Salesforce.com is without a doubt the leading CRM software solution in the world. Salesforce.com is also one of the fastest growing software companies of our age and that growth curve is not going to plateau any time soon. The reason for such growth is not just because it’s a great CRM, , but also because it has cultivated a community of expert who share their knowledge of salesforce.com with other users, it offers an expansive library of training resources, it has world-class product support, and most importantly it has highly reliable and secure infrastructure.

There is also another important reason for Salesforce.com’s growth these days, one that is taking Salesforce.com beyond CRM and establishing it as a major enterprise grade software platform for today’s enterprises. It is none other than it’s very own core platform offering – Force.com, also known as the App Cloud.

Somewhere towards the end of 2008 Salesforce.com embarked on a mission to extend its SaaS offering beyond just CRM. By this time customers and partners were already building non-CRM apps to satisfy the ever growing demands of their business teams. Every company had some version of an expense management app, field service app, invoicing and ordering app only because the Salesforce platform provided a quick to create and quick to deploy tool set that many competing software vendors did not provide.

What does the App Cloud have to do with taking Salesforce.com beyond CRM?

High-growth organizations have adopted Salesforce.com as a trusted CRM for over a decade. Over the past few years, Salesforce.com has continued to evolve as expert partners have built (and users have installed and utilized) non-CRM business support applications on the App Cloud—otherwise known as the Force.com platform. Users are able to purchase such applications from the Salesforce.com AppExchange or build their own apps using intuitive clicks rather than code in a relatively easy fashion.

For example, take The FinancialForce PSA app— It’s an easy to use app used for accounting and professional services management. Such apps extend Salesforce.com beyond the standard CRM functionality and this is made possible because Salesforce.com has enabled its community of professionals, partners, and customers to leverage the Force.com App Cloud platform as a core PaaS offering and a fraction of the cost of standard CRM licenses. The Force.com Platform opens up creative possibilities to expand Salesforce.com to best fit individual customers’ non-CRM business and has ensured that Salesforce.com the company can grow beyond CRM not just by acquisition but also based on it’s own product offerings.

What motivates high growth companies to choose Salesforce.com as an enterprise platform and not just as a CRM?

Low development costs, shorter app build times, and low maintenance costs make Force.com a great alternative to more common development environments, especially for lean organizations and those focused on high growth. Most high-growth companies often contract out their products, services, and solutions that are not part of the core business model to external parties, while they focus only on items that are essential to the core business goals. These companies usually have a high affinity for platforms like Force.com that enable them to contract out the infrastructure, hardware, operating system, and data center components to Salesforce.com. In the meantime, they can focus on building their business efficiently by either purchasing commercial apps via the AppExchange or developing essential apps on this platform without having to worry about maintaining an army of IT resources.

It does not matter how big or small a business is—they can all benefit from the Salesforce.com App Cloud. The PaaS platform effectively speeds up the growth trajectory of companies because the leadership does not have to worry about common technological impediments to business growth.
Gartner’s famous quadrant depicts Salesforce.com as an industry leader in the platform as a service space—and rightly so. When leveraged to its full capacity, this platform provides unfathomable benefits to organizations that adopt it—not just for their CRM, but for all capabilities above and beyond.
To sum it all up, Salesforce.com under the leadership of it’s CEO and management and with the help of it’s ISV app partners has indeed moved beyond being just a CRM provider and transformed into a true enterprise cloud computing company offering a multitude of solutions on one homogeneous platform Force.com.