Salesforce

Salesforce, Inc.
Type	Public
Traded as	NYSE: CRM; DJIA component; S&P 500 component
Industry	Enterprise software; Cloud computing
Founded	March 1999
Founder	Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, Frank Dominguez
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States
Key people	Marc Benioff (Chairman and chief executive officer); Parker Harris (Co-founder)
Products	Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, Agentforce, Slack, Tableau, MuleSoft, Heroku
Employees	Approximately 76,000
Website	salesforce.com

Salesforce, Inc. is an American software company headquartered in San Francisco that provides customer relationship management and related business applications delivered over the internet. It is the largest such vendor in the world and was among the first companies to demonstrate that serious business software could be sold as a subscription service rather than installed.

It was founded in March 1999 by Marc Benioff, a former Oracle executive, with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez, in a rented apartment on Telegraph Hill. Its founding slogan, "the end of software", and its logo of the word software inside a red prohibition sign, made the proposition explicit: applications should be accessed through a browser and paid for monthly, as a utility, rather than bought as a licence and installed on the customer's own servers.

The company listed in 2004 and has grown into one of the largest software businesses in the world, through both organic growth and a sequence of very large acquisitions including ExactTarget, Demandware, MuleSoft, Tableau, Slack and, in 2025, Informatica.

Salesforce is also notable for its philanthropic model and for the public prominence of its founder, who has been among the more politically active technology executives of his generation, a source both of the company's distinctive reputation and of recurring controversy.

History

Founding and the software-as-a-service argument, 1999 to 2004

Marc Benioff had spent thirteen years at Oracle, becoming its youngest vice president, and had been mentored by Larry Ellison, who subsequently invested in Salesforce and served briefly on its board.

The argument for the company was that enterprise software's delivery model was the problem. Buying customer relationship management software in 1999 meant purchasing licences, purchasing servers, engaging consultants for an implementation lasting many months, and repeating much of the exercise at each upgrade. Siebel Systems, then the market leader, had built a large business on exactly this. Benioff's proposition was that the software should run in the vendor's own data centre, be shared by all customers on common infrastructure, be upgraded for everyone simultaneously, and be rented.

The technical enabler was multi-tenancy: one running instance of the application serving many customers, with each customer's data separated logically rather than physically. This is what makes the economics work, because the cost of serving an additional customer approaches zero, and it is the property that distinguished Salesforce from application service providers that merely hosted separate copies of conventional software.

The marketing was deliberately confrontational. Salesforce staged mock protests outside Siebel's user conference, hired actors, and ran advertising built around the prohibition of the word software. Benioff has described the strategy as necessary for a company with no money competing against an incumbent with a large sales force.

The product reached general availability in 2000 and the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 23 June 2004.

Platform and ecosystem, 2005 to 2015

Salesforce's most consequential strategic decision after the delivery model was to become a platform.

AppExchange, launched in 2006, allowed third parties to build and sell applications that ran on Salesforce's infrastructure and integrated with its data, and it predated Apple's App Store by two years. Benioff has said he suggested the name to Steve Jobs.

Force.com, introduced in 2007, exposed the underlying platform so that customers could build their own applications, using a declarative configuration model for most requirements and a proprietary language, Apex, for the rest. The effect was to convert Salesforce from an application into an environment, which both deepened the dependence of its customers and created a very large professional community of administrators, developers and consultants whose careers are built on the product.

Heroku, acquired in 2010, added a platform for hosting applications written in conventional languages.

Acquisitions expanded the product range: Radian6 in 2011 for social monitoring, Buddy Media in 2012, ExactTarget in 2013 for approximately US$2.5 billion, which became Marketing Cloud, RelateIQ in 2014, and Demandware in 2016 for approximately US$2.8 billion, which became Commerce Cloud.

Einstein, announced in 2016, applied machine learning across the applications for scoring leads, predicting outcomes and recommending actions, and was among the earlier examples of an enterprise vendor embedding such capability rather than selling it separately.

Large acquisitions and activist pressure, 2016 to 2023

The scale of acquisition increased substantially.

MuleSoft, bought in 2018 for approximately US$6.5 billion, provides integration between systems, which matters because a customer relationship platform is only as useful as the data it can reach, and most of that data lives in systems Salesforce does not supply.

Tableau, bought in 2019 for approximately US$15.7 billion in stock, is a data visualisation and analytics company whose product had been adopted by analysts throughout large organisations and which gave Salesforce a position in analytics.

Slack, bought in 2021 for approximately US$27.7 billion, was the largest acquisition in the company's history. The reasoning was that work had moved into messaging, that Slack was where a substantial number of knowledge workers spent their day, and that Salesforce's applications would be more valuable embedded in it than accessed separately. The price was widely regarded as high, and the acquisition was a principal target of the criticism that followed.

That criticism arrived in late 2022 and 2023, when growth slowed and margins lagged those of comparable software companies. A group of activist investors, including Starboard Value, Elliott Management, ValueAct, Inclusive Capital and Third Point, took positions simultaneously, an unusual concentration, and pressed for cost reduction, margin improvement and restraint in acquisitions.

Salesforce responded with approximately 8,000 redundancies in January 2023, about 10 per cent of the workforce, substantial cost reduction, a dissolved mergers and acquisitions board committee, the first share repurchase in its history and a first dividend. Operating margin roughly doubled within two years and the activists withdrew without a proxy contest.

The period also saw the departure of several senior figures, including the co-chief executive Bret Taylor in late 2022, the second co-chief executive to leave after Keith Block in 2020, and Slack's founder Stewart Butterfield in 2023.

Agents and data, 2024 to 2026

Salesforce's strategy since 2024 has been built on the proposition that the next form of enterprise software is not an application a person uses but an agent that acts on their behalf.

Agentforce, deployed in September and October 2024 as the successor to Einstein, provides autonomous agents that operate within the company's applications, handling customer service enquiries, qualifying sales leads, resolving cases and executing workflows, with human escalation where required. It is sold on a consumption basis, priced per conversation, which is a significant departure from the per-seat subscription model on which Salesforce and the whole software-as-a-service industry were built.

The pricing change is more consequential than the technology. A business that charges per user is a business whose revenue depends on employment; a business whose agents perform work that people previously performed is, if it continues charging per user, selling something that reduces its own revenue base. The move to consumption pricing is the industry's attempt to resolve this, and how it resolves will determine the economics of enterprise software for the next decade.

Data Cloud underpins the strategy, unifying customer data from Salesforce and from other systems into a single profile that agents and applications can act on. The company's argument, common to every incumbent, is that the model is not the differentiator and the governed data is.

Informatica, a data management, integration and governance company, was agreed in June 2025 for approximately US$8 billion and completed in November 2025, ahead of the original target of early 2026, after earlier negotiations in 2024 had failed. It substantially strengthens the data layer.

Contentful, a content management platform, was announced in June 2026 for a reported US$1.5 billion and completed on 1 September 2026. m3ter, a London-based metering and rating platform for consumption-based billing, was agreed in June 2026, which is directly relevant to the pricing transition described above.

Headless 360, introduced at the TDX developer conference in April 2026, exposes the platform's data, workflows and governance controls as application programming interfaces, Model Context Protocol servers and command line tools, so that tasks can be performed without the user interface. This is an explicit acknowledgement that the interface through which enterprise software is used may cease to be a screen.

In June 2026 the company integrated autonomous shopping agents natively into its commerce products.

Benioff said in a June 2025 interview that artificial intelligence was performing between 30 and 50 per cent of internal work at Salesforce, including software engineering, customer service, marketing and analytics, and the company has reduced support headcount substantially while redeploying staff. The claim has been treated sceptically by some observers and is among the more specific statements any large company has made about the effect of the technology on its own workforce.

Products

Sales Cloud is the original product, managing accounts, contacts, opportunities and forecasts.

Service Cloud handles customer support cases, knowledge bases, field service and contact centre operations, and is now the larger of the two.

Marketing Cloud, from ExactTarget, manages campaigns, email, journeys and personalisation.

Commerce Cloud, from Demandware, provides online retail storefronts.

Data Cloud unifies customer data across systems.

Agentforce provides autonomous agents across the applications.

Slack is the messaging and collaboration product, increasingly positioned as the interface through which agents are engaged.

Tableau provides analytics and visualisation.

MuleSoft provides integration and application programming interface management.

Heroku hosts applications.

