The Marketing Performance Blueprint: Strategies and Technologies to Build and Measure Business Success

Chapter 7 Manage the Marketing Technology Matrix

Modern marketers are becoming technologists.

INTO THE CLOUD

In March 1999, Marc Benioff (@Benioff), Parker Harris (@parkerharris), Frank Dominguez, and Dave Moellenhoff launched Salesforce.com out of a rented, one-bedroom San Francisco apartment that Benioff called “the Laboratory.” It was from this unassuming headquarters that the team set out to end traditional software business and technology models and build a global CRM solution.

According to Benioff, “I saw an opportunity to deliver business software applications in a new way. My vision was to make software easier to purchase, simpler to use, and more democratic without the complexities of installation, maintenance, and constant upgrades. Rather than selling multimillion-dollar CD-ROM software packages that took six to 18 months for companies to install and required hefty investments in hardware and networking, we would sell software as a service (SaaS) through a model known as cloud computing. Companies could pay per-user, per-month fees for the services they used, and those services would be delivered to them immediately via the Internet, in the cloud.”¹

Today, Salesforce.com (@salesforce) has become an industry heavyweight, with a market cap of more than $36 billion (as of March 2014), more than 12,000 employees, more than 100,000 customers, and an annual conference, Dreamforce (@Dreamforce), which draws more than 140,000 attendees. The company also has moved aggressively ...