To see the massive growth potential that cloud computing giant Salesforce.com, Inc. (CRM – Analyst Report) has, one need only look at the company’s current EPS estimates. This year, analysts expect the company to earn 19 cents per share. Next year, that number is expected to nearly double to 35 cents.
Founded in 1999, “growth” has been a pretty consistent theme for Salesforce, a leader in enterprise-level customer relationship management (CRM – Analyst Report) products. In 2004, the company went public with just $50 million in annual revenue and 500 employees. Today Salesforce employs over 16,000 people and brings in over $6 billion per year.
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Currently, Salesforce has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) and is clearly one of the best cloud computing companies on the market. In this company profile, we’ll look at what exactly Salesforce does, how it has reached this point, and what it needs to improve upon to continue its success.
Leading Products
As stated above, Salesforce is most known for its line of CRM products. Its CRM business is broken up into eight parts: Sales, Service, Data, Marketing, Community, Analytics, Apps, and Internet of Things.
Salesforce’s primary enterprise offering is Salesforce.com, which is a case and task management tool. Building on this is Force.com, which is a “Platform as a service” (PaaS) product. In cloud computing, PaaS tools provide a platform for customers to develop, run, and maintain web applications without the difficulty of building the infrastructure that goes into developing an app.
In this case, Salesforce customers use Force.com to build add-on applications that are integrated into the main Salesforce.com interface. Force.com use two technologies that Salesforce developed. The first, called “Apex,” is a Java-like coding language. The second is “Visualforce,” a view control that is used to create custom pages that are compatible with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
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