IIM Indore Mumbai Salesforce.com | Business Model Analysis |

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About the Company:
Salesforce.com Inc. is a global enterprise software company headquartered in
San Francisco, California. Though best known for its customer relationship management (CRM) product, Salesforce has also expanded into the "social enterprise arena" through acquisition and by steadily improving and augmenting its core development platform. It was ranked number 27 in Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For in 2012.
It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the S&P 500 index.

The company was founded in March 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez as a company specializing in software as a service (SaaS).

In June 2004, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol CRM, raising US$110 million.
Company Specializes in cloud based CRM and offers SaaS and PaaS solutions.
Growth of Cloud Based Services
A series of macro-trends is fundamentally changing the way businesses must operate. Globalization is changing the competitive landscape, and mobility is changing the way workers do their jobs.
An explosion of consumer-oriented, on-demand services, led by Amazon.com and Apple’s iTunes, has taught people how easy it can be to access and share information or the goods and services they want.
These experiences, combined with the escalating competitive climate and challenges of managing an increasingly dispersed workforce as well as rapidly developing secure internet infrastructure are forcing businesses of all sizes to re-think how they acquire and utilize software applications.
Unwilling to continue to tolerate the operating inefficiencies and ongoing costs of traditional on-premise software products, a growing number of businesses are now adopting on-demand solutions to meet their business needs.
This has opened the door to an exciting new era of opportunity for organizations to leverage and build their own on-demand applications and a Pandora’s box of challenges for organizations trying to develop and deliver SaaS , PaaS and IaaS solutions in a cost-effective fashion.
Salesforce.com: Platform as a service
What is PaaS?
"Cloud computing" has dramatically changed how business applications are built and run. Delivering a new application is now as fast as opening the internet browser. Platform as a service-- or PaaS-- is a proven model for running applications without the hassle of maintaining the hardware and software infrastructure at the company. Enterprises of all sizes have adopted PaaS solutions like Salesforce.com for the simplicity, scalability and reliability. PaaS applications that always have the latest features without constant upgrade pain.
At its core, Platform as a Service (PaaS) eliminates the expense and complexity of evaluating, buying, configuring, and managing all the hardware and software needed for custom-built applications.

The Traditional Application Development Model is Broken
Building and running on-premise applications has always been complex, expensive, and slow. Each application required hardware, an operating system, a database, middleware, Web servers, and other software. Once the stack was assembled, a team of developers had to navigate frameworks like J2EE and .NET. A team of network, database, and system management experts was needed to keep everything up and running. Inevitably, a business requirement would require a change to the application, which would then kick off another lengthy development, test, and redeployment cycle.
Additionally, large companies often needed specialized facilities to house their data centres and a team to maintain them. Enormous amounts of electricity also were needed to power the servers as well as the systems to keep them cool. Finally, a failover site was needed to mirror the data centre so information could be replicated in case of a disaster.
Applications built with this complexity and infrastructure are difficult to scale for usage spike demands, brittle to update as the business needs change, and are difficult to make mobile and social.
The New Model: Cloud Apps
Just as Amazon.com, eBay, Google, iTunes, and YouTube made it possible to access new capabilities and new markets through a Web browser, PaaS offers a faster, more cost-effective model for application development and delivery.
PaaS provides the entire infrastructure needed to develop and run applications over the Internet. Users can access custom apps built in the cloud, just like their SaaS apps, while IT departments and ISVs can focus on innovation instead of complex infrastructure. By leveraging PaaS, organizations can redirect a significant portion of their budgets from “keeping the lights on” to creating applications that provide real business value.
PaaS is driving a new era of mass innovation and business agility. For the first time, developers can focus on application expertise for their business, not managing complex hardware and software infrastructure.

Measure development in minutes, not months
From multi-layered security to instantly social to mobile optimization — Force.com allows users to do it all.
The platform allows external developers to create add-on applications that integrate into the main salesforce.com application and are hosted on salesforce.com's infrastructure.
These applications are built using Apex (a proprietary Java-like programming language for the Force.com platform) and Visualforce (an XML-like syntax for building user interfaces in HTML or Flex).

