Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Why Salesforce?

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There are some great CRM tools in the wild.  In addition to being a certified Salesforce administrator, I’ve personally set up, configured, and used ACT, Goldmine, SugarCRM, and Zoho.  The first two are fine for small offices or individuals and the latter two can do a great job even for enterprises.  Prices range from free on up.

With all that in mind, why is Salesforce my solution of choice for most situations?  We could spend all night arguing about which product is easier to setup, more customizable, or gives a better user experience, but there is one factor that to me, makes the decision obvious.  That factor is Force.com from Salesforce.

In a gross oversimplification, Force.com is a cloud computing platform that allows development of multi tenant applications that are hosted on Salesforce’s servers.  Using this paradigm, applications can be built, tested, and deployed in a fraction of the time required for traditional methods.  Developers can concentrate on creating applications and not on IT resources, server versions, and hardware.

The potential for bringing the entire—or at least a large portion—of a company’s internal applications under on banner, while at the same time hugely reducing the onsite hardware requirements, is to me, the killer feature.  I have no doubt that other enterprise CRM vendors either are or will work to extend themselves in a similar manner, but for now, Salesforce is the gold standard for cloud based platform development.

Your mileage may vary.  What have I missed?  Why am I wrong?  Leave a comment and educate me!
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2 comments:

  1. We agree with you Paul. That's why we picked Force.com to build FinancialForce.com our finance and accounting product. It allows us to use the entire salesforce infrastructure (so we get to build apps not infrastructure) and allows us to build accounting fully integrated with the salesforce Sales and Service Clouds.

    Not only that but building on Force also gives you the benefit of salesforce's future developments. Look at Chatter, which native apps will inherit as it is released.

    No other combination of platform and business applications provides the foundation that salesforce and Force.com does.
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  2. Hi Jeremy,

    Thanks for the comments!

    I think you hit the nail square on the head--it is the combination of platform and business applications that make it such a competitor killer. There is no other company that offers such an out of the box set of tools along with the ability to roll your own.

    I might be singing a different tune in five years, but for now, Salesforce is far ahead of the rest of the pack.

    Paul
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