Salesforce.com is gearing up for a wider range of cloud-based software targeted at specific industries, going beyond its comfort zone of delivering online customer relationship management (CRM) software.
In a meeting with journalists at the Dreamforce conference earlier this month, Salesforce.com president and vice chairman Keith Block hinted at some of the industries that the company is eyeing.
“If you want to speak to a retail bank, you need to understand how it connects with customers,” he said.
The same goes for life sciences and pharmaceutical firms, Block said, adding that those companies have business processes that can be transformed by Salesforce.com.
According to a Reuters report today, Salesforce is making a dash for the life sciences and healthcare sectors, and has started selling software to the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Salesforce’s upcoming offerings to meet the needs of specific industries has been a long time coming. Traditionally, businesses tend to customise Salesforce.com for some business processes that may not be related to CRM or marketing.
A few large organisations in Singapore, for example, are known to be using Salesforce’s CRM software to run operational processes rather than engage customers.
Asked about how Salesforce would tweak its cloud computing platform to meet the needs of more industries, Block said the company will continue to build on its strengths in catering to businesses that want to engage their customers in a mobile and social environment.
The vertical offerings – IT industry parlance for software catered to specific industries – are a direct challenge to SAP’s dominance in business software. Large organisations depend on SAP to meet very specific needs in banking, engineering and healthcare.
“We want to be bigger than SAP,” Block said. “SAP is the third largest software company in the world, and we certainly think we have an opportunity to surpass them. We have our sights locked on being a $20 billion company.”
Block noted that more companies are trying to break out of SAP, citing companies like 3M which moved to Salesforce. “We see that as an enormous opportunity of trying to take the data in those systems and turning them into systems of engagement,” he said.
To get there, Block outlined some key areas such as product innovation, where Salesforce recently unveiled its Wave analytics cloud, and international expansion through partnerships.
With more chief marketing officers calling the shots in buying decisions involving CRM and marketing software, Salesforce recently partnered with advertising firm Omnicom to provide a range of sales and marketing services for Omnicom’s global clients.
