have built flourishing ecosystems to be sure, the sheer scale of last week’s Dreamforce conference underscores the fact that nobody has ever built an ecosystem bigger or better than Salesforce has.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/09/21/salesforce-ecosystem-growth-beyond-the-cloud/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Kevin Krejci.
