& p 500 component industry software founded 1999 ; 17 years ago 1999 founder marc benioff parker harris headquarters the landmark san francisco california u.s. key people marc benioff chairman & ceo parker harris exec . vp of technology products sales cloud service cloud platform marketing cloud services cloud computing social enterprise solutions revenue us 6.667 billion 2016 1 operating income us 111 million 2016 1 net income us 47.43 million 2016 1 total assets us 12.77 billion 2016 1 total equity us 5.002 billion 2016 1 owner marc benioff 6 % 2 number of employees 19 000 2015 1 subsidiaries quip demandware website salesforce.com footnotes references as of april 2013 . 3 4 salesforce.com stylized as sales orce is an american cloud computing company headquartered in san francisco california . though its revenue comes from a customer relationship management crm product salesforce also capitalizes on commercial applications of social networking through acquisition . as of early 2016 it is one of the most highly valued american cloud computing companies with a market capitalization above 55 billion 5 although the company has never turned a gaap profit in any fiscal year since its inception in 1999 . 6 7 it is listed on the new york stock exchange with the symbol crm and is a constituent of the s & p 500 index . contents 1 history 2 services 2.1 salesforce 2.2 force.com 2.3 salesforce1 2.4 work.com 2.4.1 history 2.5 data.com 2.6 desk.com 2.7 do.com 2.8 site.com 2.9 salesforce ideas 2.10 appexchange 2.11 configuration 2.12 web services 2.13 sales performance accelerator 3 technologies 3.1 apex 3.2 visualforce 3.3 lightning 4 operations 4.1 venture capital fund 4.2 it infrastructure 4.3 salesforce.org salesforce foundation 5 criticisms 5.1 salesforce for outlook 5.2 salesforce.com 5.3 force.com 5.4 data.com 6 acquisitions 7 financials 8 see also 9 references 10 external links history edit the company was founded in 1999 by former oracle executive marc benioff parker harris dave moellenhoff and frank dominguez as a company specializing in software as a service saas . 8 harris moellenhoff and dominguez three software developers previously at consulting firm left coast software were introduced to benioff through friend and former oracle colleague bobby yazdani . 9 harris and team wrote the initial sales automation software which launched to its first customers in the fall of 1999 . 10 in june 2004 the company s initial public offering was listed on the new york stock exchange under the stock symbol crm and raised us 110 million . 11 early investors include larry ellison halsey minor stewart henderson mark iscaro and igor sill of geneva venture partners as well as nancy pelosi . in october 2014 salesforce announced the development of its customer success platform to tie together salesforce s services including sales service marketing analytics community and mobile apps . 12 services edit salesforce.com s customer relationship management crm service is broken down into several broad categories sales cloud 13 service cloud 14 data cloud 15 including jigsaw marketing cloud community cloud 16 including chatter analytics cloud 17 app cloud and iot with over 100 000 customers . 18 salesforce edit salesforce is the primary enterprise offering within the salesforce1 platform . it provides companies with an interface for case management and task management and a system for automatically routing and escalating important events . the salesforce customer portal provides customers the ability to track their own cases includes a social networking plug in that enables the user to join the conversation about their company on social networking websites provides analytical tools and other services including email alert google search and access to customers entitlement and contracts . 19 force.com edit force.com is a platform as a service paas that allows developers to create multitenant single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants add on applications that integrate into the main salesforce.com application . 20 force.com applications are hosted on salesforce.com s infrastructure . 21 force.com applications are built using apex a proprietary java like programming language for force.com and visualforce an xml 22 syntax typically used to generate html . the force.com platform receives three complete releases a year . as the platform is provided as a service to its developers every single development instance also receives all these updates . in the spring 2015 release a new framework for building user interfaces lightning components was introduced in beta . 23 lightning components are built using the open source aura framework 24 but with support for apex as the server side language instead of aura s javascript dependency . this has been described as an alternative to not necessarily a replacement for visualforce pages . 25 according to a september 2009 gartner group report 26 force.com had over 1 000 customer accounts . as of 2013 the force.com platform has 1.4 million registered developers . 27 salesforce1 edit salesforce1 pronounced as salesforce one is salesforce s mobile application for android and ios . 28 work.com edit work.com previously rypple is a social performance management platform that helps managers and employees improve work performance through continuous coaching real time feedback and recognition . 29 it is marketed as a solution for sales performance customer service marketing and as a service that can be employed by human resource departments . history edit work.com then known as rypple was founded by daniel debow and david stein who wanted to create a simple way of asking for feedback anonymously at work . 30 the company was formed in may 2008 and their client list included mozilla facebook linkedin and the gilt groupe . rypple reverses the onus on the demand for more feedback by getting employees to build and manage their own coaching networks . 31 in september 2011 rypple announced that they had hired bohdan zabawskyj as its chief technology officer . 32 in 2011 rypple developed a more formalized management methodology called okr objectives and key results for spotify . 