By Business & Finance 
Pictured: Maria Martinez, President, Global Customer Success and Salesforce Latin America, on stage at Dublin Tech Summit 2017.
In a month where Salesforce made game-changing announcements in the big data and AI spheres, we recognise their commitment to Ireland since their foundation.
Since its foundation in San Francisco in 1999, Salesforce has enjoyed a rapid rise to the top, becoming the world’s leading customer relations management (CRM) services provider. The firm opened its first overseas hub in Ireland in 2000 and since then it has been servicing the EMEA markets from here, at its Sandyford offices, where over 1,000 people are employed. They came in at number 2 on the Great Place to Work Institute ranking in Ireland for 2017.
Salesforce now boasts 25,000 staff worldwide, more than two million subscribers to its services and the highest valuation of any American cloud computing company, at $61 billion (€52 billion).
At their global conference, Dreamforce 2017, in November, they announced a partnership with Google as their preferred cloud storage provider. With this partnership of the world’s largest search engine and the world’s largest CRM service provider, it opens up new avenues for personalisation online. With Google’s data analytics skills, the CRM platform will be able to provide consumer insights in order to deliver the most relevant targeted marketing to users online. Google will be offering eligible Salesforce customers company-wide G suite licenses at no additional cost for up to one year, providing them with a quick and easy way to kick-start their collaborative cloud experience.
“Our partnership with Google represents the best of both worlds for our customers,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce. “There has never been an easier way for companies to run their entire business in the cloud – from productivity apps, email and analytics,, to sales, service and marketing apps, this partnership will make our customers smarter and more productive.”
Future fantastic
The announcement at Dreamforce 2017 of MyEinstein was another major talking point. Research done by Salesforce has shown that 48pc of marketers in Ireland and the UK are now using AI and that figure is only going to grow. The new Salesforce platform allows admins and developers of any level to build and customise AI-powered sales and marketing apps of their own “using clicks not code”.
They say, “With myEinstein, the employees who are actually managing and driving business processes have the power to build and customize AI apps to fit their specific needs, paving the way for everyone to be smarter and more productive.”
Social issues
The company is well-known and consistently lauded for outperforming its peers in the CSR arena. Their commitment to equal pay for men and women, overall gender balance in the workplace, LGBTQ inclusion and a clear commitment to diversity overall is complemented with their 1-1-1 philanthropic model – whereby 1 per cent of profits and 1 per cent of staff hours are given up to volunteering activities and 1 per cent of Salesforce’s products and services are provided free of charge to NGOs, charities and other nonprofit entities. It is a model which has been copied by many other major corporations. Their cSR strategy is built into the company business model rather than addressed as an afterthought.
