Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Dayon, Executive VP of Applications, Salesforce.com (Part 2)

SM: Right. Given that that’s what’s going on in the world, how do decide what to acquire, what to bring in to Salesforce.com?

AD: Salesforce is, obviously, not an early stage company. We are a $3 billion company today. We’ve hundreds of thousands of customers, pretty much of all sizes. My position at Salesforce is to continue to grow and find emerging opportunities as well as to grow our existing businesses. So, my role in terms of acquisition is to look at the market coverage and make sure that there are no blind spots. For example, when we decided [in 2011] to acquire Radian6, it’s because we felt we had a blind spot for marketers of companies of all sizes. In the marketing space, we realized that whether you are a five-person company or you’re the largest consumer goods company, you need to engage in social media. You need to monitor and connect that to your business processes. We had a blind spot. We decided to make a buy. When we look at what it takes to monitor millions of tweets every day, to monitor billions of blogs every day, to be the Google of the social world, you have to buy the best in class in the space, which is what we did with Radian6. That has been a super successful acquisition.

There are other segments of the market. For example, on myriads where we are already a leader, you take customer service. For customer service, we have a product called the Service Cloud. But this product was designed, since day one, to serve companies of above 200 employees. We today [support] the largest call centers in the world, you take American Express Travel services, the largest banks in the industry are running on Service Cloud, and we have car sales. What are we doing on the low end? Service Cloud was not the product for the low end, so we decided to go and look around and see who are the best people who can power thousands of small businesses with the right pricing model, and we found Assistly. It’s a company that was started [in 2010] by Alex Bard. He is an amazing entrepreneur. I think Assistly was his fourth company. Alex built a service where in five minutes, any entrepreneur could activate a Web channel, a phone channel, chats, social presence all around a unified queue in terms of communication that is both Web based and mobile. You can service your customer from your iPhone. You can run your compact center from your pocket on the road.

We decided these people are amazing. In five minutes, you can give all that power to customers, and the pricing model was pay-per-hour, just $1 per hour. Don’t charge per user because in a small company, everybody is an agent. So, these guys were good at technology. They were also good at rethinking the pricing, kind of the way Salesforce did 10 years ago with the price-per-user and the price-as-you-go. We decided to acquire Assistly. We went back to the drawing board with them to say, “Let’s make sure we launch the same service with a completely different level of scale,” because it was only a three-year-old company. Now, it’s part of Salesforce. Let’s bring the trust. Let’s bring the reliability of Salesforce. We re-launched that service two months ago under the Desk.com brand, which is the help desk for small businesses. It’s an amazing business because it’s low touch, it’s open, which means that you can work with Desk.com and connect and share your data with other services whether it’s the Android app marketplace or Google Apps marketplace types of solutions in order to run your business. That acquisition [filled] another blind spot.

That’s the way we look at the market. We look at the market coverage because we need to cover a lot of different markets from sales to service, marketing and HR. And we look at what about the little guys, the big guys, the middle guys? We have a map, and we look at what areas we should build and what areas we believe there is amazing technology out there.

The most recent acquisition we did was Rypple. Rypple is about HR. We see the world of HR changing dramatically. HR is becoming social and here as well, it’s an area where we felt our customers were asking for more. As we are powering their social networks, they want the HR processes to be integrated, whether you are hiring people or you’re managing or developing your employees. So, we made that acquisition because we felt we had a blind spot. We’re very acquisitive.

Salesforce is only 10 years old, so we’re still a startup. We are big for a startup, but we’re still convinced that innovation and agility are very important in new startups. We always try to have a good blend of existing senior leaders, people who [advanced within] Salesforce over the 10 years as well as new leaders who are coming from acquisitions, like me. I joined four years ago from an acquisition. We try to keep that DNA among the management team and part of the executive committee at Salesforce. If you sit down around the table in a management meeting, half of the leaders are entrepreneurs who have joined the company. That’s deep in our DNA. We love startups, small companies and people who want to disrupt markets, and we think, at the size that we are, we have to have a good balance between what we build with the power of our size and the innovation that is happening outside.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Dayon, Executive VP of Applications, Salesforce.com
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