Pay-as-you-go customer relationship management (CRM) and e-business software provider Salesforce.com is to expand its European headquarters in Ireland. The news follows a €100m investment in R&D strategy for its latest S3 product set.
Based in Dublin since 2001, Salesforce.com has grown to employ 50 people at its European headquarters at Powerscourt in Wicklow. However, the CRM maverick that is turning the traditional sales model for the software industry upside down is planning to move to a larger office block in Dublin’s Leopardstown area to make more room for an impending expansion.
Fergus Gloster, Salesforce.com’s vice president of marketing for Europe, said it was too early to say how many new jobs will be created over the coming months. “The Irish operation is seeing the fruit of this [investment]. We are continuing to expand and we are currently negotiating for new premises in Dublin, in the Leopardstown area. We employ 50 people in Ireland right now, but Dublin will benefit significantly from the investment. I am reluctant to comment on numbers, but it is fair to say we are expanding and the move to a new building will provide for that,” Gloster said.
The 50 people employed at Salesforce.com in Ireland are chiefly involved in software sales and distribution as well as maintaining the international content of Salesforce.com’s corporate websites. Within two years, the European operation has expanded consistently and has gained 11,000 individual users across Europe as customers.
Salesforce.com was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff who pioneered the notion of delivering enterprise applications via a website, often by dial-up modem, and billing companies ranging from the smallest to the largest of firms on a pay-as-you-use basis, contrary to the multi-million dollar lock-in contracts which were the norm for traditional enterprise players like Siebel and Oracle. Salesforce.com currently has more than 93,000 users across 6,700 companies in 110 countries, including global firms such as AOL Time Warner, Dow Jones, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Nokia, and Irish firms that include Am-beo, Cape Clear and Jurys Doyle Hotel Group. In a recent issue of Business Week, Salesforce.com was listed in its InfoTech 100, along with Google, as one of the few tech IPOs in waiting.
This year, Salesforce.com turned in its first profitable quarter with US$19.1m in revenues. Listed as the world’s third most influential enterprise software applications vendor after Microsoft and SAP by UK magazine Computer Business Review, the company in recent days revealed a €100m investment in new product upgrades as well as striking a major landmark enterprise deals with Dell.
The decision to invest US$100m in R&D will see the development of the company’s latest S3 product set over four years, which includes 100 new features to the existing Salesforce.com CRM product. All of this, Gloster explained, is to spread the company further across the enterprise sector, enabling the smallest to the largest of firms to manage sales force automation, campaign management, customer service and support internal business operations, a swell as manage documents and files.
To make S3, the company joined forces with technology giants Microsoft, Borland and Sun and the newly updated system was deployed instantaneously over the internet across its 6,700-strong customer base.
By John Kennedy
