The $213-b market cap Salesforce sells business software such as sales, marketing, customer service and work collaboration tool Slack, which it bought for $28 billion in December 2020. Salesforce is considered rival by a crop of Indian SaaS firms including Zoho and Freshworks, which sell business software in the global market.
Salesforce had brought on board former SBI chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya to head its India unit just after the onset of the global pandemic. Under her leadership, the San Francisco-headquartered Salesforce has doubled down on Research and Development, and product development in India, said Taylor. He added that some of Salesforce’s products in the financial services space were built out of its Hyderabad, India, office.
Taylor said simplifying its software to work for smaller businesses is an ongoing attempt at Salesforce. “We understand that every company cannot have a Salesforce administrator. So simplifying our software is an area of continuous focus.”
As more and more businesses look to accommodate work from anywhere as a viable, ensuring model of work, Salesforce would also look at reimagining its talent policy, given the increasing need for flexibility among employees.
Taylor’s views on global sourcing of talent to reflect the realities of work after the pandemic has been echoed, in a way, by Indian SaaS company Zoho, which is opening rural offices in the hinterland to allow employees to work from where they want.
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Taylor said employee preferences for flexibility would drive companies to invest more in creating better employee experiences and digital tools to help them work from where they want.
Salesforce grew its revenues by 25% last year to reach $26.5 billion and has given a guidance to reach $32 billion in the current year. Taylor said Salesforce, which turned 23 recently, would make a pivot towards a “Slack-first” company so that its customers would have the opportunity to work out of digital platform where functions such as sales, marketing, and support are executed on the Slack platform.
Hybrid work
Bret said Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology officers would need to think about building a digital platform that would help them through the upcoming wave of disruption, such as the pandemic. “In my recent travels, I’ve seen disruption because of the pandemic, the Ukraine crisis, rising fuel prices, the Great Resignation and other labour problems and what’s been constant is investment in digital technologies.”
Salesforce has announced that it was exiting relationships with businesses based in Russia; Taylor clarified that the company did not have a lot of exposure to cause any material impact.