33 rypple also partnered with facebook to create loops short for feedback loops which gathers feedback from co workers thank you s progress against goals and coaching from supervisors into one channel for a rich robust continuous performance review . 34 in december 2011 salesforce.com announced that they would acquire rypple . the transaction was completed in 2012 and rypple was rebranded as work.com in september 2012 . 35 data.com edit data.com previously known as jigsaw is a cloud based automated system for acquiring and managing crm records within a user s salesforce.com account . 36 data.com is also an online business directory of companies and business professionals that is built maintained and accessed by a worldwide community of over a million subscribers . 37 a large database allows members to exchange and share the business information of more than 29 million contacts from over 4 million companies . this information consists of what is commonly found on a business card . data.com utilizes a user generated database that s continually updated by its members . data.com s contacts act as a virtual business card offering name title postal and email addresses and direct dial phone numbers for individual contacts . desk.com edit desk.com previously known as assistly is a cloud based helpdesk system for interacting with customers and solving customer issues . 38 desk.com includes the following features multi channel capabilities for handling customer requests portal knowledgebase chat email twitter callback an agent to customer communication interface available as web application and mobile app 38 a unified support queue combined with flexible and extensible business rules an administrative interface to easily configure the system rich analytics do.com edit do.com was a cloud based task management system for small groups and businesses introduced in 2011 and discontinued in 2014 . 39 40 41 salesforce did not offer any reason for shutting down the service however it provided an export tool to save data entered within the do.com interface . the do.com domain was sold to a startup in 2014 . 42 site.com edit site.com is a portal to the salesforce lightning app builder a technology that allows for rapid application development of cloud based applications . salesforce ideas edit salesforce ideas is a suggestion management systems based on dell ideastorm that enables registered users to add promote demote and comment on ideas . each idea is represented as an article and such articles are updated by salesforce to indicate when an idea is implemented . appexchange edit launched in 2005 the salesforce appexchange is an online application marketplace for third party applications that run on the force.com platform . applications are available for free as well as yearly or monthly subscription models . applications available range from integrations with sharepoint to mobile approval management . 43 as of february 2015 it features 2 658 applications which have driven a total of over 2.8 million installs . 44 configuration edit salesforce users can configure their crm application . in the system there are tabs such as contacts reports and accounts . each tab contains associated information . configuration can be done on each tab by adding user defined custom fields . 45 configuration can also be done at the platform level by adding configured applications to a salesforce instance that is adding sets of customized novel tabs for specific vertical or function level finance human resources etc. features . web services edit in addition to the web interface salesforce.com offers a soap rest web service api that enables integration with other systems ... . sales performance accelerator edit salesforce.com launched a new product called sales performance accelerator in july 2013 . it combines the crm with the work.com performance management application as well as customer lead information from data.com . 46 technologies edit this section needs additional citations for verification . please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources . unsourced material may be challenged and removed . may 2015 learn how and when to remove this template message apex edit apex is a proprietary programming language provided by the force.com platform to developers similar to java . it is a strongly typed object oriented case insensitive programming language following a dot notation and curly brackets syntax . apex can be used to execute programmed functions during most processes on the force.com platform including custom buttons and links event handlers on record insertion update or deletion via scheduling or via the custom controllers of visualforce pages . due to the multitenant nature of the platform the language has strictly imposed governor limitations to guard against any code monopolizing shared resources . salesforce has provided a series of asynchronous processing methods for apex to allow developers to produce longer running and more complex apex code . 47 visualforce edit visualforce is the view control technology on the force.com platform . it is an open close tag based library with structure and markup very similar to html . visualforce can be used to create entire custom pages inside a salesforce organisation in conjunction with many other front end technologies such as html5 css3 and javascript . one of the key benefits of visualforce is tight coupling to native features of the platform such as controller methods and data access that would not typically be available to other front end technologies . lightning edit in 2014 salesforce made public the frontend of its platform called lightning . 48 this component based framework is what the salesforce1 mobile app is built on and customers are now able to build on it as well . salesforce built on this framework in 2015 by releasing the lightning design system 49 an html style framework with default css styling built in . this framework allows customers to build their own components to either use in their internal instances and or sell on the appexchange . one of the new tools released is known as the salesforce lightning app builder for rapid application development of responsive web interfaces . this interface allows for