SFDC CEO Benioff Named Top Business Leader
December 3, 2007 Leave a Comment
10 years ago, few executives would have believed in the end of installed software. Five years ago, companies were still very reluctant to put sensitive data into a hosted platform. Now we are in the age where on-demand applications are actually the preferred platform for marketing solutions. It is only a matter of time before finance/account, ERP, and other typical enterprise platforms follow suit.
As Google has been for many companies, salesforce.com’s platform has been a key enabler to many SaaS vendors, giving them access to a massive number of potential clients via their AppExchange ecosystem. Salesforce.com users have instant access to roughly 700 AppExchange partners, each with a solution designed to integrate seamlessly with the CRM platform. It remains to be seen how lucrative the ecosystem will be for salesforce.com in terms of direct revenue but it certainly does lend its own services a certain amount of stickiness that rivals Microsoft (on-demand CRM due out in the near future) and NetSuite (who has a similar but much smaller ecosystem) may find difficult to emulate.
The entire list of 2007 Agenda Setters is available atsiliconagendasetters.com