Build
Form builder. Force.com's drag-and-drop tools, auto-generated user interfaces, pre-built components, and pre-designed templates helps in quick application development. Users can simply create objects and drag them onto the pages to interact with the data. With Force.com,users can build rich forms without complex code.
Travel
Mobile optimized. Everything which is build with Force.com automatically runs on iPads, iPhones, and other smart devices. Users can also develop custom HTML5-native apps with our SDKs. Give the employees the data they need wherever they need it.

Analyze
Real-time reports: Users can drag and drop to create personalized reports and dashboards by department, role, and individual. Show key business metrics in real time and easily drill down for additional detail. Force.com integrates easily with existing ERP.

Automate: Visual process manager. Users can design and automate virtually any business process—from approving a discount, to routing a service call, to generating a quote. Add business logic to applications; write database triggers, and program controllers in the user interface. Visual process workflow lets users add complex business logic to all the apps.

Integrate
Open APIs. Force.com's SOAP and REST-based APIs can be called from a wide variety of client-side languages or middleware.
Force.com integrates easily with Oracle, SAP, and other back-office systems, and includes support for all major development tools and IDEs, such as .NET, Java, and PHP.

Globalize
International deployment. Instantly deploy across the globe without worrying about hardware, installation, or maintenance. Data is always accessible and relevant. Salesforce.com has data centres located around the world.
Develop
Programmable logic. Users can create the user interface and the business logic.

Collaborate
Employee social network. Collaboration is automatically a part of every app build. Groups, feeds, push notifications, and file sharing help employees securely share information and stay up to date on changes and updates within the organization.
Secure
Multilayered security. Salesforce.com has a comprehensive privacy and security program that encompasses certifications, practices, people, and technology, and includes SAS 70 Type II and HIPAA certifications. Force.com's world-class security has been road tested by some of the most security conscious organizations across the globe.

Control
Identity management. Built-in user authentication and identity management lets users control where apps are deployed, and which data each user can access at the object, field, or record leve
Salesforce.com: Software as a service
Salesforce.com's cloud based CRM solution can be broken down into several broad categories: 1. Sales Cloud, 2. Service Cloud, 3. Data Cloud (including Jigsaw), 4. Collaboration Cloud (including Chatter) and 5. Custom Cloud (including Force.com).
The Sales Cloud

These comprises of several cloud based ready to use applications. They are based on pay per use model. Salesforce.com can customize these services based on client needs.
This application runs in the cloud, so the user can access it anywhere through an Internet-enabled mobile device or a connected computer. The Sales Cloud includes a real-time sales collaborative tool called Chatter, provides sales representatives with a complete customer profile and account history, allows the user to manage marketing campaign spending and performance across a variety of channels from a single application, tracks all opportunity-related data including milestones, decision makers, customer communications, and any other information unique to the company's sales process.
Automatic email reminders can be scheduled to keep teams up to date on the latest information.
Marketing & leads
It has been designed to optimize campaigns from lead to close, on every channel. It helps in making smarter decisions about where to invest, as well as shows the impact of marketing activities on company's bottom line. Lead management
With the Sales Cloud, marketing and sales come together: It's the command centre for managing and tracking campaigns across all channels—including social media—from lead capture to close. One can make smarter decisions about where to invest and show the impact of marketing activities on company's bottom line.

Campaign management
Tracking the results of marketing campaigns across a variety of channels - from online ads to social media—all in a single application. When leads come in from the campaigns, automated scoring and lead routing ensures that leads always get to the right sales representatives.

Data.com
Data.com scrubs the CRM clean, so that sales and marketing efforts are enabled with complete, accurate data. * Real-time clean data
Instantly access millions of top-quality D&B company profiles and Jigsaw contacts together in one place. User will get clean, current, and accurate names, emails, phone numbers, employee counts, and more. * New life for incomplete, outdated records
On average, 91% of CRM data is incomplete, and 70% becomes outdated each year. But user can make the dead end leads instantly actionable by using Data.com to fill in missing account and contact information. * Instant Chatter alerts
It helps user to know when important contact or account data changes. Chatter automatically alerts the instant when a title, email, phone number, or any other details are updated. * Data-quality dashboards
User can easily visualize the health of the data—and how hard it's working.

Mobile access
Provides instantaneous access to leads. Salesforce enables conversion of lead into an opportunity from smartphone so that the sales process starts right away.

