Salesforce.com Moving Aggressively Into A Broader Marketing Platform

Salesforce.com, a fast-growing on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) company, is rapidly broadening its scope to become more of a complete sales, marketing and customer service system provider. In doing so, it is likely to attract increased competition from some bigger rivals. According to this Business Week article, Salesforce.com grew 76% in 2005, 60% in 2006, and is expected to see 45% growth this year. That means quadrupling in size in three years! And talk about guerrilla marketing: their stock symbol on the NYSE is CRM.

Salesforce.com started its existence in what at the time was thought to be a Sales-as-a-Service (SaaS) niche. That business model has turned out to be a lot more than a niche (see Information Week article), and before they knew it bigger competitors had to contend with this new rival.

This week, Salesforce.com is expected to announce the acquisition of Koral Technologies, a company that makes software to help companies that need a content management system to help track and archive “unstructured” digital documents. The Koral Technology is what is behind the Apex Content system that Salesforce.com announced last Monday (see TechCrunch story). The system integrates with Salesforce’s CRM platform and its tag-based, AJAX interface seems to be getting great reviews. However, this move will put Salesforce.com in direct competition with products from Microsoft (Sharepoint) and Oracle. Those are some heavyweight rivals.