History of Salesforce
Salesforce, which is today the number 1 CRM in the world connecting companies and customers in the digital age. It was founded in 1999 in San Francisco. The premise of Salesforce was to enable companies of all sizes to use advanced technologies, such as cloud, mobile devices, social networks, voice and artificial intelligence. In order to connect in a whole new way with customers☁️
How it all started?
Starting all over again. It all started in March 1999 in one of the apartments atop Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. In the apartment that was next to Marc Benioff’s house. In addition to Marc, there were three other men in the apartment who started working in this small office were Parker Harris, Frank Dominguez, and Dave Moellenhoff. Interestingly, apart from them, in the apartment there were also posters with the Dalai Lama, Albert Einstein and two dogs? ?
Marc was inspired to create the first prototype from Amazon with its tabs at the top, which was easy to use.
Through the years
In July 1999, Marc’s first full-time job at Salesforce.com was to find an office. He found them at the Rincon Center, which was eight thousand square feet but had only 10 employees, which was disturbing to Parker. Until November 1999, desks were located in the corridors, and the conference rooms were full-time employees. A year later, it’s time to move to One Market Street.
Unfortunately, the year 2000 has come and the dot-com bubble bursts, which laid off 20% of the company’s employees. And on February 7, Salesforce.com officially launched the “Software’s End” event at the Regency Theater in San Francisco with 1,500 participants and a concert with The B-52s.
2003 the first Dreamforce event, one of the most iconic parts of the Salesforce ecosystem. Of course, earlier Salesforce organized many events across the country called: City Tours, which usually lasted several hours and presented new Salesforce features and an action plan.
However, the new event did not last several hours, it lasted for several days! The first edition of Dreamforce was held in downtown San Francisco at the Westin St. Francis and gathered just over 1,000 registered attendees who came to the event to attend 52 presentations. Dreamforce was used to launch a product called Sforce 2.0 – the industry’s first on-demand application service.
In September 2005, Salesforce launched its AppExchange service, which changed business software forever. AppExchange offers third-party developers a place to work on their own applications and share them with Salesforce customers.
In 2006, Salesforce did not stop there. Parker Harris developed a technology called Visualforce that allowed users to create whatever user interface they wanted – they could create forms, buttons, links, and embed whatever they wanted. This paved the way for the logical expansion of the Salesforce SaaS platform, Platform-as-a-Service.
They called it Force.com and it was released on Dreamforce 2008. This opened up opportunities for customers to build their own custom applications on the Force.com platform. Not only allowing users to access the robust and scalable CRM solution that customers loved, but now allowing them to access absolutely everything!
Over the years, Salesforce grew until in 2012, the company already employed 9,800 employees in 22 offices around the world and Salesforce leased space in an unbuilt skyscraper at 350 Mission Street. Dreamforce 2012 gathered 90,000 registered participants. Salesforce Marketing Cloud was introduced during the keynote speech.
In 2013, Salesforce introduces the Salesforce1 platform that allows customers to do business over the phone.
Salesforce in 2014 introduces the Trailhead training platform, which opens access to knowledge about technology and building a career in the industry. The platform is available to anyone and anywhere. Since its premiere at Dreamforce 2014, Trailhead has gained immense popularity around the world, especially with the introduction of Superbadges, certification exams moving to the Trailhead platform, and continuously adding more modules across multiple tasks.
At Dreamforce 2016, Salesforce announced its newest product, Einstein. Einstein was developed for each Salesforce product and enables all Salesforce customers to access the latest information about their platform and customers.
It provided advanced artificial intelligence capabilities for sales, service and marketing. Einstein was presented in front of the 170,000 crowd that had flocked to San Fran for the 4-day conference, and 15 million viewers were watching more via Salesforce Live. This is simply unbelievable compared to the first Dreamforce, where over 1,000 participants could fit into one downtown San Francisco hotel.
In 2018, Salesforce made its largest acquisition at the time, bringing MuleSoft to Ohana. MuleSoft is a platform that enables companies to connect legacy backend systems to the cloud, supporting them in their digital transformation. The acquisition filled a gap in the Salesforce product portfolio, so they no longer had to look for an external company that would meet this requirement.
The company is also introducing Salesforce Customer 360, a new platform service that seamlessly manages customer data in the cloud via a click-based user interface.
In 2020, Salesforce launched a range of products and resources to help companies deal with the pandemic, including:
Salesforce Care, a set of free rapid response solutions, companies were able to stay connected with employees, customers and partners during the pandemic.
Work.com, a suite of expert advice, content, data, and new products to help companies around the world reopen and grow their businesses and communities.
Vaccine Cloud to help public health authorities, healthcare providers and non-profit organizations rapidly scale vaccine operations, from recipient enrollment and planning to inventory management and public health awareness.
Salessforce also signs an official takeover contract for Slack.
In 2021, Salesforce announced its Netflix-style streaming service called “Salesforce +” – this would be Salesforce going into production by creating original series to empower its customers and prospects.
☁️Salesforce.com’s successes are impressive, but their impact on the community and the world they are trying to create is even greater. With their 1/1/1 model, they donated millions of dollars and thousands of hours of volunteer work, as well as millions of dollars of their own product to charities around the world?
Best Regards,
Karpato Salesforce Partner Poland
