Browse > Home / Salesforce.com News / OVER ONE MILLION SERVED

OVER ONE MILLION SERVED

December 6, 2007

Salesforce.com Reaches New Milestone: 1 Million Subscribers

By Jason Stewart

December 6, 2007 - Salesforce.com had made a few big announcements on two coasts yesterday, in San Francisco and New York, most notably that they have now surpassed 1 million subscribers and they expect to hit $1B in revenues in 2008. They had already announced they planned to hit $1B, but combine that with their huge subscriber milestone it is most certainly big news for the company Marc Benioff described as the “…drivers, catalysts and evangelists” of software as a service (SaaS).

SFDC certainly seems to be the only ones out there doing SaaS right. Even many of their partners – endorsed and approved members of the AppExchange program – can struggle with the concept. As Marc Benioff lauded several companies who are “going native” and developing new programs on the Force.com platform, I was struck by the thought of how enticing and charismatic SFDC can be, but how it can be very risky to rely so heavily on SFDC’s customer list as your sole source of revenue. Some simple math: $50/month per seat, 5 seats per customer, 1000 customers equals the $3M in revenue which is considered by some to be the measure of a viable technology business. Even if you double the price you still need 500 customers to reach $3M in revenue – and you would need to ask yourself if you offer the same level of functionality that SFDC offers for close to the same price (which is not likely), as well as overcome the stigma of being an add-on that costs almost (if not more) than SFDC. This could explain why some of the most successful AppExchange partners either have a “pay-as-you-go” model piggybacking on a free AppExchange download, or revenue streams that are independent of Salesforce.com.

It can be tough out there for a SaaS company, which is what makes the success of Salesforce.com such a milestone.

The second announcement was about the creation of the “Force for Change” awards, where 10 of Salesforce.com’s non-profit customers were selected to be honored and to also receive donations of $100,000 each. The recipients, all great causes, were:

San Francisco Connect

Bronx Lab School

Room to Read

Transfair USA

Acumen Fund

The Tibet House US

San Francisco General Hospital

The Bridge School

Endeavor Kiva.org

I have always been struck by how committed Salesforce.com is to not only helping the community (with their Salesforce.com Foundation as well as their 1/1/1 policy), but also making it as easy as possible for non-profit organizations to use salesforce.com to help run their organizations. Local user groups dedicated to non-profits are also appearing, with the most recent being in the San Francisco Bay Area. Non-profits can find information on the product donation program here.

From a straight “product” perspective, the most interesting announcement was for the introduction of “Salesforce to Salesforce,” a new development which could revolutionize BtoB partner relationships. If both parties are Salesforce.com customers, individual records (leads, opportunities, etc.) can be shared across multiple organizations. People seemed really excited by this, especially when the words “social networking” and “Facebook” began being thrown around, and I was initially intrigued as this might serve to replace the PRM system which has been criticized for both costs and functionality limitations. I thought that it would enable me to share a lead with a partner, and then we would both be working from the same record shared across both systems. In looking through the literature that was distributed and the release notes, however, it seems like the records will still exist independently in both systems. I will be able to see the updated record in my partner’s instance but not make changes to it, and vice versa. Still pretty darn cool though.

The rest of the time was taken up with the showing of this video, and discussions of the Force.com platform and a Visualforce demonstration. Longer versions of both were also done at Dreamforce in September. Overall, a very big day for Salesforce.com and a true “million subscriber celebration.”

–

About Jason

Mr. Stewart leads demand generation programs for Demandbase and is a recognized thought leader in the B2B lead generation and lead management space. He founded and leads the Salesforce.com user group in Salesforce.com’s headquarters location (San Francisco) and has spent 10+ years in B2B telesales, demand generation, lead management and marketing operations with a variety of businesses including Maxager Technology, MarketLive, and Inference Corporation.

To learn more about Jason or Demandbase, visit Jason’s blog on demand generation.

Written by admin · Filed Under Salesforce.com News 

Email This Post Email This Post

Comments

2 Responses to “OVER ONE MILLION SERVED”

  1. Elay on December 7th, 2007 12:23 pm

    I’m on the PRM team and I’d like to clarify a couple points you made.

    While the records are independent, they are 100% shared when each party opts in to share. So as a vendor or a partner you can share records with each other and then keep updates in sync. But the power here is that any party can decide when to stop sharing.

    Thanks for the coverage.

  2. News of Salesforce’s 1 Million Subscribers Hits Mainstream | Salesforce Times on December 10th, 2007 8:21 am

    [...] our coverage of the 1 Million subscriber achievement here and the official release [...]

Got something to say?