Platform, formerly Force.com, allows customers to build applications, with Lightning as the user interface framework, Apex as the programming language, Flow for declarative automation and the Trailhead learning system.

Industry Clouds provide configurations for financial services, health, manufacturing, automotive, consumer goods, communications, energy, non-profit and public sector.

AppExchange hosts several thousand third-party applications.

Business model and finances

Salesforce sells subscriptions, historically per user per month across several editions of increasing capability, and increasingly on consumption for agent-based products.

Revenue has grown from approximately US$1 billion in the 2009 financial year to more than US$35 billion, making it among the largest software companies in the world. Growth, which exceeded 20 per cent annually for most of the company's history, slowed into the single digits and low teens from 2023.

Operating margin was historically low for a software company, in the low single digits on a reported basis, because Salesforce reinvested aggressively in sales and in acquisitions and because stock-based compensation was very large. The activist campaign of 2023 changed this, and reported operating margin has since risen substantially.

The company's costs are dominated by sales and marketing, which for most of its history exceeded a third of revenue, reflecting a model in which growth is bought through a very large direct sales organisation. Reducing that proportion has been the central financial objective since 2023.

Dreamforce, the annual conference held in San Francisco, draws well over 100,000 attendees, is among the largest business events in the world, and has an effect on the city's hotels and transport substantial enough to be measured.

Philanthropy and the 1-1-1 model

Salesforce's most distinctive institutional feature is the 1-1-1 model, adopted at founding, under which the company commits one per cent of its equity, one per cent of its product and one per cent of employees' time to charitable purposes.

The equity commitment, made when the shares were worth very little, has produced a foundation with very substantial assets. The product commitment provides free or discounted software to non-profits and educational institutions, which has made Salesforce the default system for a large part of the non-profit sector and which is, in addition to being philanthropy, an extremely effective distribution strategy. The time commitment provides employees with paid volunteering days.

The model has been adopted by more than 20,000 companies through the Pledge 1% movement, which Salesforce co-founded, and is among the more widely imitated pieces of corporate practice to come out of Silicon Valley.

Benioff and his wife Lynne have also given very large sums personally, principally to children's hospitals at the University of California San Francisco and at Oakland, and to ocean research, and he purchased Time magazine in 2018 for US$190 million.

Marc Benioff and the company's public profile

Salesforce is unusually identified with its founder, who has been chief executive for the great majority of its history and who has used the position to intervene in public affairs more than almost any comparable executive.

Marc Benioff was born in San Francisco in 1964, wrote and sold software as a teenager, worked at Apple as an intern under Steve Jobs, and joined Oracle at 23. He has written several books about the company and about what he calls stakeholder capitalism, the argument that a business is responsible to employees, customers, communities and the planet as well as to shareholders.

His interventions have included campaigning against Indiana's religious freedom legislation in 2015, which he argued permitted discrimination, and threatening to reduce the company's investment in the state; funding and campaigning for Proposition C in San Francisco in 2018, a tax on large companies to fund homelessness services, in public opposition to Jack Dorsey and other technology executives; conducting equal pay audits at Salesforce and spending tens of millions of dollars to correct disparities; and offering to relocate employees from states restricting abortion access after the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

These positions made him among the more admired executives on the American left for a decade, which made the reaction to his statements in October 2025 correspondingly sharp. Benioff declared support for Donald Trump and urged the deployment of the National Guard to San Francisco while federal troops were being sent to other cities. The remarks produced substantial controversy, criticism from San Francisco officials and from within the company, and calls for boycotts, and he subsequently apologised for the National Guard comment while maintaining aspects of his broader position.

The episode illustrated a risk inherent in the model he had built. A company that takes public positions accumulates goodwill among those who share them and is judged by the same standard when the positions change.

Technology and platform

Multi-tenancy

Multi-tenancy is the architectural decision on which the whole business rests and it is worth explaining.

In a conventional arrangement each customer runs its own copy of an application, with its own database and its own version. Upgrading means upgrading each copy separately, which is why enterprise upgrades take months and why customers run versions years behind.

In a multi-tenant system one running instance serves every customer. Customer data is separated by an identifier rather than by a separate database, configuration is stored as data rather than as code, and everyone runs the same version. Upgrades happen for everyone at once, three times a year in Salesforce's case, and require no action by the customer.

The consequences follow directly. The marginal cost of an additional customer is very low, which permits a subscription price far below the licence-plus-implementation cost of conventional software. Every customer benefits immediately from every improvement. And customisation must be expressed as configuration and as code that runs within a governed boundary, because arbitrary modification of a shared system is impossible.

The last point is the constraint customers most often encounter. Salesforce's governor limits, which cap how much processing, how many queries and how much memory a piece of custom code may consume, exist because one customer's inefficient code would otherwise degrade everyone's service, and they are among the most frequently discussed aspects of developing on the platform.

The development model

Salesforce is configured before it is programmed. Objects, fields, page layouts, validation rules, approval processes and automation are defined declaratively through administrative interfaces, and a very large professional community of administrators works entirely in that layer without writing code.

Where code is required, Apex is a proprietary language resembling Java that runs on the platform's servers, and Lightning Web Components provide the browser interface using web standards. Flow has progressively absorbed the declarative automation that previously required code.

Trailhead, launched in 2014, is the company's free online learning system, with modules, badges and certifications. It has been unusually effective: it created a recognised career path, brought a large number of people into the technology industry from unrelated backgrounds, and produced a labour supply for the ecosystem that competitors lack. The community of certified professionals, several hundred thousand strong, is a genuine competitive asset and is entirely a product of the company's decision to give the training away.

Data and integration

The limitation of any customer relationship system is that the customer's data is not all in it. Orders are in the enterprise resource planning system, support tickets may be elsewhere, product usage is in the application itself, and marketing data is in a third place.

MuleSoft addresses this through integration, connecting systems and exposing them as application programming interfaces. Data Cloud addresses it by ingesting data into a unified profile. Informatica, acquired in 2025, addresses the governance, quality and lineage of that data, which is the part that matters most once agents are acting on it, because an agent that acts on incorrect data acts incorrectly at scale.

Headless 360, introduced in April 2026, exposes the platform itself as programmable surfaces rather than as screens, which is the logical conclusion of a strategy in which the user may be another piece of software.

Workforce and culture

Salesforce employs approximately 76,000 people, down from a peak of about 80,000 before the 2023 reductions.

The company's internal culture is organised around Ohana, a Hawaiian concept of extended family that Benioff adopted after a period in Hawaii and that has been used to describe the relationship between employees, customers, partners and communities. It has been praised as a genuine attempt at a values-led organisation and criticised as appropriation of Hawaiian culture and as language that made the January 2023 redundancies particularly jarring.

Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, completed in 2018 and at 326 metres the tallest building in the city, houses the headquarters. Its Ohana Floor at the top is open to non-profit groups. The company also occupies towers in Indianapolis, New York, London, Sydney, Tokyo and elsewhere, and its presence in San Francisco's downtown is large enough that its decisions about office attendance have a measurable effect on the district's economy.

The company has published pay equity audits since 2015 and has spent a reported figure well above US$20 million adjusting salaries, and it reports on diversity with more specificity than most of its peers.

Financial history

Revenue passed US$1 billion in the financial year ending January 2009, US$5 billion in 2015, US$10 billion in 2018, US$21 billion in 2021, US$31 billion in 2023 and more than US$35 billion since.

The company reported minimal or negative net income for most of its history, by design: it reinvested in sales capacity and absorbed very large stock-based compensation and acquisition-related amortisation. The activist campaign of 2022 and 2023 changed the priority from growth at any margin to profitable growth, and reported operating margin rose from the low single digits to the high teens and then above twenty per cent within three years.

The company initiated its first dividend and its first substantial share repurchase programme in the same period, both of which are markers of a business the market now treats as mature.

It joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average in August 2020, replacing ExxonMobil, a substitution that was widely noted as symbolic of the shift in the American economy.

