When we think of enterprise SaaS companies today, just about every startup in the space aspires to be a platform. That means they want people using their stack of services to build entirely new applications, either to enhance the base product, or even build entirely independent companies. But when Salesforce launched Force.com, the company’s Platform as a Service, in 2007, there wasn’t any model.
It turns out that Force.com was actually the culmination of a series of incremental steps after the launch of the first version of Salesforce in February, 2000, all of which were designed to make the software more flexible for customers. Company co-founder and CTO Parker Harris says they didn’t have this goal to be a platform early on. “We were a solution first, I would say. We didn’t say ‘let’s build a platform and then build sales-force automation on top of it.’ We wanted a solution that people could actually use,” Harris told TechCrunch.
The march toward becoming a full-fledged platform started with simple customization. That first version of Salesforce was pretty basic, and the company learned over time that customers didn’t always use the same language it did to describe customers and accounts — and that was something that would need to change.
Customizing the product
As Harris tells it, around 2003 a customer came to co-founder Marc Benioff with a special request. It wanted to use Salesforce, but needed to change the default field names. This company sold to hospitals, not businesses, and the default nomenclature of accounts and contacts didn’t work for them.
Harris joked that it took some time for him and fellow programmers Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez to warm to the idea of customization. “Dave, Frank and I told Marc to tell them that they could just tell their people that an account is a hospital and a contact is the patient — and they’ll be fine.” They saw the need though, and went to work. A couple of weeks later, the team came back with a solution and they were on their way.
It would eventually lead to a platform, but it started with customization because, as Harris said, they couldn’t build one Salesforce for healthcare and another for insurance and a third for finance. “We knew that wouldn’t scale, and so the platform [eventually] just evolved out of this really close relationship with our customers and the needs they had,” he said.
Brent Leary, who is co-founder at CRM Essential, was working in that time frame helping companies implement that early version of Salesforce. He said that the custom fields were absolutely essential for his clients to make the software align with the way they worked. Without that ability, they couldn’t have used Salesforce. Customization drove sales.
Developing APIs with S Force
Fields were just the launching point for further customization that would happen over time. Customized fields led to customized objects, a more sophisticated construct where customers could create their own database tables specific for their organizations and link to them in Salesforce, effectively making it their own.
Leary says his customers had a certain way of doing things and they needed to not only customize field names, but also add new fields that were part of their business process. This customization capability really helped push the solution across a variety of verticals. “In each of those industries [we were working with], the sales people had certain pieces of information that were crucial to them being able to go through the sales process. Customization was key right from the beginning,” he said.
The company officially launched a product called S Force in 2003, an early attempt at more advanced customization. “We launched a platform that was called S Force, and it was just a set of APIs, but we had a vision of building something more that could not only be customized with metadata, but you could actually write to those APIs and build extensions,” Harris said. It would be some time before you could create entire applications, but extensions were a starting point for more sophisticated integration.
Launching the AppExchange
The next step would be the AppExchange, a marketplace where partners and other interested parties could sell add-ons that helped extend Salesforce.
According to Harris, the AppExchange idea actually developed after a meeting with Steve Jobs at Apple. Harris says that Benioff invited him and co-founder Dave Moellenhoff to a meeting with Jobs, who gave them a bit of key advice.” It was an incredible meeting, but one of the things that Jobs was telling [us] was that you really need to think about ecosystems. And so from there, we started to grow what we now call the AppExchange,” he said.
The AppExchange went live in 2006 and was the first example of an enterprise app store, a notion that is commonplace now, but was unheard of at that time. Ultimately, it was another step toward that platform that would come the following year at Dreamforce.
Harris said that part of the idea behind the AppExchange was a practical one. He knew that he didn’t have enough engineers to provide all the tools each industry would need to run Salesforce for its unique requirements. The AppExchange provided a marketplace to sell industry-specific extensions.
“Now with the iPhone, everyone’s like, oh yeah, of course, there’s an ecosystem and I can download an app and turn my iPhone into whatever I want it to do. This is the same idea with Salesforce. It’s an architecture that allows that ecosystem to grow, guided by our customers,” he said.
Force.com completes platform vision
At Dreamforce in 2007, the company took the idea of customization to the limit when it announced Force.com. It was a platform where developers could take advantage of the Salesforce toolset and build whole applications on top of it.
Companies like FinancialForce, Veeva, ServiceMax, Apttus and many others have since built independent companies on top of the Salesforce platform. As Jeremy Roche, founder of FinancialForce told TechCrunch in 2016, people thought he was a bit crazy hitching his wagon to another company’s platform. “When we launched FinancialForce.com, I heard all types of questions and doubts, mostly on whether I had gone mad building a company on someone else’s platform,” he told TechCrunch at the time.
Kirk Krappe, who founded Apttus in 2006, was an early adherent of the platform, even before it was officially announced. The company went on to raise $404 million and was sold to Thoma Bravo last year. He said that building on top of Salesforce really helped the company in the early days.
“Simply put, it was because it democratized the software business – we were a handful of guys in a laundry room and it brought not only reliability and customer access, but also inherent marketing because of the strength of the Salesforce brand,” Krappe said at the time.
When you combine that platform with the AppExchange, you had a way to build and market the app. Successful companies would move beyond the AppExchange of course, but it gave them access to the Salesforce market and all that entailed to give the products an early marketing push. The company changed the branding from Force.com to Salesforce Lightning Platform in 2015.
The fact is that today every enterprise SaaS company wants to build upon that early model, but Salesforce had to do it without any help. The company broke new ground when it created this approach, and every enterprise SaaS company that has followed is really building upon that original idea.