Some startling numbers emerged from Salesforce.com’s fourth-quarter earnings announcement on Feb. 21, including a 58 percent increase in sales—the company added an impressive 90,000 net new subscribers for the quarter—tempered by a 91 percent drop in quarterly profits, mainly as a result of spending on the business. Now the company has outlined its strategy for adding to its bottom line.
During a luncheon in New York on Feb. 27, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff outlined the company’s formally named Salesforce.com 2.0 Strategy, which is designed to take the company into the next decade (Salesforce.com will have its 10-year anniversary in about two years). The strategy has two basic prongs: vertical applications that build on Salesforce.com’s CRM (customer relationship management) core, with a focus on financial services; and the platform, which includes the Saleforce.com “Circle of Success.”
The idea behind the Circle of Success starts with applications—Salesforce selling them and developers building them using Apex, the company’s new development language and platform. The rest of the circle includes using ideas generated by customers and developers building applications on Apex, advertising them on AppExchange, and using AppStore to both market and sell the applications.
What do potential Apex developers want from Salesforce.com? Click here to read more.
The concept is that all the capabilities will intersect to form a continuous cycle of idea generation, application development and sales, but in a democratized fashion, since Salesforce.com said it wants to be open, in order to foment the next Salesforce.com.
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