Salesforce, Inc. It provides applications focused on sales , customer service , marketing automation , e-commerce , analytics , artificial intelligence , and application development. Founded by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff in March , Salesforce grew quickly, making its initial public offering in Despite its losses, Salesforce continued strong during the early s. Salesforce also gained notability during this period for its "the end of software" tagline and marketing campaign, and even hired actors to hold up signs with its slogan outside a Siebel Systems conference.
In , Salesforce held its first annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. In , the company released Trailhead, a free online learning platform.
Salesforce launched the Sustainability Cloud Net Zero Cloud as of , which is used by companies to track progress towards achieving their net zero emissions goals. Across and , Salesforce saw some notable leadership changes; in February , co-chief executive officer Keith Block stepped down from his position in the company. In April , "Salesforce. Acceleration Economy reported that Salesforce had surpassed SAP to become the world's largest enterprise software vendor in August The next month, Salesforce announced a partnership with Meta Platforms.
The deal called for Meta's consumer application WhatsApp to integrate Salesforce's Customer platform to allow consumers to communicate with companies directly. In November , Salesforce announced it would terminate some employees from its sales team. When asked about the departures, Benioff stated, "people come and people go"; Salesforce's stock dropped to a week low after Nelson's resignation.
According to Benioff, the company hired too aggressively during the COVID pandemic and the increase in working from home led to the layoff. The company also reduced office space as part of the restructuring plan. Other services include app creation, data integration and visualization, and training. In March , Salesforce launched Einstein Copilot: Health Actions, a conversation assistant based on its earlier artificial intelligence platform Einstein.
