Salesforce.com wants to remain focus in what it does best i.e. CRM, an application that manages relationships with customers and its platform. “Two of the most strategic aspects of cloud computing,” says Salesforce.com CEO citing Merrill Lynch report expecting the cloud computing market to reach $100 billion in 2010.
For Marc Benioff, the San Francisco, Calif.-based company will not build other categories of enterprise applications like ones managing human resources, enterprise/manufacturing resources planning (ERP) or enterprise financials (payable/receivable/general ledger…) because it will distract the company for its core.
“If all the sudden we decide to start selling some new category of applications, there will be competition between [our internal] resources [like taking some sales people out of CRM for example],” explains Benioff.
Salesforce.com growth is constrained by its salesforce or the lack thereof… Can it really scale?
In an usual turn of event, Benioff admitted that he was jealous of SAP’s and Oracle’s salesforce. “If I’m jealous of Oracle or SAP for anything, it’s because they have sales forces in the 10s of thousands. We only have 3,000+ employees… I wish I had twice, 3 times as many salespeople that I have,” added the company’s chief. “We view ourselves as a distribution constrained organisation”.
The only way Salesforce.com can scale is if it can attract developers on its platforms and start developing those hard, heavy and complex enterprise applications. ”I want to have all these applications on our platform but I just don’t want to pay for their development and I’d really like to see other people to sell it if they can,” said Benioff.
Anyone out there interested?
Here’s a video excerpt of Benioff’s comments:
