Salesforce Organizational Analysis Organizational Analysis of Salesforce.com

Salesforce Organizational Analysis Organizational Analysis of Salesforce.com Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) has completely redefined the economics of cloud computing by successfully using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that enables enterprises to pay just for the software they use, while also significantly streamlining the agility and speed of application customization. These are major improvements over how enterprise software has been sold in the past, where sales cycles were often very long, expensive and complex often taking nine to 12 months to complete.

Being able to pay for enterprise software from an operating expense (OPEX) budget quickly is replacing the more time-consuming and expensive capital expense (CAPEX) budgeting process (Upson, 2011). Salesforce.com competes in the global Customer Relationship Management (CRM) enterprise software industry, which is a class of software companies use for better attracting, selling and serving their customers (Denning, 2011). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the basic legal, social, global marketing and economic factors that are affecting Salesforce's ability to grow today and into the future.

The potential change factors that will affect Salesforce's growth over the long-term are also discussed. Analysis Of Salesforce.com Salesforce.com operates as a corporation with limited liability as defined their organizational structure. They are however a publically-traded business on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) an d as a result must abide by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 reporting requirements including the disclosure of significant financial events that could and do affect their overall financial performance.

The social aspects of Salesforce.com are prevalent throughout the many social networks the company participates on. Their CEO and founder Mac Benioff was also recently mentioned as one of the most socially active CEOs in industry (Salesforce.com Investor Relations, 2013). Salesforce.com has also devised a unique and highly differentiated suite of applications entirely based on social networks, with the most well-known being Salesforce.com Chatter (Denning, 2011).

Chatter is a product suite that combines the ease of use found on social networks Facebook and Twitter with integration to a given company's CRM systems and overall system of record for managing finance, operations and manufacturing (Denning, 2011). Salesforce.com is immersed in social networking as a result and leads the enterprise software market in their adoption of these technologies. From a global marketing standpoint, Salesforce.com is a the worldwide leader in CRM software sales with 14% market share.

Figure 1 is from a recent Forbes article analyzing the CRM marketplace, which indicated 40% of all CRM systems sold are SaaS-based and Salesforce being the market leader. Figure 1: Worldwide CRM Software Spending by Vendor, 2012 Source: Forbes From a global marketing standpoint, Salesforce is orchestrating their value chain well by incorporating industry, operational management, operational and financial issues all into a cohesive, unified strategy.

The company is specifically doing this first by relying on an above-average level of research & development (R&D) into new application design on the SaaS platform exclusively (Salesforce.com Investor Relations, 2013). These investments in R&D have also helped the company to stay on parity an d on some applications, take market leadership functionality in terms of relative competitive position (Lee, Kim, Noh, Lee, 2010).

Salesforce.com has been successful in transitioning enterprise software companies to the cloud platform by also designing their operations management and operational workflows for greater accountability and transparency of performance relative to on-premise enterprise vendors (Orr, 2006). Salesforce.com has been able to accomplish this by focusing on creating trust in their systems and processes. They were the first software vendor selling into enterprise-level companies to provide 24/7, always-available updates of server and cloud performance at the website trust.salesforce.com for example (Salesforce.com Investor Relations, 2013).

The operational management, operational and financial management systems of the company are designed to provide greater agility for customers to grow their application suites as they need to in order to serve their customers (Denning, 2011). This agility has given Salesforce.com greater resiliency to the overall challenges of managing a rapidly growing, cloud-only business. It has also given the company the ability to create a more effective long-term transition and growth path for its customers as well (Denning, 2011).

The potential change factors of the Salesforce.com business model revolve around stabilizing.