PDF: 2962 pages, 5.2 MB - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

Software/IT Services/Business Process Outsourcing
strongly in the Indian market,” says vice president for international
development & strategy Kaiser Mulla-Feroze. “Most Indian
companies have not used CRM previously. Salesforce.com gives
them an easy path to upgrading their operations compared to
deploying traditional software.”
In the meantime, India has become one of Salesforce.com’s topperforming
Asian markets, and the company has opened an office
in Gurgaon. “It’s a volume play with lots of small and mid-size
companies,” Mulla-Feroze explains as he talks about the Indian
market. “Barring the biggest conglomerates and corporations, even
most large companies in India would be considered mid-sized
organizations by U.S. standards in terms of revenue base.” While
that may be the right profile for Salesforce.com, reaching those
huge numbers of customers and working with them to optimize use
of the service can be a daunting prospect for any company. “That
is what has differentiated us from the competition since our early
days,” says Mulla-Feroze, who has been with the company since
2001. “With the software–as-a-service, subscription-based model
you have to prove your worth to the customer every month.”
Salesforce.com saw an opportunity to scale up quickly through
Indian IT alliance partners serving both Indian and multinational
customers. TCS, Infosys, and Wipro have all integrated
Salesforce.com elements into their CRM practices, and have
trained and deployed hundreds of their own consultants to implement
Salesforce.com solutions at customer sites.
In 2006, IT solutions provider Wipro Technologies announced an alliance
under which it would offer on-demand computing, applications
consulting and implementation services, lifecycle management, and
support services, deploying Salesforce.com’s CRM applications and
platform. Cognizant formed a similar alliance in 2007.
But CRM is only the beginning. Part of Salesforce.com’s sales pitch
to customers and partners has been the ease with which they can
use its platform, called Force.com, to customize the software and
even build their own applications. “Traditionally, when developers
build new applications, they need to invest in all the infrastructure:
the hardware, the database, the application server, the web server,”
Mulla-Feroze says. “Here, all you need is a Web browser.”
A few years ago, the company launched a developer network with
access to discussion boards, development tools, and a directory of
open source code. Users were encouraged to build their own
141