Social accounts & contacts
This sales cloud application helps in bringing social intelligence to sales process. User can Gain insights from popular social media sites—like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Klout—right within Salesforce to help in selling more effectively. And get a complete picture of the customer in one place—including account history, key contacts, customer communications, and internal account discussions.
Get social
Helps user tap into activity on social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter and makes it easier to build stronger, longer-lasting relationships and close more deals.
360-degree view
The Sales Cloud provides quick access to all critical account data, including key contacts, communication history, shared documents, partners in the account, and more. Companies can get a complete picture of every contact, from social insights to campaign history to opportunities they're involved in.
Partner management
Partner Portal helps in building loyalty, enhanced collaboration, bagging more deals, and connecting Users’ Salesforce to that of partners' to collaborate on opportunities, leads, and much more with Salesforce-to-Salesforce.

Manage the full partner lifecycle
Partners can securely register deals, collaborate on opportunities, request marketing funds, and directly access relevant information to help them easily do business with each other. It provides unfettered visibility into the activities, performance, and end-to-end ROI of indirect channel.

Partner portal
Easily deploy a fully branded partner portal, where partners can register deals, work on opportunities, access the latest content, request shared market development funds (MDF), and collaborate seamlessly.

Salesforce to Salesforce
If user’s partners already use Salesforce to manage their business, Salesforce to Salesforce allows user to connect, share, update, and synchronize leads, opportunities, accounts, contacts, activities, cases, custom objects, and more, all in real time. And, it's free for any Salesforce user.

Chatter Communities
Allows users to create private branded social communities for customers and partners.

Chatter Communities for Partners will connect companies with distributors, resellers and suppliers in entirely new ways to drive more sales.
Service
Communities give customers one place where they can go to get answers. Seamless escalation to the contact centre makes communities first line of support, and breaks down the silos between traditional self-service and peer-to-peer service. Increase loyalty and decrease costs.

One seamless platform
Transition seamlessly between communities for the employees, customers, and partners -- and access the data & workflow -- all in one place. User can even customize and create any kind of community.
Fast setup
Communities is 100% in the cloud, so companies can customize quickly and get started.
Analytics
Make smarter decisions as a team. Salesforce.com gives an at-a-glance, real-time, personalized view of business, and gives insights through real-time feeds. Everyone from executives to sales reps is a click away from the information they need to answer key questions and manage their business for success. Real-Time dashboards
Real-time dashboards provide a complete picture of the business. With dynamic and filtered dashboards, can drive to shared KPIs to align the business, while giving each leader the personalized view they want.

Drag-and-drop reports
Users can just drag and drop on the fields, filters, groupings, and charts that companies want, and get an immediate real-time view, with instant drill-down to operational data.

Enterprise Analytics
What-if modelling, filtering. Enterprise Analytics gives everyone the power of joined reports, data bucketing, and advanced filtering.

Forecasting
An accurate sales forecast is critical to managing the business. With Collaborative Forecasts, companies get one real-time view of the entire team’s forecast, including in-line forecast summary adjustments, override visibility up and down the management hierarchy, and of course multi-currency support, custom forecast categories, and a complete, real-time view into team's opportunities. Quotas and quota attainment
Quickly see how the team is performing against plan. The forecast screen shows quota and quota attainment right alongside the forecast numbers. By tracking overall quota attainment for the month, the forecast period, or in each forecast category.

Custom forecast categories
Users can use standard forecast categories like pipeline, best case, commit, and closed—or tweak them to map to the organization’s forecast stages.

Opportunities & Quotes
Users can find deal stage, products, competition, quotes, and deal team information right on the Opportunity, and track any changes in real time on Chatter feed.

Opportunity tracking
Opportunity records display critical details about the deals which teams are working on, like how much each one is worth, who the competition is, and what stage the deal is in. Companies can follow the opportunity feed to receive automatic updates via Chatter, plus track all associated activities as they happen to close deals faster.

Products and quotes
Companies can Track product-level information on each opportunity, including quantity, standard price, quoted price, and product codes. They can set up revenue and quantity schedules to mirror payment and delivery terms. And with built-in quoting capabilities, reps can automatically populate a quote with relevant customer data, generate a PDF from an approved template, and email it to customers directly from salesforce.com in just a few clicks.

Mobile
Teams can be informed with real-time updates to Opportunities made right from iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry smartphone.

