The slew of announcements at Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce event were not just marks of its own growing maturity but the initial steps that are taking it into a host of new markets. Having thoroughly disrupted CRM and the rest of the front office space, it is extending its disruptive influence into new sectors and to suppliers who may not have directly felt its force before.
Everything is being oriented around social media (and originates from front office needs) in a bid to unify the Salesforce.com portfolio (i.e. consolidate its own developments and its acquisitions, which together span multiple business functions). So the marketing cloud is now the social marketing cloud which continues to challenge broad based CRM providers like SAP and Oracle but also puts specialist like Marketo, Aprimo and Eloqua in its sights. Chatterbox takes on cloud-natives like Dropbox, Box, Huddle and the legion of file sharing and collaboration specialists. If it can unify external facing social media with internal collaboration through its Chatter portfolio it will put itself more than step ahead of the competition.
Then there is Work.com, its foray into HR (there will be much more to come in this space) which, among many others, takes on SAP/Successfactors, Oracle/Taleo, but also up and coming cloud native Workday and the likes of IBM/Kenexa. Don’t forget Salesforce Identify which provides Facebook-style identify management services and takes Salesforce.com into the management and security spaces (Symantec, Sophos, CA, cloud specialists like Okta and so on). And of course the Heroku-based cloud service for Java shows of enterprise credentials which renews the pressure on the cloud platforms from Microsoft, SAP, Oracle. Lets not forget the Touch Platform services that bring Salesforce.com into this fevered space.
Now, not all of the initiatives are destined to be roaring successes and the developments are geared around the Salesforce.com platform and customer base so are not standalone challenges. They do expand Salesforce.com’s base, show prospects an alternative path forward (whether from Salesforc.com or other cloud pure plays), and have the potential to leach revenue from incumbents in this markets the new products apply to. This is why vendors outside the CRM space should be paying close attention to Salesforce.com.