Salesforce Gunning to Be Bigger than SAP

Yesterday at the Boston Salesforce 1 World Tour Keith Block, president of Salesforce.com, explained his confidence and prediction that Salesforce will be bigger than SAP and become the largest applications company in the world while also becoming the third largest enterprise software company.
In order to surpass SAP Keith Block said Salesforce.com “will focus on six verticals — by organic development, partnering, or acquisition — to help surpass SAP as top dog.” Those verticals will be financial services, healthcare, retail, communication/media, public sector and automotive/manufacturing.

Salesforce.com will also grow their enterprise application by not only improving the SaaS application itself but also building it’s partner ecosystem and continuing to grow the ever popular AppExchanage which already has over 2,000 apps for Salesforce users. Salesforce.com has built an app ecosystem that allow companies to develop and sell enterprise wide applications within the Salesforce platform.

We can also assume that Salesforce.com will continue to grow their enterprise by continuing to acquire like-minded companies. Their recent acquisition of ExactTarget, an Indianapolis email marketing company, for $2.5 billion (yes, that’s a “b”) has propelled Salesforce deep into the marketing space which is a necessary function of any CRM application.

Salesforce Surpasses SAP in Revenue

In 2013 Salesforce took the lead over SAP in the CRM space by banking on the growth of cloud based solutions. According to CMS wire “Salesforce had revenues of US$ 2.5 billion last year, an increase of 26% on its figures for 2011. For its part, SAP only grew 0.1% for the same period with total revenues of US$ 2.6 billion in CRM, which would seem to suggest that, at least in this space, SAP has stagnated.”

Salesforce vs. SAP

As expected, SAP won’t be backing down as they feel their strong install and customer base is loyal and trusts them. But Keith Block is confident that their momentum from Q4 last year will run strongly well into 2014 and beyond. Yesterday it was announced that Salesforce’s fourth quarter numbers from last year had 37% growth with $1 billion of revenue in that quarter alone.