Cat and Shanmao's blog

Started a new job at salesforce.com in mid January this year. After over 7 years at Oracle I decided it was time for new experiences.

Salesforce.com (SFDC) is known for 'software as a service' aka 'SAAS'. What this boils down to is that they basically have a website and you can perform useful tasks on the website (which is a very generic description - but I find SAAS as simply a rebranding of what many envisioned for the web from very early on and don't quite see why it's such a new thing). The key to SAAS is that software is never installed on the customers computer. They simply need a web browser and no further software.

SFDC has specialized in CRM which is a type of 'enterprise' software. CRM is Customer Relationship Management which is a catch-all term for organizing the customer facing side of you business to manage things like marketing campaigns, your salesforce, customer support, etc. SFDC handles B2B CRM and B2B means Business to Business. So for instance, United Airlines might use SFDC for its salespeople to organize all their accounts for sales to other businesses. United might try to sell a certain quantity of business flights to say General Electric. They could manage that account and the process surrounding the account using SFDC.

However, SFDC is moving beyond CRM. They're trying to make the website 'extensible' so third parties can write programs that run on the SFDC website. For instance, you may have a good idea for HR software so you could take your ideas implement them on the SFDC site then sell your software using the SFDC site paying SFDC a fee of course. Of course, due to the SAAS principle no software is ever downloaded by the customer, they simply point a browser to the SFDC site and access the HR package.

SFDC has a pretty good orientation program. There's a one day orientation where various VPs and directors come in to talk about various aspects of the company. Generally very informative. And far better than anything I ever experienced at Oracle or CIBC. Actually, there was no orientation at Oracle or CIBC.

One of the good things about SFDC is the Salesforce Foundation. This is SFDC's charity and non-profit organization. Employees are encouraged to take 4 hours of company time per month and donate that time to some charity. As part of orientation you are assigned a task with your fellow new hires. My task was to participate in an after school program in the Tenderloin, a bad inner city area in San Francisco. The Salvation Army runs this program and receives help from volunteers including SFDC new hires. We went to the Tenderloin school 3pm the day after our orientation. We then walked the kids (ages 7-10 for the most part), played with them in a local park, then took them over to the Salvation Army office to help them with schoolwork and to play with them more. This was quite a rewarding experience. The kids were generally from poor families and I could see that one boy for instance was wearing clothes that were far too small and too light for the cool winter weather. Not sure if his parents didn't have the money for proper clothes or were negligent.

In Feb, my group at work decided to take one afternoon and donate our time together to a non-profit group that supplements kids art and literacy programs at school. This involved putting together portfolios that students would use. This time we interacted mostly with SFDC employees (basically a bunch of sitting around a table folding papers) so it wasn't as rewarding as helping young children. However, since we can do whatever activity we want we can do something different next month either as a group or as individuals. No need to do the tasks together. Also, the 4 hours a month could be pooled together to take say a 6 day block at the end of the year to do some offsite work (perhaps in the US, perhaps overseas).

A few weeks later I went for one week of 'admin' training. This prepares you to be an administrator of a customer account on SFDC. For example, if United Airlines used SFDC there would have to be one or more United employees who did the behind the scenes organization of their SFDC account. The United salespeople would then use the account as set up by the admin. This training was pretty intensive and exposed you to the primary concepts (and also showed you that they have work to do to modernize their interface).

The office is organized around the open concept model. This simply means there are no private offices except for a small handful of executives. Even VPs and senior VPs are in small cubicles side by side with developers.

So good so far. More to come later.