Cloud pure-play Salesforce.com is putting more money where its growth is in Europe and plans to create 750 new jobs in the region over the next 24 months. The UK is tagged as one of its four core European countries in terms of investment (along with France, Germany and more recently the Netherlands) so we would expect a good proportion of those new jobs to surface in the UK.
The move signals European enterprises’ willingness to adopt cloud technologies for its cost and flexibility benefits and further emphasises the threat Salesforce.com poses to traditional suppliers like SAP and Oracle. At its conference last week SAP was open about the threat of cloud providers to its core business, hence its earlier SuccessFactors acquisition, its planned Ariba purchase, and its revamped cloud strategy. Oracle, with its Taleo acquisition and other initiatives, is due to reveal the latest iteration of its cloud strategy on June 6. Salesforce.com’s European revenue leapt 33% to $118m in Q1 FY13 and it now has 20,000 customers in Europe. We believe the UK is one of its largest markets outside the US.
Philanthropy is an important part of the Salesforce.com ethos through its Salesfore.com Foundation, and the UK will benefit from a new initiative – a partnership between the Foundation and Skills for Growth Landmark to create the BizAcademy Apprenticeship programme, which is aimed at unemployed youth in the UK.
Back on the business side of things the company, which now brands itself as a social enterprise company, announced at its London Cloudforce event that it was setting its sights even more firmly on the enterprise collaboration market. It has extended its Chatter social enterprise tool and made it real time, with the addition of instant messaging and screensharing. This is notable because it will put Chatter up against the likes of Citrix’s GoToMeeting and Cisco’s WebEx. One of the things Salesforce.com can be relied on to do is add to its roster of competitors – but that is a mark of how disruptive it is to the market.