Files & libraries
Users can find and share the key documents without digging through file repositories and old emails. It helps to collaborate to revise presentations using social features like comment threads, following, @mentions, and "likes." Share files securely, keep track of what's most useful, and get notified when content changes. Collaborate
Put key sales assets in the cloud and the entire team can work together from anywhere, on any device. Team can collaborate on a wide range of files as a small team, across the organization, or externally with customers.

Search
Put all of the files, content, and customer information in one place to make it easier than ever to find. With quick filters, users can find what they need by group, library and most recent,. They can also follow a file to ensure they never have to search for it again, and always have the latest version on hand.

Libraries
It helps to Keep the hardest hitting, most up-to-date sales tools in front of the sales and marketing team, and eliminate mistakes in the sales cycle by managing and publishing the most accurate product specs, contract documents, and price lists, both internally and externally. Quickly see commonly used files, get real-time alerts whenever content is updated, and use tags to easily classify content across libraries, and enable faster searching through filtered results.
Track every customer email
Salesforce lets companies easily track customer emails from any email tool with a simple BCC that automatically captures every customer interaction within Salesforce, and associates it with the appropriate contact, as well as opportunities or accounts that contact is a part of.

Email campaigns and templates
Salesforce lets both sales and marketing leaders craft vivid email templates on any topic, so team can instantly drive customer interest, with automatic follow-up tracking in Salesforce.

The Service Cloud
Customer service is social
It empowers the customers with communities. It facilitates service delivery to customers on the social media channels where they live and give the agents tools for collaboration. Social Contact Centre
It is fully integrated with the company’s call-centre telephony and back-office apps

Communities
Increase loyalty and decrease costs: With communities, companies can give customers one place to go to get the answer they need. Seamless escalation to the contact centre makes communities first line of support.

Social Customer Service
Deliver answers anywhere. Let questions and comments from social media channels become part of &&& case queue. Route them through a single hub, and monitor and prioritize conversations by sentiment and influence. Then use insights from their online profiles to deliver better answers faster. Resolve issues faster. Live Agent web chat lets companies give customers faster answers. So their cases get quicker resolutions. Pre-integrated with the Service Cloud, there’s nothing to install. Embed Live Agent into the site and start giving customers instant answers in real time.

Visual Workflow
Streamline process management. It supports several processes from call scripting and returns, to quotes and resolutions and automated approvals for critical processes. Get consistency and speed across every customer-service channel, from the call centre to the web, all entirely in the cloud.
Dashboards and Reports
Complete customer insight. No complicated setup is required, just the customer service metrics that are important.
Chatter
Users can collaborate in real time. Agents can collaborate, share insights, or get input from peers instantly. And every user can fine-tune their feeds to get information from the groups and individuals that matter most to them.

Contracts and Entitlements
Lower costs and give every customer the level of service they deserve. Keep tabs on key milestones and metrics. Continuously track progress against service milestones to ensure amazing service. Mobile
With mobile access to the Service Cloud, users can also get the latest performance metrics anywhere and anytime. And field service apps from the AppExchange let users manage field ops, from scheduling to logistics and more. AppExchange
The AppExchange—the world’s leading cloud application marketplace—has thousands of apps, social tools, and expert services to help optimize the Salesforce deployment.

Marketing Cloud
Social Listening
User can tap into real-time conversations from more than 400 million social sources. They can use social insights to make better business decisions in marketing, sales and service.
The Marketing Cloud tracks sources across the web, including: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and online communities. Real-time dashboards give actionable insight, such as customer sentiment, demographics, intent and influence.

Social Content
Create compelling social presences. Create and deploy social content to customers wherever they are - on social networks, websites and mobile. Use more than 50 social applications, such as contests, videos and photo galleries, to engage fans with powerful content. Add social components to all content and maximize the reach across the web.
Engagement
Allows companies to connect with customers. Build a community of advocates by connecting with customers when and where they are most engaged. Discover and respond to customers and prospects in real-time across social platforms. Spark conversations with messaging power that extends beyond simple text - attach videos, images and links to engage users or drive traffic.
Scale engagement with social workflow and automation. Leverage granular rights and permissions to give users the access they need without sacrificing security.

Workflow and Automation
Companies can align sales, service and marketing and apply sophisticated analysis and rules to organize the thousands of conversations happening across the web.
They can bring social insights into Salesforce CRM for use with sales and service.

Social Ads
Helps in reaching the desired audience by quickly and easily creating highly targeted campaigns at scale.

