What is Salesforce?

• Salesforce.com is a software as a service (SaaS) company that distributes business software on a subscription basis. 
• Salesforce hosts the applications offsite. It is best known for its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products.
• Salesforce.com is headquartered in San Francisco, with regional headquarters in Morges, Switzerland (covering Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Singapore (covering Asia Pacific less Japan), and Tokyo (covering Japan). Other major offices are in Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, and San Mateo, California. Salesforce.com has its services translated into 16 different languages and currently has 82,400 customers and over 2,100,000 subscribers.

Products and services


Customer Relationship Management
Salesforce.com's CRM solution is broken down into several broad categories: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud (including Jigsaw), Collaboration Cloud (including Chatter) and Custom Cloud (including Force.com).


The Sales Cloud
This application runs in the cloud, so the user can access it anywhere through an Internet-enabled mobile device or a connected computer. The Sales Cloud includes a real-time sales collaborative tool called Chatter, provides sales representatives with a complete customer profile and account history, allows the user to manage marketing campaign spending and performance across a variety of channels from a single application, tracks all opportunity-related data including milestones, decision makers, customer communications, and any other information unique to the company's sales process. Automatic email reminders can be scheduled to keep teams up to date on the latest information.
Other activities can be done on the Salesforce cloud. These include using the Jigsaw business data to access over 20 million complete and current business contacts from right inside Salesforce CRM, and designing and automating any process in Salesforce CRM.


The Service Cloud
The Service Cloud provides companies with a call center-like view that enables companies to create and track cases coming in from every channel, and automatically route and escalate what’s important. The Salesforce CRM-powered customer portal provides customers the ability to track their own cases 24 hours a day, includes a social networking plug-in that enables the user to join the conversation about their company on social networking websites, provides analytical tools and other services including email services, chatting tools, Google search, and access to customers' entitlement and contracts.


Force.com platform
Main article: Force.com
Salesforce.com's PaaS product is known as the Force.com platform. The platform allows external developers to create add-on applications that integrate into the main salesforce.com application and are hosted on salesforce.com's infrastructure.
These applications are built using Apex (a proprietary Java-like programming language for the Force.com platform) and Visualforce (an XML-like syntax for building user interfaces in HTML, Ajax or Flex).


Chatter
Chatter, released in June 2010, is a real-time collaboration platform for users. The service sends information proactively via a real-time news stream. Users can follow coworkers and data to receive broadcast updates about project and customer status. Users can also form groups and post messages on each other's profiles to collaborate on projects.


AppExchange
Launched in 2005, AppExchange is a marketplace for cloud computing applications built for the salesforce.com community and delivered by partners or by third-party developers, which users can purchase and add to their salesforce.com environment. As of October 2010, there are over 900 applications available from over 450 independent software vendors. All salesforce.com partners can distribute applications and solutions on the AppExchange. Applications created on the Force.com platform are installed by salesforce.com customers.


Configuration
Salesforce users can configure their CRM application. In the system, there are tabs such as "Contacts," "Reports," and "Accounts." Each tab contains associated information. For example, "Contacts" has standard fields like First Name, Last Name, and Email. Configuration can be done on each tab by adding user-defined custom fields.
Configuration can also be done at the "platform" level by adding configured applications to a Salesforce instance, that is adding sets of customized / novel tabs for specific vertical- or function-level (Finance, Human Resources, etc.) features.


Web services
In addition to the web interface, salesforce.com offers a SOAP/REST Web service API that enables integration with other systems.


Mobile support
In April 2009, salesforce.com released a slimmed down version of their application for subscribers with BlackBerry, iPhone, and Windows Mobile devices. In January 2010, salesforce.com started to promote the use of 2D Barcodes (SPARQCode) for exporting contact information to mobile handsets.


Other
Other technologies allowing more advanced customization of Salesforce interfaces are the in-house technologies Apex (a Java-like programming language and programming platform), VisualForce (a user interface library), and S-controls (Salesforce widgets – these are predominantly based on JavaScript). S-controls are deprecated as of March 2010. It is possible to edit and use existing controls, but no new ones can be created.