Salesforce

Salesforce.com Inc., which often trades under the stylized abbreviation SFDC, is a cloud computing company based in California. The vast majority of the business' revenue is generated via its primary product, a customer relationship management tool, though it also sells a number of other services. Many of these revolve around the implementation of commercial applications of social networking.

The company went public in 2004, at which time it managed to raise $110 million. Notable investors include Larry Ellison, Nancy Pelosi, and Halsey Minor. Today the company has over 10,000 employees, making it the largest tech employer in San Francisco.

In 2018, Salesforce was rated 1st in Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For." Its assets total over $17 billion, and its annual revenue has reached over $8 billion.

Salesforce was founded by former Oracle executives Marc Benioff, Dave Moellenhoff, Frank Dominguez, and Parker Harriss. The company would offer a SaaS (software as a service) product, meaning it would be able to generate a recurring income from business clients.

The primary service offered by Salesforce-the self-named Salesforce platform-enables users to manage and track customers and leads, helping them to maintain relationships and encourage conversions.

Other useful offerings include Lightning Platform, which is a "platform as a service" that allows developers to create multitenant software that could be integrated into the Salesforce.com application, thereby expanding its capabilities to offer custom solutions. Community Cloud allows customers to create online web properties intended for external collaboration. These include custom portals, customer service tools, and channel sales. Work.com is a social performance management platform that helps employers and employees alike to improve work performance via coaching, feedback, and recognition. In short, while Salesforce is primarily a CRM tool, the power of its codebase has a lot of additional potential that the company is keen to tap.