In part the Force.com tour is a celebration for salesforce. 10th birthday, $ 1 billion in revenue. It has been quite a ride.
As I spent the day yesterday talking to analysts and partners and customers at the event in NYC yesterday, it hit me the next billion would be a lot different in at least 4 ways
a) The pressure to go up-market.
Every chance he gets, CEO Marc Benioff emphasizes his customers have always been a third really small businesses, a third mid-size and a third large customers. It is clear in the salesperson recruiting and customer targeting that the company wants that mix to skew to the third category. If there is a chink in the salesforce armor, it is that 2/3rd of its revenues go towards SG&A. The conventional wisdom is larger customers should help reduce that. The risk of course, it means hiring the "elephant hunters" from Oracle and IBM and SAP. Watch for the related corrupting influences.
b) The pressure to cozy up to bigger SIs
In line with the above point, again the conventional wisdom is salesforce needs the IBMs and the Accentures as it sells higher. I have written before one of the nice "features" of salesforce is its ecosystem of new age SIs like appirio, Blue Wolf and Model Metrics. But could they handle global 20,000 user implementations? Enter the bigger SIs. To me, again another potential corruption influence to what has worked well over the first billion.
c) The pressure to expand the functional footprint
Compare the salesforce application growth to the iPhone apps store - close to 20,000 new applications in less than 12 months. Unfair as that comparison may be, that is the "new normal". There was quite a bit of emphasis yesterday on the Service Cloud which is finally rolling out with functionality acquired via Intstranet as the core piece. Then there is continued focus on ISVs like Coda leveraging salesforce's platform to fill out the functional footprint. The reality: unless the pace of delivery of internal or partner solutions increases dramatically, salesforce will become a development tool more than an application company over the course of the next billion in revenue.
d) The pressure to "sell"
One of the most frustrating things I find at salesforce events is constant rumors about who is going to "buy them". As salesforce gets bigger each year, the list of potential acquirers gets smaller and the pressure to sell grows. I find it the equivalent of child porn - I am repulsed at the thought of what one of the larger vendors mentioned as a buyer would do to this 10 year old. But that idle conversation continues.
It will take Marc and his team even more discipline to stay the course and continue to believe they have created something special - and so different. They earned the first billion by being different. They need to remember that and not become too "mainstream" as they plan their next billion.
