As part of my series of posts on vertical solutions, I had an excellent briefing this week from Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, EVP of Industries at Salesforce. I am also impressed at the wide range of sessions by industry that are being offered at Dreamforce next week. Here, for example, is the "trail map" of sessions for the financial services sector. They have similar for travel and hospitality, retail and consumer goods, public sector, media and communications, manufacturing, health and life sciences.
It would be fair to say that Salesforce's vertical journey to date has come in fits and starts. In his new book, Trailblazer, CEO Marc Benioff describes the "Merrill Lynch Mutiny". Merrill (and parent Bank of America) in 2013 was at the time Salesforce’s biggest customer and nearly threw the vendor out. As Marc describes they creatively worked out the issues, but as you can imagine a failure there would have significantly slowed down its financial services drive. Similarly, he describes a brilliant piece of marketing to get them to position the Toyota Friend IoT platform and then leverage that to other manufacturing customers. But these were opportunistic moves, not well thought out industry strategies.
Also, after a decade of AppExchange there still aren't many partners that offer detailed operational books of record - like insurance claims processing or retail merchandising or clinical coverage in healthcare on the Force platform. While Veeva which sells in the pharma sector has a annual billion dollar revenue run rate, most of the others are sub-$ 100 million - so somewhat modest after a decade, compared to Salesforce's own rocketship growth selling more horizontally.
The Merrill hiccup seven years ago is a distant memory and its the pace of industry focus has accelerated. Salesforce's own vertical functionality tends to be in its wheelhouse - in customer-centric, front-office areas like mortgage borrower apps in financial services and local government licensing and permitting in the public sector.
Given the massive size of the verticals they are targeting, the Salesforce/partner coverage is still limited. But one slide in particular Neeracha presented shows their momentum. They are showing up in more industry specific events like HIMSS and not only attracting more prospects from those verticals (who in turn clamor for more industry functionality) but also getting a chance to understand and potentially recruit the operational vendors who present at those events.
I look forward to next week's industry sessions at Dreamforce and also tracking Salesforce's partner ecosystem growth. After two decades of cloud and in-memory applications, only about 20% of a grid across countries and industry processes has a decent choice in contemporary architecture. So many white spaces beckon. I am truly excited about Salesforce's accelerating commitment to verticals.
