From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 63

servers, are leaders among the specialists. 5 The general public became
acquainted with Salesforce when it ran two ads costing $3 million during
the 2011 Super Bowl. Marc Benioff founded the company in 1999 as one
of the irst to offer Software as a Service, and the company has since added
Platform as a Service to its offerings. Its specialty is customer-relationship
management (CRM), a system for managing interactions with clients and
prospective clients, primarily to expand sales but also to manage customer
service and technical support. CRM has been in use for two decades and is
now expanding into the cloud. It operates through software that enables
companies to manage their sales and customer-service processes and assess
successes and failures. Rather than house CRM internally, companies con-
tract with Salesforce, which provides software and services from its cloud
servers. These include storage for all data associated with marketing and
sales for a speciic company and access to 20 million or so iles on business
contacts. Companies can also work with Salesforce to develop their own
applications and tools in the Salesforce cloud. In April 2012, the company
employed close to 8,000 people and generated $2.25 billion in annual
revenues. In 2013 it joined a wave of merger and acquisition activity in
the industry by spending $2.5 billion on ExactTarget, a company that
specializes in managing sales campaigns. As cloud leaders like AWS bulk
up with takeover activity, Salesforce felt the need to keep pace. The upside
of specialization is that it enables a company to concentrate resources and
expertise, but the downside is vulnerability. The company faced this in
2007 when it fell victim to a phishing attack that enabled hackers to lure
an employee into revealing credentials that were used to gather customer
contact data. The attackers went on to send further attacks to customers
through fake Salesforce invoices. Some customers fell for the scam and
coughed up more information. For a company specializing in the secure
management of customer relations, this was an especially dificult and
almost company-destroying failure. Larger irms like Amazon have faced
similar challenges, but highly diversiied companies like Amazon are bet-
ter able to weather such storms.
The other challenge for a specialist company is facing genuine competi-
tion from one of the giants that can bankroll a major initiative and keep
it going in the absence of an immediate boost in proit. Such a challenge
came from Microsoft, which moved into CRM after Salesforce but has
begun to catch up in customers, markets, and offerings. More importantly,