For a company that immortalized the circle-slash “No Software” icon to underscore the wildly different reality of the cloud, Salesforce sure has sold a lot of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software in its 23-year history.
In fact, about $150 billion across the past two decades, starting with $5.4 million for fiscal 2002, reaching $1 billion in fiscal 2010, and now well on its way this year to blowing past $30 billion. And in Salesforce’s fiscal Q2 ended July 31, Marc Benioff’s company achieved what many people thought impossible: It surpassed SAP as the world’s largest enterprise-applications provider, as Salesforce posted quarterly revenue of $7.72 billion compared to SAP’s $7.52 billion.
In doing so, Salesforce made good on an absolutely wild prediction that Benioff made 20 years ago regarding the disruptive and ultimately transformative power of the cloud and his company’s future: “There were the leaders, but Oracle displaced them. The same thing is going to happen again. It’s the beginning of a brand new technology and business world.”
How did Salesforce do the impossible?