Salesforce first emerged in 1999 as the first cloud computing platform to start a business model built on partnership. They built this unique and vibrant ecosystem that helped them gain a lot of popularity at that time. Primarily because from the start, they have been focused on the success of each customer, developer and partner they get in business with. The combination of innovation and customer success has built favourable circumstances and opportunities for everyone that are a part of the Salesforce ecosystem. 

It began as a lead management/Sales process automation tool. After that, they added customer service and marketing automation into the platform before moving to B2B, B2C, and B2B2C e-commerce. In its 20 years of existence, Salesforce has not changed its goal of being the leader of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). The Salesforce ecosystem is based on these four main engagement and collaboration models:

Customer engagement

Around 1.8 million Salesforce customers now contribute to the Salesforce success community, a place where customers can not only connect and answer each other's queries but also give suggestions on what Salesforce can do to improve the ecosystem. The Salesforce IdeaExchange, a community-driven innovation hub where community members can post an idea and vote on new product features they would like to see in future.

App marketplace

The Salesforce AppExchange is the number one enterprise app marketplace that has several thousand apps that can be deployed into Salesforce CRM.  Each AppExchange app is pre-integrated to work with all Salesforce products and can be customized to meet a company’s needs. There have been more than 4 million downloads from the AppExchange in total. 70% of Salesforce users, from a small startup to enterprises, have installed at least one app from the AppExchange. 

Salesforce partners

Salesforce has one of the largest Consultant and Partner ecosystems among other tech companies in the world. The Partner Community connects one directly to other partners to help each other drive innovation across companies and industries. As a result, thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers have built businesses from what Salesforce AppExchange has to offer. They offer a range of certifications, training, and other resources to their ISV partners to help them connect better with their customers.

Salesforce developers

Salesforce provides customer 360 platform to their developers from several Salesforce consulting companies that contains a toolbox of app cloud services to build employee and customer apps faster and in any language. It’s built-in technology and services help developers to speed the app building process by just Drag-and-drop premade Salesforce Lightning Components. Trailhead, their new learning platform helps aspiring and professional Salesforce devs to learn in-demand skills and kickstart their career.

How is the Salesforce Ecosystem growing? 

Salesforce, the world’s biggest customer relationship management, has seen tremendous growth over the last few years.  A company that began as nothing more than an experiment is now more diverse, complex, and incredible than ever. It has transformed the way we experience business and sales, much of its credit goes to the potential of its ecosystem. 

The Salesforce ecosystem of customers, marketplace, partners and developers is created on the top of its unique business model that is focused on engagement and collaboration. They were not wrong to believe that an open-ended and creative partnership would be beneficial for creating tremendous possibilities in the enterprise app cloud. 

Few stats, according to the Salesforce financial reports, the company has doubled its number of customers at the spending level of $20 million in 2018. It has been able to generate a cloud-revenue backlog of $20 billion, which is an increase of 40% from a year ago. More than 40% of people have joined the company outside of America FY2018, Bringing it closer to its mission of becoming a global company.

New opportunities in the Ecosystem

Over the years, Salesforce has extended its ecosystem through the addition of new companies, strategic partnerships with market leaders, and ofinancial reportspportunities for aspiring Salesforce ISVs. This Partner and developer ecosystem is a robust extension of Salesforce and combined it is anywhere up to four times larger than the company itself.

A 2016 research into the Salesforce ecosystem infographic from IDC shows that  Salesforce and its cloud ecosystem of partners and customers are having a tremendous global impact on local economies to bring growth, innovation, jobs and in-demand tech skills. IDC predicted that by 2020 Salesforce’s ecosystem will have created $389 billion in positive GDP impact and 1.9 million net-new jobs worldwide. At the same time, it would also create up to 2.8 million indirect jobs. There are over 300,000 job posting requiring Salesforce related skills.

Forming new partnerships

Choosing the right partners and having good connections works in favour of any business. Salesforce maintains one of the largest partner ecosystems in the world, which includes connections with market leaders like Google, IBM, and Amazon. Salesforce's partnership with IBM gives them access to IBM's artificial intelligence “Watson”, which helps improve their own AI solution, Einstein. On the other hand, Google’s consumer-focused business model gives Salesforce better market understanding. Due to this partnership with these industry pioneers, Salesforce generates new opportunities for independent software vendors and developers that have established their entire business around their app contribution to the Salesforce marketplace, the “AppExchange”. 

The Future of the Salesforce Ecosystem

Over the years, the relationships that Salesforce has made based on their “Ohana” approach have presented endless opportunities for aspiring Salesforce partners and consultants. Salesforce adds new opportunities to the ecosystem every year,  which helps it grow more impressively. While Salesforce will remain focused on improving the customer and partner experience through its ecosystem, the company will continue to add software and partners to the Salesforce AppExchange. 

If it’s established that you want to build your business in and around the Salesforce ecosystem then we will help you do exactly that. There are over 3,600 apps present in the AppExchange. This is a good place to start for building new enterprise apps for Salesforce ERP and CRM add-ons. Evon Technologies has successfully provided Salesforce development and consulting services to Salesforce partners and ISV’s. We are aware of the development efforts, deployment efforts, scalability, and Salesforce restrictions in providing Salesforce integration to an application. Therefore, we will take you up on your project ideas and help you build new enterprise apps for the Salesforce platform in every step of the way. We will also make sure that your product gets through the Salesforce quality test and becomes ISV certified. 

Reach us out here, to find your way into the Salesforce ecosystem and become a part of it.