From Sales Cloud to AI backed smart Einstein: The Salesforce saga

Bangalore: It’s been close to two decades or precisely 18 long years since Marc Benioff and Parker Harris founded Salesforce.com in 1990.

Being among the early cloud computing enterprise software companies, Salesforce has come a long way in setting new trends in the software industry, particularly the way enterprises and organisations consumed software applications over the cloud, popularly known as ‘Software-as-a-Service’ (SaaS) rather than on-premise.

The Cloud revolution

Probably, it wouldn’t be wrong to say, Salesforce played a crucial role in setting off a silent cloud revolution. And gradually, over the past decade or more, it compelled other enterprise software vendors to follow its footsteps into a future that became today’s cloud dominated IT world but hardly few had foreseen it then.

But most importantly from Salesforce’s perspective and its future existence was winning the trust of enterprises and their CIOs, which became Salesforce’s early adaptors and customers as well. Since then, that silent cloud revolution has become more prominent and visible across the globe as cloud made its presence felt across industry segments and verticals.

Despite the security concerns over the cloud, the virtues of scalability, manageability and overall cost effectiveness proved cloud and Salesforce to an extent, more appealing and popular among enterprises and businesses of all sizes and shapes.

“It started with Sales Cloud and that was 18 years ago and later it becomes almost a revolution as people started to adopt cloud across all segments, across geographies,” says Deepak Pargaonkar, Salesforce India’s Senior Director - Solution Engineering.

“Today, we not only have sales, but we have sales, services like software as a Service (SaaS), marketing, analytics, community, internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), development platforms like Platform as a Service (PaaS) and all kinds of solutions,” adds Pargaonkar.

Over the years, it has continued to rule the cloud market with sheer dominance in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software along with a range of cloud offerings and, software and platform based services like SaaS and PaaS.

Leading the CRM and Cloud market

“When we look at all these solutions, we have the smart CRM – of course it is world’s no.1 CRM as per lot of analysts and market reports. So we are now world’s no. 1 CRM and no. 1 cloud computing company and also the fastest growing enterprise software company,” stresses Paragaonkar.

Salesforce has been leading the CRM software market globally for past many years. According to an IDC report, Salesforce has been ranked no.1 CRM vendor in terms of revenue with an 18.1% market share in 2016 and it has maintained the top spot for the fourth consecutive year leaving behind SAP, Oracle and other vendors.

And it’s not just IDC but several technology market research firms including Gartner have ranked Salesforce as the top CRM provider worldwide. Gartner predicts that by 2018, Salesforce.com will have over 15 million end users.

As per S&P Global data, Salesforce’s market value has increased more than twice from $33 billion to around $70 billion during the past three years. Salesforce has become the first enterprise cloud software company to cross the $10 billion revenue mark, as per its second quarter earnings report released in August this year.

Building the Trust factor

Most of Salesforce solutions and services are available to customers in India over Salesforce Cloud, although it doesn’t have any local datacentres in India. Despite of this, according Paragaonkar, it’s the ‘trust’ factor that is driving the relationship between the customers and Salesforce.

“Trust is the single most important thing for us because customers are entrusting us with the single most important asset they have and that is data. And we know, we have to keep it very secure and so trust is of highest priority,” he emphasizes.

Businesses and enterprises in India across verticals are leveraging Salesforce solutions for business transformation as well as improving customer experience. “We are seeing a lot of innovation and digital transformation is happening here in India over Salesforce solutions,” says Paragaonkar.

Banking on technological advancements in India

Using Salesforce solutions several financial services customers in India have able to reduce loan approval process time to seconds from days. “It is happening because of technological advancements in India like Aadhaar and CIBIL but at the same time we have this innovative platform like Salesforce, which allows these customers to do all of that,” he comments.

But Paragaonkar credits Salesforce’s business focus platform entirely for that by saying that it allows customers to focus on their business while the configuring processes, rules and integration remains easy on the platform.

Citing examples of Philips and Schneider Electric, Paragaonkar points out that these companies are doing phenomenal innovation on the Salesforce platform globally. Likewise, he also points to some of Indian customers like Janlakshmi (Financial Services), HCL and Urban Ladder are also leveraging the platform to innovate things, connect to their customers and providing a great customer experience.

Enabling Digital and Business transformation

With organisations focusing more on digital and business transformation today, Salesforce’s platform is becoming the comprehensive solution for customers to innovate beside its standard offerings of sales, marketing, services and more.

“We have over 150,000 customers globally and we have substantial customers in India across geographies, across all segments – financial services, manufacturing, professional services and e-commerce, where we are seeing a lot of uptake and the adoption across all sizes and solutions – small, medium and large enterprises,” informs Paragaonkar.

Interestingly, Salesforce has been present in India since 2005 and it set up a Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Hyderabad last year with a plan to hire 1000 people by 2020. Also, it appointed Sunil Jose as Senior Area VP and Country Leader for India in July this year. Although, India is a key market for the San Francisco based company, it doesn’t disclose the number of customers it serves in India.

With every passing year, Salesforce’s stature has grown with more technological capabilities, wider product and solution portfolio; and yet, it continues to evolve with the changing times and new emerging technologies. It has new solutions in the areas of Internet of Things (IoT), mobility and analytics; however the company has been focusing extensively on artificial intelligence (AI).

Focusing on AI

In fact, Salesforce Einstein – its latest Al powered enterprise grade business assistance solution launched in 2016 has been grabbing lots of attentions of business leaders and IT decision makers for its extremely powerful predicting capabilities.

“With Salesforce Einstein, which is our AI tool, we are bringing all the power in the journey of digital transformation of the organisation. All the CRM capabilities coupled with the smart Einstein – AI solution we have an excellent offering for digital transformation,” says Paragaonkar.

Since Einstein’s launch last year, according to the company it is already making over 475 million AI based predictions on the platform every day across all customer segments globally.

Salseforce Einstein is an AI backed tool for CRM, built and designed to serve the organisation’s needs across key business functions like sales, service, marketing and IT using the company’s or organisation’s data. It uses self-learning algorithms and data to instantly deliver highly accurate forecasts or predictions related to business functions and helping organisations in decision making processes.

This new tool in last one year has already created a lot of buzz and interest not just in overseas market but even in India. Janalakshmi Financial Services is among the few organisations and Salesforce’s customer in India that is already closely evaluating and assessing Einstein’s capabilities and business benefits.

“For businesses like Janalakshmi, the customer is crucial. Solutions like Einstein help you focus on what matters most, is our customer. We have scores of data and learning from the data is essential for our business to grow. With an AI solution, the ability to deliver predictions and recommendations with automation capabilities will help us truly connect with customers,” comments Vidyasagar Bedida, Senior VP, Technology - Janalakshmi Financial Services.

“From a business perspective, features that have the capability to analyze seasonality and historical performance helps make highly accurate, individualized sales forecasts, translating the data behind each forecast into human language, so sales leaders know what to expect from the pipeline and why,” adds Bedida.

Enterprises and business can leverage Salesforce Einstein in the area of sales, analytics, service, marking and more to get the intelligence predictions and forecasts. “But they can also build their own customised solutions and applications on top it by using Einstein as a platform,” concludes Paragaonkar.