How does Salesforce.com use cloud computing?

Salesforce.com uses cloud computing to provide their customers with customer relationship
management (CRM) And other application software solutions in the form of Software as a
service leased over the internet compared to the software bought and installed to the machine
locally. The platform designed to support sales, marketing and customer support in both
business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) contexts. Salesforce.com offers
five versions of Sales Cloud on a per-user, per month basis, from lowest to highest: Group,
Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited and Performance. The company offers three levels of
support contracts: Standard Success Plan, Premier Success Plan and Premier+ Success Plan.
Subscribers to Salesforce.com don’t have to purchase or maintain any hardware (able it
personal computing devices) nor do they have to install and maintain any hardware (able it
personal computing devices) nor do they have to install any special operating systems, database
servers, or application servers. There are no operating systems, database servers, or application
servers to install, no consultants and staff, and no expensive licensing and maintenance fees.
Users access the Salesforce.com cloud through a standard Web browser or a mobile handheld
device. The sales and service clouds help businesses improve sales cloud, and the custom cloud.
The custom cloud provides a venue for customers to develop their own applications for use
within the broader Salesforce network.

What are some of the challenges facing Saleforce as it continues its growth? How well will
it able to meet those challenges?

Some of the challenges that face Salesforce.com as it continues its growth are: - the increasing
presence of major industry competitors such as SAP and Microsoft. Another challenges faced
by Salesforce.com is it’s limited product line.

To be able to meet those challenges, Salesforce.com needs to diversify its business models into
other fields. Salesforce.com recently went into a partnership with Google to counteract
Microsoft’s entry into the cloud computing market. They combine its service with Gmail,
Google Docs, Google Talk and Google Calendar to allow its customers to accomplish more
tasks via the Web. By partnering with Apple, Salesforce.com can expand its applications to
iPhone users who will have access to their data anywhere any time. Sales force should ensure
the system is available 24/7 with no outages and defending the system against security breaches
and having a contingency plan action to ensure business continuity such as moving to a backup
server in a matter of minutes. To counteract the challenge of widening its business operations,

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Salesforce.com should release applications or software to download for subscribing that deal
in areas outside the cloud computing industry. Salesforce should collaborate with Amazon to
enable new extensions like Force.com customers to tap into Amazon’s cloud computing
services (Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service) Amazon’s services would
handle the “cloudburst computing” tasks of Force.com applications that require extra
processing power or storage capacity.

What kind of businesses could benefit from switching to Salesforce and why?

Many e-business would benefit from implementing Salesforce.com. This implementation

would streamline day-to-day activities and make computing and problem solving simpler for
employees and customers alike. Large corporations would benefit from Salesforce.com as well.
This would make working with employees across international borders easier. Another
business that can benefit from salesforce are the small and medium enterprises (SME). Due to
the lower cost, SMEs would find salesforce a more appealing solution than paying licensing
fees to larger corporation systems such as SAP and ORACLE. Businesses that are trying to
increase the sophistication of their computing abilities could also benefit from using
Salesforce.com application

What factors would you take into account in deciding whether to use Salesforce.com for
your business?
When deciding whether or not to implement Salesforce.com with my business, I would need
to consider several factors. The main consideration factor ease of use. This is one of the
primary reasons that drive the Salesforce adoption rate. Sales Reps have better visibility into
their accounts, contacts, opportunities, tasks, all from a single place. They have a complete
360-degree view of the customer, which in turn helps them to make better business decisions
and close deals faster. In addition to that the default Salesforce platform comes with a wide
array of features and functionalities which caters to most organizational needs. During the
implementation process, the Admin can make point-and-click alterations via the Force.com
builder to configure the solution as per the required business process. Another area where
Salesforce scores major brownie points amongst its competitors is its ability to be highly
customizable. While a majority of requirements can be handled through configuration,
sometimes there is a need to add/extend the existing functionalities to accurately reflect your
business needs. For Salesforce customization, technical expertise is required on Apex Code
and Visualforce pages. The very special part that can be highlighted in Sales Force would be
the track customer lifecycle. The solution has been built for customers and sales reps to track

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the potential and customer lifecycle – Sales Cloud for channelling sales activities, Service
Cloud and Desk.com to anticipate and cater to customer needs, Marketing Cloud and Pardot to
build 1-o-1 customer journeys and drive sales, Analytics to deliver customizable insights and
gain deeper understanding of the requires business’s performance. The Salesforce team and
community work closely to build the solution better each day – they listen to customer
feedbacks and requests and incorporate new features in the solution. Thrice every year
Salesforce releases new features to drive their reputation for product functionality and customer
satisfaction. Being a Cloud Platform, the implementation time for Salesforce is much lesser
than standard solutions, thereby lessening the Go-Live timeframe. The feature-rich solution
can be configured easily and even if any customization is required, it can be incorporated in a
systematic order easily.

Besides these factors ,how reliable the Internet access is. Another factor would be the size of
said business. If I owned a smaller business with a handful of employees, then Salesforce.com
would be unnecessary.

Could a company run its entire business using Salesforce.com, Force.com and App
Exchange? -Explain your answer.

Yes, a company is able to run its entire business using the three platforms, Salesforce.com,
Force.com and AppExchange due to the flexibility of the platforms that allows users to
customize to fit their needs.

Salesforce.com is a very powerful platform that is capable of handling of large amount of

corporate data in its cloud based platform. This combined with the large storage and transaction
handling, making it suitable for any forms of businesses. Salesforce.com’s cloud based
platform also allows a cheaper and much more efficient way of working on multiple platforms
such as smartphones and various PCs. Instead of going through the tedious process of installing
the software across every device, Salesforce.com can be accessed through browsers. Another
key factor when exploring cloud based applications, would be the security of the platform.
Salesforce.com has been able to keep their platforms secure and transparent by allowing
customers to audit their security infrastructure.

Salesforce built AppExchange for enterprise to provide everything from point solutions to full-
blown professional automation apps empowering them to achieve measurable business goals
in the cloud App Exchange runs somewhat as an app distribution platform , allowing the
customers of salesforce to easily install third party apps and add-ons to Salesforce.com that are

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able to cater to the customers' needs outside of sales functions such as human resources. More
than 3,000 apps are available today on AppExchange. In 2016, 85 percent of Fortune 100
companies were connecting with their customers with at least one Salesforce AppExchange
app. One very handy aspect of AppExchange apps is that each installation applies to only one
Salesforce instance. This means you can easily run extended tests and training on a new app in
a sandbox instance first before rolling it out in production. Currently, AppExchange apps in
total have more than 3 million installs. This makes it an attractively comprehensive source of
social, mobile, and cloud-connected apps for businesses.

Force.com is a development tool and IT services that can allow the users to customize
Salesforce.com to fit their requirements adding a level of customizability for the user.