The rise of Salesforce.com

摘要

In less than 10 years Salesforce. com has helped transform the way business software is delivered and has become one of the biggest suppliers in the multibillion-pound customer relationship management (CRM) market. The company - founded in a small San Francisco apartment in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff - has repeatedly beaten stock market expectations and does not appear to have been badly hit - so far, at least -by the credit crunch. Benioff, the company's chairman and chief executive, is one of the IT industry's characters. Sporting a Larry Eh'son-style beard, he has written a book called Compassionate Capitalism and coined the term "end of software" - referring to the rise of on-demand software: software that is accessed over the internet through a web browser, often on a pay-per-use basis.