Yes it is,
The CEO of a tiny startup that no one had heard of paid actors to carry “anti-software” signs. They marched in front of a user conference for Siebel Systems, which sold customer retention management software. Later that year, Benioff hosted a military-themed party where guests threw “pieces of software” into trash bins.
The stunts gained attention, but no one really believed that Benioff’s startup Salesforce could take on giant web based crm software company. Business Insider wrote an article on the protest and called Salesforce “the ant at the picnic.”
The ant at the picnic has helped to create a $250 billion global market. Benioff’s company was built around one main idea: that software should be delivered 24/7 to people over the cloud. Salesforce was the first company to do this. In the late 1990s, companies like Oracle and SAP were selling software to businesses that had to be installed and updated on-premise. Now, Oracle, SAP, and the rest of the world are belatedly building cloud products like web based crm software, trying to catch on to the movement that Salesforce started.
Salesforce staked a claim by building one of the first cloud products, a CRM tool, and aggressively evangelizing the company’s vision. They sold users on the idea of the cloud around a relatively straightforward product. Then they started building out other products and looking for ways to nurture a growing ecosystem—ideally to drive revenue back to Salesforce. Now, they’re defending their position as an incumbent by building more use cases and improving their own products in direct response to competitors.
Comments
Post a Comment