Measurement
Users can track campaign ROI. Identify how social activity drives sales. Track the performance of content, such as how it increases website traffic, signups or downloads.
Use data to optimize social campaigns in real-time and create more effective new campaigns. Determine the brand advocates and how social presences increase revenue.
Success Stories
Financial Times:
With its iconic salmon-colored paper, the Financial Times has been a leading provider of business news, commentary, and analysis for almost 125 years. In recent years, the FT has reshaped and adapted to the rapidly changing environment for news media. By embracing a channel-neutral strategy, the publication has ensured its authoritative, award-winning, and independent journalism is available to readers anytime, anywhere, and on whichever device its increasingly mobile audience might choose. Digital subscribers now exceed global print circulation among its daily global audience of 2.1+ million.
To underpin these changes, alignment of the entire Financial Times team to suit the new business landscape was crucial. Salesforce is used by many of the organization’s employees, including ad sales teams, journalists, and back office personnel. “The ability to consolidate onto one platform has had a big impact for us. It’s more cost-effective to maintain and support, and users only have to log into one place,” says Christina Scott, CIO.
With a common view of customer information, teams across the company are able to attract and retain advertisers and subscribers. Advertiser contact information and sales activities are tracked in Sales Cloud. The company also uses Sales Cloud to manage subscriber data, and is moving its billing system—for both businesses and consumers—into Salesforce for complete and detailed views.
As a subscription business, Financial Times knows that customer acquisition is just the beginning. More than 100 agents in call centres across the globe use Service Cloud to track issues and resolve them quickly. “From a service or subscription point of view, managing our customers on a single platform is critical to survival,” adds Scott.
The Financial Times has also moved many of its systems from legacy platforms into Salesforce, including contracts, directories, IT help desk, and order management. The Salesforce Platform even powers the website for the company’s popular consumer luxury lifestyle magazine, How to Spend It.
Social media is the source for a new era
The Financial Times uses social media channels including Facebook and Twitter to share breaking stories, cultivate online communities, and create deeper engagement with readers. The company also uses Marketing Cloud to monitor and engage with social customers. “Marketing Cloud lets us use social media to see how we’re doing,” says Scott. “Social media is the fastest growing traffic source to FT.com, increasing by 20 percent in the first six months of 2012, and is an increasingly important driver of new customers.”

General Electric (GE)
The image of an incandescent lightbulb is indelibly attached to the General Electric brand. But the company that was founded by Thomas Edison is now on the forefront of a variety of industries from consumer appliances to healthcare to power-generation. GE Aviation’s innovative new path involves building closer connections to its customers—and even making its products more socially connected. To make GE Aviation’s business more social, the company looked to the latest cloud technologies—and invented some additional ones.
GE Aviation started by using Salesforce to connect with commercial customers and manage opportunities. At first the division saw Salesforce simply as a way to give everyone access to customer data. But it was the collaboration it enabled that changed the day-to-day business. “Salesforce connected salespeople. It connected sales and marketing people. And it made those connections in a very iterative, fast way,” says GE's CMO, Beth Comstock. “It also gives everyone the synthesis of the data that we need to really know our customers.”
Chatter adds a deeper level of collaboration to GE Aviation’s sales efforts. Reps use it to share documents, answer questions, and get instantaneous feedback. “What might've taken a team—in the best case—a week, can now be done in minutes,” continues Comstock. “The immediacy and the touch points of Chatter change commercial business as we know it.”
Social networks are helping GE Aviation update its brand image and become more approachable to consumers. Using Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, the division can take consumers behind the scenes to see innovation at work. Social networks also provide valuable feedback, and GE Aviation is monitoring and participating in online conversations about its brand. “Social networks give &&& continual real-time feedback, unlike anything &&& can get from a focus group,” says Comstock. “Plus, they are a great source for ideas for future inventions.”
Visionary machines that will stay connected
It’s not just the people of GE Aviation that are becoming social. New products that will talk to customers are in development. The new GEnx jet engine—currently flying on Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner—has proven the capability to provide newsfeeds that can be accessed by service teams on their mobile devices. “The idea of connecting a machine to a social network is really exciting,” says Comstock. “We can build a community of service professionals around a machine to help reduce maintenance costs and increase engine lifespan. Social will help us deliver a better engine than ever before.”