Salesforce

Founded in 1999, Salesforce has been, along with Amazon, one of the primary evangelists for the cloud-computing industry. Launched by Marc Benioff with the audacious concept of “No Software!,” Salesforce has become the largest SaaS vendor in the world and has held the #3 spot on the Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings for more than 2 years. It recently became the only publicly traded company in U.S. history to post increased revenue every quarter for 20 straight years. From Benioff’s early vision of online applications for salespeople—ergo the company name—Salesforce has evolved into what it calls “the customer company” with a vast array of SaaS applications plus a fast-growing PaaS business. The company’s Dreamforce event, held every fall in San Francisco, has become the enterprise-tech business’s largest conference and exemplifies the torrid growth and widespread embrace of cloud computing.

Salesforce’s cloud services

Building out from its initial SaaS applications aimed at salespeople and the sales process, Salesforce now offers a broad fleet of apps covering all aspects of customer engagement. That includes sales, service, marketing, commerce, and engagement clouds, and Salesforce is #1 or #2 in the world in each of those separate but interrelated categories. A few years ago, the company also began offering industry-specific clouds, including Manufacturing, Government, Philanthropy and more. Salesforce’s PaaS services include MuleSoft for integration, Tableau for analytics and the Heroku platform.

Why Salesforce has earned a spot in the Cloud Wars Top 10

Salesforce is likely to top $20 billion in revenue for calendar 2020, and is has made itself synonymous with cloud computing. It continues to push its high-power brand and technologies into new markets, and has been one of the primary driving forces of cloud computing in the world.