Timeline

1999 Founded in March by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez; the 1-1-1 philanthropic model is adopted.
2000 The product becomes generally available; the "end of software" campaign runs.
2004 Lists on the New York Stock Exchange on 23 June.
2006 AppExchange launches.
2007 Force.com exposes the platform to customers.
2010 Heroku is acquired.
2013 ExactTarget is acquired for approximately US$2.5 billion.
2014 Trailhead launches.
2016 Demandware is acquired; Einstein is announced.
2018 MuleSoft is acquired for approximately US$6.5 billion; Salesforce Tower opens; Proposition C is passed in San Francisco.
2019 Tableau is acquired for approximately US$15.7 billion.
2020 Joins the Dow Jones Industrial Average in August.
2021 Slack is acquired for approximately US$27.7 billion.
2022 Bret Taylor leaves as co-chief executive; growth slows.
2023 Approximately 8,000 positions are cut in January; five activist investors take positions; the first dividend and buyback are announced.
2024 Agentforce is deployed in September and October.
2025 Informatica is acquired for approximately US$8 billion, completing in November; Benioff's October remarks on the National Guard produce controversy.
2026 Headless 360 is introduced in April; Contentful is acquired for a reported US$1.5 billion, completing on 1 September; m3ter is agreed in June.

Competition

Microsoft is the most structurally dangerous competitor, through Dynamics 365, which is bundled into enterprise agreements customers already hold, and through Teams, which competes with Slack on the same basis and which was the subject of a European Commission antitrust complaint brought by Slack in 2020 and resolved through Microsoft's unbundling commitments in 2024.

SAP and Oracle compete across customer-facing applications and hold the enterprise resource planning systems that generate much of the data.

Adobe competes in marketing and experience.

HubSpot and Zoho compete in the mid-market and smaller businesses, where Salesforce's complexity and cost are disadvantages.

ServiceNow, led since 2019 by Salesforce's former chief executive Bill McDermott, competes increasingly directly in workflow and, with agent products, in service.

Snowflake and Databricks compete for the data layer that both companies regard as the foundation of agent-based applications.

The wider competitive question is whether the per-seat application category survives the shift to agents at all. If work is performed by software rather than by people using software, the incumbent with the largest installed base of seats has the most to lose, and Salesforce's rapid move to consumption pricing reflects an accurate reading of that risk.

Criticism

Cost and complexity. Salesforce is expensive, and the total cost of a deployment, including the consultants and administrators required to configure and maintain it, typically exceeds the subscription substantially. Customers have complained about price increases, about the requirement to buy higher editions to obtain functionality previously included, and about the difficulty of reducing seat counts mid-term.

Acquisition integration. The company has been criticised for buying more than it integrates, with Tableau, MuleSoft and Slack each operating for extended periods as largely separate products, and the Slack price in particular has been questioned persistently.

Layoffs. The January 2023 reduction of approximately 8,000 positions was difficult to reconcile with the company's self-presentation as a family and with the Ohana culture it promotes, and Benioff's subsequent comments about productivity and about newer employees were poorly received internally.

Data protection. The company has faced scrutiny in Europe over international data transfers and, in 2019, litigation alleging that it had facilitated trafficking by providing software to Backpage, a case that was allowed to proceed in part.

Environmental and political tensions. Contracts with United States Customs and Border Protection produced internal objection in 2018 and 2019, with employees petitioning for their cancellation; the company retained them, stating that the work did not involve enforcement operations.

Assessment

Salesforce's historical significance rests on one idea executed early and completely: that business software should be a service.

The idea is now so general that its novelty is hard to recall. In 1999 the proposition that a large company would keep its customer data on someone else's servers and access it through a browser was regarded as unserious, and the objections raised, concerning security, performance, customisation and control, were the same ones raised against every subsequent shift to shared infrastructure. Salesforce demonstrated they were surmountable, and the entire software industry followed.

The company's second achievement, the platform, is less discussed and may be more durable. AppExchange, Force.com, Trailhead and the professional community around them created a dependency that is not about the product's features. An organisation with a hundred administrators and developers who know Salesforce, thousands of hours of configuration and an ecosystem of applications does not switch because a competitor is cheaper.

The difficulties are those of a mature company in a maturing category. Growth has slowed, the acquisitions have been expensive and imperfectly integrated, the cost structure required activist intervention to correct, and the founder's public profile, long an asset, became a liability in 2025.

The determining question is the one Agentforce addresses. If enterprise software becomes agents doing work rather than applications people use, then every assumption underlying a per-seat subscription business is in question, and the company that built the per-seat subscription business has the most at stake. Salesforce has moved faster than its competitors to reprice, which is the correct response to a threat it has identified accurately. Whether it also holds the right assets, the data, the integrations and the interfaces, to be the place where that work happens is not yet decided.