Salesforce

Salesforce is a Software as a Service company founded in 1999 that built the first major cloud-native Customer Relationship Management platform and, in doing so, proved that enterprise software could be sold by subscription rather than perpetual license. Its architectural legacy is less interesting than its commercial one: Salesforce demonstrated that the SaaS model could support complex, customizable business applications at scale, and it trained a generation of enterprises to accept that their critical data would reside on someone else's servers. The company later expanded through acquisition — Tableau, Slack, MuleSoft — becoming less a CRM vendor than a platform conglomerate whose real product is the integration layer that binds its acquisitions together.