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Salesforce history
Salesforce company history timeline
In 2000, Marc Benioff staged the first theatrical protest that Silicon Valley had ever seen.
salesforce.com Launches Its Service in 2000
Revenue hits $5.4 million for fiscal year ending January 31, 2001.
In March 2001, the company launched a full suite of CRM applications, including new tools for customer service and marketing that enabled it to begin targeting medium-sized businesses, companies in the 5,000- to 10,000-user range.
Salesforce delivers $22.4 million in revenue for the fiscal year, ending January 31, 2002.
A second consecutive profitable quarter followed, when the company posted $127,000 in net income in the fall of 2003.
But the Salesforce Ohana has been around from the very beginning, with wearing Hawaiian shirts into work to instil the culture and a Hawaiian-themed launch party for Salesforce.com going public in June 2004.
Salesforce earns $176 million in revenue over the fiscal year ending January 31, 2005.
Towards the end of the year, during the first week of October, Benioff celebrated what he referred to as "the most exciting week of my career," according to the October 5, 2005 edition of the Financial Times.
The French firm was founded in 2005 and sold software to improve interoperability between big-name ECM systems, used to manage unstructured data, such as documents and email, often required for compliance or e-discovery.
It has earned $309.98 million in revenue for fiscal year ending January 31, 2006.
The announcement of the $5.8 billion acquisition, which was completed in early 2006, coincided with the release of AppExchange, the product hailed by Benioff.
At Dreamforce 2006, more than 5,000 members of the Salesforce community gathered to hear about the latest innovations at Salesforce.com.
Kenlet (January 2007) – original product CrispyNews used at Salesforce IdeaExchange and Dell IdeaStorm – now relaunched as Salesforce Ideas
Revenue tops $497 million for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2007.
Instranet (August 2008) – now re-branded to Salesforce Knowledge
They called it Force.com and it was released at Dreamforce 2008.
GroupSwim (December 2009) – now part of Salesforce Chatter
Informavores (December 2009) – now re-branded to Visual Workflow
With 2009's Dreamforce came the announcement of Chatter, which functionality continues to be used or upgraded with each seasonal release.
Revenues rise by more than 20% to $1.3 billion for the fiscal year, ending January 31, 2010.
Annual revenue rises to almost $1.66 billion for the fiscal year, ending January 31, 2011.
Salesforce had actually made an earlier investment in the start-up, and finally bought it in 2011 for $80 million.
Annual revenue rises 37% over the fiscal year to almost $2.27 billion, for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2012.
GoInstant (July 2012) for US$70 million
Dreamforce 2012 notches up 90,000 registered attendees.
2012 – Introduction of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud
clipboard.com (May 2013) for US$12 million
ExactTarget (announced June 4, 2013) for US$2.5 billion
In 2013 Salesforce rolled out the Salesforce1 platform, with the goal to open up access to as much information as you can access on a computer.
Annual revenue over the fiscal year exceeds $4 billion for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2014.
In October 2014, Salesforce announced the development of its Customer Success Platform to tie together Salesforce's services, including sales, service, marketing, analytics, community, and mobile apps.
The Lightning experience new was slowly rolled out to the community over the summer of 2015 with an official launch at Dreamforce a couple of months later.
The company generates more than $6.66 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2016.
In October 2017, Salesforce launched a Facebook Analytics tool for business-to-business marketers.
In 2017, the company's rapid growth continued.
In September 2018, Salesforce partnered with Apple intended on improving apps for businesses.
Then, myTrailhead made it easy for organisations to create gamified training, and in 2019 went mobile with Trailhead GO for iOS.
In 2019 they followed suit and shocked everyone with their $15.7 Billion acquisition of Tableau, one of the world’s leading data visualisation and business intelligence companies.
In February 2020, co-chief executive officer Keith Block stepped down from his position in the company.
On December 1, 2020, it was announced that Salesforce would acquire Slack for $27.7 billion.
In February 2021, Salesforce announced that CFO Mark Hawkins would be retiring from his position after six years of working for the company; however, retaining a position as CFO emeritus until October.
So far in 2022, it’s been a wild ride with the Salesforce platform.
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Salesforce competitors
| Company name | Founded date | Revenue | Employee size | Job openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Informatica | 1993 | $1.6B | 5,249 | 6 |
| Workday | 2005 | $8.4B | 12,500 | 151 |
| Scan One A Corvel Co | - | $330,000 | 5 | - |
| DocuSign | 2003 | $3.0B | 7,461 | 153 |
| Intuit | 1983 | $16.3B | 10,600 | 1,163 |
| Sumo Logic | 2010 | $300.7M | 800 | 20 |
| Tableau | 2003 | $1.2B | 4,181 | - |
| Microsoft | 1975 | $245.1B | 182,268 | 2,877 |
| Oracle | 1977 | $53.0B | 132,000 | 49,574 |
| Cisco | 1984 | $53.8B | 79,500 | 1,920 |
Salesforce history FAQs
Zippia gives an in-depth look into the details of Salesforce, including salaries, political affiliations, employee data, and more, in order to inform job seekers about Salesforce. The employee data is based on information from people who have self-reported their past or current employments at Salesforce. The data on this page is also based on data sources collected from public and open data sources on the Internet and other locations, as well as proprietary data we licensed from other companies. Sources of data may include, but are not limited to, the BLS, company filings, estimates based on those filings, H1B filings, and other public and private datasets. While we have made attempts to ensure that the information displayed are correct, Zippia is not responsible for any errors or omissions or for the results obtained from the use of this information. None of the information on this page has been provided or approved by Salesforce. The data presented on this page does not represent the view of Salesforce and its employees or that of Zippia.
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