Salesforce has hired IBM enterprise sales pro Jeff Lautenbach to head its enterprise sales division as it gets ready to take on some of the largest companies in the world as customers &8212' and as rivals.
The company, which first made its name a decade ago as a provider of Web-based customer-relationship management software to smaller companies for whom traditional enterprise software was unaffordable, has finally realized it is playing with the bigger dogs in the park. The company&'s major competition comes from other customer relationship management (CRM) software providers like Oracle. They aren&'t run-of-the-mill tech companies, they are behemoths with massive revenues that demand a little more attention than some of the other smaller CRM providers Salesforce has typically competed with.
Lautenbach was with IBM a4‚¬a4¯ another major competitor for Oracle a4‚¬a4¯ for 20 years, where he manned the company&'s 1000-strong enterprise sales team. He&'ll be responsible for pitching the company&'s service major enterprises a4‚¬a4¯ like Dell, a current Salesforce customer, for example a4‚¬a4¯ rather than Salesforce&'s traditional strategy of targeting business managers.
Salesforce looks like it has been building up its resources to attack the enterprise market in full force a4‚¬a4¯ including some targets outside of its typical CRM software market. The company has acquired three companies in just under two months. Salesforce dropped a whopping $212 million for Heroku to bolster its development tools for its web services and picked up Manymoon to expand into some other cloud services.
The company also recently launched Chatter.com, an enterprise-style social network that is free and open to everyone. Salesforce does want to convince Chatter.com users to sign up for the‚ official‚ Chatter service, and then Salesforce&'s CRM service, but it&'s still a bit outside of Salesforce&'s enterprise activity. Salesforce initially launched Chatter as a Twitter-like service to compete initially with Yammer and make a splash in the collaboration space.
Salesforce also recently named former Microsoft government sales guy Matt Miszewski to head the company&'s government sales team.
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Companies: Dell, IBM, Oracle, salesforce, SAP
People: Jeff Lautenbach
Companies: Dell, IBM, Oracle, salesforce, SAP
People: Jeff Lautenbach
Matthew Lynley is VentureBeat's enterprise writer. He graduated from the University of North Carolina, where he studied math and physics, in May 2010. He has reported for Reuters. He currently lives in San Francisco, California. You can reach him at mattl@venturebeat.com (all story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com), and on Twitter at @logicalmoron.
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