Salesforce, founded in 1999 and headquartered in San Francisco, is a global provider of cloud-based software focused on customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise applications. The company popularized the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for CRM and has built a broad portfolio of products designed to help organizations manage sales, service, marketing, commerce and analytics through a unified, cloud-first platform.
Core offerings include Sales Cloud for sales automation, Service Cloud for customer support, Marketing Cloud for digital marketing and engagement, and Commerce Cloud for e-commerce. Salesforce also offers a platform layer—Salesforce Platform (formerly Force.com) and AppExchange—for building and distributing custom business applications, along with AI capabilities marketed under the Einstein brand. Strategic acquisitions over the years, including MuleSoft for integration, Tableau for analytics and Slack for collaboration, have expanded the company’s capabilities across integration, data visualization and workplace communication.
Salesforce serves organizations of varying sizes across industries and geographies, operating globally through direct sales, partners and a large ecosystem of consultants and independent software vendors. Its products are used by companies to centralize customer data, automate business processes, analyze customer insights and enable omnichannel engagement.
Marc Benioff is the company’s founder and has long served in leadership roles, including chairman and chief executive. Parker Harris is a co-founder and has been a senior technology leader. Salesforce’s strategy emphasizes platform extensibility, ecosystem partnerships and integrating analytics and AI into core CRM workflows to help customers drive digital transformation.