A Salesforce to be Reckoned With
October 22, 2009
Last week I had my first real introduction to developing APEX code to build a custom trigger in one of our portfolio company’s salesforce.com implementation. For those of you who don’t know APEX is salesforce.com’s proprietary programming language (similar to JAVA) that is used to develop custom applications, pluggins, and triggers on the force.com platform. Though I have no software development experience I was able to put something together with the help of some of my colleagues who have a development background, and by taking apart some sample code that did something similar.
Two weeks ago I attended the saleforce.com Cloudforce tour, where they present some of the new features, give demos, and also breakout into more specific sessions. I attended the APEX advanced developer session because I knew that I would be working on this project. What I was surprised to find was how built-out and developed the force.com platform actually is. For a platform and language that haven’t been around for very long relative to other programming languages, there is an incredibly vibrant and interactive online community, and there are a tremendous number of tools and resources available for developers.
Reflecting on what I learned at the conference I realized that salesforce.com has just done an incredible job executing their go-to-market strategy, and is a model to any expansion stage SaaS company. They took their bread and butter crm/sfa platforms to market and have taken the middle market by storm. In the last few years they have blown out the support functionality, and now their strategy and messaging around the force.com platform are setting them up to compete with major players like Amazon.com in the cloud platform/infrastructure market. Now they are continuing to execute with the content, events, support, and messaging to back their products and strategic direction.
As a consultant at a growth venture capital firm that invests in expansion stage SaaS based business models, I aspire to help all of our portfolio companies to execute in their sector’s as well as Salesforce.com does in theirs.