In-house reliability
See correction below
“When you’re running a system that’s doing millions of [Web] pages a day, you need to understand every aspect in your system,” Moellenhoff says. “If you have a bunch of products from third parties, those are just boxes. All of our session management, database information pooling — we understand everything that is going on.”
By opting to build a new type of system instead of simply hosting existing sales-force tools, Moellenhoff also hopes to transform graying ideas of an ASP value-add role and scale capabilities.
“People use ASP [to describe] taking exciting client server applications and hosting them. We didn’t consider that to really work,” Moellenhoff says. “To really build a Web-based service, you need to architect from the beginning a multi-tenant architecture where many companies are living in the same stack.”
After starting his IT career at Metropolis Software, one of the initial CRM players, Moellenhoff left to form his own Java consultant business, Left Coast Software. Upon joining Salesforce.com, the CTO decided to earmark Java as a key cog behind the ASP’s solution.
Moellenhoff admits he is now more cautious in his technology decisions. “Back in the early days of Salesforce.com, things we were doing and changes we made to live production environments even frighten me now,” he says.
Those early risks paid off. In just a few years, the San Francisco-based Salesforce.com has built a loyal following of customers eager to dump obtrusive client/server software implementation in favor of an immediate return ASP monthly subscription billing rate. The company provides SFA (sales-force automation) and marketing applications designed to save on training, workflow processes, real-time upgrades, and it has added CRM to its repertoire.
Salesforce.com’s ascension to profitability has not gone unnoticed. A Morgan Stanley report last September rated the ASP as adding more customers than any other CRM solutions provider during the past two years. Its customer base includes Adobe Systems, Siemens, Fujitsu, and Wachovia.
Still licking wounds from the dot-com implosion and evaporation of a prime customer base, many ASPs are struggling to either stay afloat or repair brand damage done through ill-fated business models and initial construction.
But Moellenhoff says sagging economic conditions help Salesforce.com’s sales push by urging customers that are feeling the budget pinch to consider the advantages of an outsourced solution.
In a CRM market once dominated by heavyweights including Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and SAP, upstart Salesforce.com is standing toe-to-toe by catering to an increasingly remote and IT-dispersed sales community, says Laurie McCabe, an analyst at Boston-based Summit Strategies.
“It’s really expensive to deploy these long-distance solutions in house. More and more customers are going to be saying, what are the alternatives?” McCabe says. “[Salesforce.com] has kind of shaken up the apple cart here.”
Moellenhoff admits the fluctuating market has thrown him and his development team a few curves, and he remains cautious about the role Web services will play. The CTO is skeptical about whether or not applications written by different and unknown parties will seamlessly work together in large-scale distributed environments.
“It won’t be an egalitarian world where everyone will write this code and it all magically works together,” Moellenhoff says. “At the end of day, programming is programming — and you have to do it well.”
Correction
In this article, we originally misspelled Marc Bineoff’s name. Also, a quote from Moellenhoff should have said that people use ASP to describe taking existing client server applications and hosting them.
