Unfolding the evolution of Salesforce

Salesforce's growth in the last 20 years has been incredible: by 2024, it is expected that the net revenue of Salesforce's industry will exceed $1 trillion (that is, $1,000,000,000,000).

Further reading

Have a read at the The Salesforce Economic Impact white paper by IDC, available at https://www.salesforce.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/reports/idc-salesforce-economy-report.pdf, for a complete analysis of the Salesforce industry economic impact worldwide.

Everything started in March 1999, just like in the old fashioned Silicon Valley start-up fables: four buddies started a company at Telegraph Hill, San Francisco, in a one-bedroom apartment (have a look at the actual pictures at https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2019/02/salesforce-san-francisco-1999.html).

It was Marc Benioff's house (founder and current CEO at Salesforce), along with Parker Harris, Frank Dominguez, and Dave Moellenhoff.

Their aim was to create business applications with the SaaS model, designing adaptable applications without high maintenance and development costs, following the same paradigm of Amazon.com: an easy-to-use site but for business applications. They developed the basis of the first SaaS CRM in just 1 month!

It was in 2000 that the Salesforce.com company moved to 1 Market Street (San Francisco) and launched the product, along with the famous and controversial No Software brand, which soon become synonymous with Salesforce. Of course, this does not mean that a SaaS application doesn't require any lines of code, but rather that your company will rely on cloud software only, and so no legacy software is needed anymore (but, as you can imagine, No Software alone is quite catchy!).

The Salesforce CRM software continued to evolve, and its features were presented in so-called City Tours, a few hour-long events handled in diverse US cities. But it was in 2003 that Salesforce launched one of its most iconic events, Dreamforce, a few-day event held in San Francisco where all Salesforce customers could meet each other and learn what was going on with their CRM software (there were around 1,000 participants).

In 2004, Salesforce.com Inc. went public on the NYSE with the CRM stock code (although I consider myself totally illiterate in financial education, I love that stock symbol choice!).

In 2006, the AppExchange portal was launched: the apps economy was just starting, and Salesforce partners could build reusable artifacts (or packages) that other packages could use to enhance their Salesforce customizations, reducing implementation and maintenance efforts. Apple's App Store was launched later on, and, as you read at https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2019/02/steve-jobs-inspired-appexchange.html, the appstore.com domain and trademark was gifted by Marc Benioff to Steve Jobs as an act of gratitude for having inspired such a successful business model.

At the 2006 Dreamforce event, the Apex on-demand programming language was presented, and that changed the way the Salesforce CRM could be customized; a lot of lines of code could run on Salesforce infrastructure to enhance automation customizations. In the same event, the Visualforce framework was also presented, granting Salesforce partners the ability to build complex user interfaces.

In 2008, the Force.com platform was delivered, which, thanks to Apex and Visualforce, let customers implement their own customized applications side by side with the usual standard CRM processes: this was the advent of the Platform as a Service (PaaS) model.

I joined the Salesforce Ohana (refer to Chapter 19, Salesforce Ohana – The Most Amazing Community Around, for more details on the Ohana movement) in early 2009, as a Salesforce junior developer at WebResults (an engineering group). It was a risky bet for our former CEO, Lorenzo Coslovi, and our CTO, Alessandro Plebani, who, a few years earlier, decided to start investing in the Salesforce world, when Salesforce was not really known in the Italian market and its market share was really small. They created a fantastic team of professionals, and I'm really grateful to both of them for letting me be part of this Salesforce revolution.

In 2012, ExactTarget was acquired and presented at the same year's Dreamforce as the new Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a product completely focused on B2C customer marketing.

2013 saw the birth of the Salesforce1 platform, which brought the whole Salesforce desktop experience to the mobile channel, anticipating the Lightning platform, which was presented a few years later.

In 2014, Trailhead was launched, a fun way to learn Salesforce-related stuff at no cost at all; anyone can create an account and access thousands of free learning modules.

In 2015, the new Lightning Experience look and feel was applied across devices (desktop, mobile, tablets, and so on) after 16 years of almost no great user interface change. It was a new and modern way to access the Salesforce data; regardless of whether you are a Lightning Experience supporter or not, you have to admit that the Salesforce guys' efforts to bring innovation to their platform is commendable. Developers have to learn a new development platform, called the Aura framework, the precursor of the recent Lightning Web Components (LWC) framework, a JavaScript-based framework introduced in 2018 that significantly increases Lightning Experience performances and code reusability.

This whole book, with an exception made for some small cases, is based on the look and feel of Lightning Experience.

2016 was the year of artificial intelligence, with the Einstein product released, meant to improve every single product by delivering the easiest machine learning functionality to the Salesforce platform. The Einstein artificial intelligence was presented in front of 170,000 attendees at that year's Dreamforce (170x more attendees than the first 2003 Dreamforce). In the same year, Salesforce acquired over 10 companies (including Quip, SteelBrick as CPQ, and DemandWare as B2C Commerce Cloud, to name a few).

In 2018, MuleSoft was acquired, bringing another important piece of technology to the platform – that is, the ability to connect legacy systems in the cloud, unleashing digital transformation with ease.

In 2019, it was time for another acquisition, Tableau, one of the leading companies in data visualization and business intelligence.

In this book, we'll be concentrating on the core of the Salesforce platform, the SaaS CRM, to find the ways to customize it and let Salesforce adapt to each company's business processes with a low-code approach – that is, a lot of point ing and clicking and little-to-no coding.

To tell how the Salesforce CRM has changed throughout the years, have a look at the following figure, which shows all the different user interfaces that have evolved over more than 20 years:

Figure 1.1 – Salesforce user interface evolution from 1999 to 2020

To understand how old I am (not that old really, but relative to the life of Salesforce, quite a bit), I was introduced to the platform in the second stage in the preceding figure.

Ah, good old times!

Further reading

To get inspired by what Marc Benioff and his folks did, refer to Marc Benioff's books, Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry (2009) and Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change (2019). For a quick and inspirational deep dive into Salesforce's history, check out the Salesforce Ben blog post at https://www.salesforceben.com/brief-history-salesforce-com/.

Let's have a quick look at how the Salesforce platform is shaped to deliver a reliable and trusted service to its customers.