Introduction
It's been a busy week for CRM giant Salesforce.com, which has not only unveiled a new, feature-packed mobile app for its customers, it's also taken over London's Heron Tower, renaming it Salesforce Tower London in the process. Swish.
Imagine the bragging rights: "Do you have a tower in central London? A tall HQ? A mission base to show off your Executive Briefing Centre? Didn't think so, pal." Of course, Salesforce is a little more humble than that, as TechRadar Pro found out after a catch up with the company's EMEA SVP, Chris Ciauri.
Ciauri took us through the thinking behind the tower takeover, its upcoming UK and European data centre launches and how the company has managed to sustain its rapid growth since starting out 15 years ago.
The tower
TechRadar Pro: Why did you re-badge Heron Tower and what is it about London that appeals to the company?
Chris Ciauri: Innovation is in the company's cultural core, and we're the first technology company to put its name on a tower in central London. People have chosen different places to put their companies and we like to think out of the box. I think it's a statement to this market about how important and big the company is. We have a data centre coming to London too - the capital is our number two market in the world behind the US.
TRP: The tower will house an 'Executive Briefing Centre'. What's that?
CC: We have something similar in San Francisco - it's really a place where we can have our most modern technology that can help our customers re-imagine the way that they can connect with their customers.
I pick the word reimagine on purpose as I feel that's part of our role - we want to help them, based on the feedback that we're getting - to challenge themselves and think about doing different things. Like saying you can run your business phone your smartphone. It gives us the ability to bring European customers in and really showcase how we can help them change their business.
TRP: Why are you opening a data centre in the UK and additional ones across Europe?
CC: The statement there is really about growth. Historically our data centres have been in the US, and we're lucky to be in a position where we can now put data centres in the UK and Europe to continue and accelerate that growth.
The growth
TRP: Salesforce.com is 15 this year - what are the key elements that have driven that growth in that time?
CC: I think the company was dogmatic about changing the industry, so the question that was asked at the beginning by our founder Marc Benioff was whether we could make enterprise software as easy as buying a book on amazon.
It's simple stuff, but I think that vision has transformed an industry, and I think it's about that conviction to not veer off that model of saying, "there's a different way to do this, it should be fast, easy to use, scalable up and down, multi-tennant". It's about all of those concepts.
The second thing I'd say is to focus on the customer. In 15 years we've become the leader in the CRM, magic quadrant, sales service and marketing segments, and we've announced today we're the CRM leader in the UK, which is exciting.
Our focus is around CRM and helping our customers connect with their customers in new ways. We talk about new ways now, so now it's about social and mobile, whereas 10 years ago it was just making it easier to do that via the cloud. We put those three major trends together and I think that's what's done it.
The new mobile app
TRP: The new Salesforce1 app is being presented as more of a fresh offering rather than an upgrade to the existing app. What was the thinking behind going for a revamp, and why should your customers download it in July?
CC: We announced Salesforce1 (the platform and application) last November at Dreamforce and relaunched it here in London this week. In the summer we'll have a second version of it. It's really just extending the functionality, but you're right - it's a rewrite of applications to make it API-first to help customers be able to run their business from their phone.
The convergence of social and mobile, and even connected devices, is where we see customers wanting to be. So we're helping our customers figure out that journey with their customers.
TRP: It's that idea that you can be playing Angry Birds on your iPhone one minute and driving sales leads the next...
CC: Absolutely. We're responding to the mix and the blend of the consumer side and the explosion you've seen there of apps. I think that's slower to come to the business world, but we certainly believe it's coming so we're making big bets.
I read something that I thought was pretty interesting. We did a study with the Economist that basically said that because of apps, people are 34% more productive. But 59% of employees say that their companies need to build more apps. So that tells us that we're just scratching the surface in terms of the kind of tools that we put in the hands of people, and there's a part we think Salesforce1 can play.
It's an app to be able to run Salesforce on your phone but it's also a platform to help customers build apps to appeal to the what you might call "frusted employee population". They're the ones asking why they can go fast in their personal life with their consumer apps but might only have Salesforce and Workday or a few others on the business side.
TRP: How important will the API aspect be? Mulesoft has introduced a SAP connector for Salesforce1 - will it be the first of many?
CC: The answer is: hugely important. The concept of Salesforce1 was building it API first so that it's delivered with 10 times the amount of APIs that Salesforce had before, which is absolutely recognition that there's power in connections.
If we can help our customers connect the assets that they have in an efficient way, they'll get an exponential business benefit. And we see it across our customer base.
UK customers that have come onboard like Eurostar obviously have a lot of infrastructure. If we can help it be an agility layer for them and help them figure out apps and things like that, they could have an app strategy; there's so much benefit they can extract for their customers.
TRP: The new Salesforce1 mobile app is compatible with Samsung wearables. How is Salesforce planning to capture traction going on in the wearables market?
CC: I think that regardless of the initial device that we chose, we see is that there's going to be an explosion in terms of connected devices.
Six or 12 months ago nobody was having that conversation, whereas now everyone's imaging that conversation. I think it's more metaphors at this point - you're choosing something to be able to go challenge a customer and say does that give you any ideas that would help you connect with your customers in new ways.
Looking ahead
TRP: How are you going to apply Internet of Things to CRM, sales, customer service and other areas of what you offer?
CC: To give you an example, General Electric's aviation division connects their jet engines to deliver service on those parts, which is the most profitable part of the business. By having them connected and using Salesforce they can see when those engines need maintenance after flying, say, the next 500km.
So instead of making a short flight from London to Dublin they get proactive service. It means they can delight their customers but at the same time deliver the service in a more profitable way because their devices are talking to them. There's myriad of examples that we're seeing really gain traction in that area.
TRP: Salesforce.com beat analysts' expectations for another quarter, but once again it hasn't managed to drive a profit. How is it going to do that?
CC: I can talk about the growth aspect of it, which I feel that I can do as growth is part of our story, particularly in a region like Europe, where we feel like we're scratching the Surface.
You see it here today with 10,000 plus people and announcements around Salesforce Tower and investments in the market - we're doing that because we're seeing an acceleration off what's already a significant business.
I can take us back to the business when you said why is all of that happening, why in 15 years and some of the things I think we're not entering that extreme momentum phase outside of the US like in places like the UK and Europe, it's just tremendous growth.
TRP: We've talked a lot about enterprises, but what is the company doing for SMBs?
CC: I think that's an interesting part of the innovation that Salesforce can bring to our customers that sometimes gets lost. We grew up as a company sort of selling to small and medium sized business, whereas most enterprise customers start at the top and bring their complex difficult to use solutions down.
I think that's why we've been successfull in selling to all these segments, but it also means we've got 100,000 people giving us feedback.
I think that also feeds our culture and innovation and ability to really bring our customers in like the executive briefing centre and say this isn't just what we're hearing from the Burberrys, here's what we're hearing from the Halos or Addison Lees that do businesses just as successfully as the enterprises.
TRP: Where are the opportunity segments and trends that Salesforce will be taking advantage of over the next few years?
CC: I think it's a great thing that we have 100,000 customers that can give us feedback - from SMBs to large enterprise. I think we can improve at helping our customers extract more value out of great technology and things like Salesforce1 if we can have a more specific dialogue within different industries.
And part of that's also to make sure that we build out an ecosystem based on industries. Whether it's financial services or manufacturing or automotive, there's certain applications - maybe some on the AppExchange and maybe some that aren't - that would help us round out the offering to a customer from that segment, so that's going to be a big bet for us going forward.
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