Salesforce plans to add 5 lakh jobs in four years

With increasing digitisation in India, cloud computing technology provider Salesforce along with its partners plan to add 5 lakh jobs by 2020.

The California-headquartered company, which gets the bulk of its revenues from small and medium-size businesses deploying customer management and marketing software, believes that contrary to the notion that cloud computing takes away jobs, it is confident that an increasing number of workforce will find jobs in the tech sector.

Companies in India are not hiring engineers en masse as advances in technologies are making many engineers redundant.

Of the 5 lakh jobs, around 1,36,000 jobs will come from within the Salesforce ecosystem (partners, system integrators), Eileen O’Mara, Senior Vice-President, Commercial Sales, APAC, told BusinessLine .

“Apart from direct jobs, we expect 350,000 indirect jobs to be added in India,” she added. Salesforce had commissioned a study to research firm IDC and these findings have come out of that initiative, company executives said.

Also, these developments are coming at a time when demonetisation initiatives by the government is pushing the use of digital technologies that can substitute usage of cash is rapidly making inroads. According to industry data, India has around 51 million SMBs, bulk of who are yet to adopt technology.

“These companies would require productivity technologies (like document writer, email) and other customer acquisition and retention tools, as they look to compete at a global level,” said O'Mara.

Digitisation offers service providers many productivity improvement opportunities which can improve effectiveness of sales personnel, according to a recent Boston Consulting Group study. New digital technologies can monitor and analyse how equipment runs at a customer site, service providers can offer predictive maintenance and advice on ways to maximise performance, said Sanchit Vir Gogia, Analyst, Greyhound Research.

Cloud computing contributed $8 billion in revenues in 2015, according to IDC.

Research firm Gartner has predicted that software revenue from India will total $5.8 billion in 2017, a 12.8 per cent increase from 2016 estimates of $5.2 billion. In comparison to Gartner's forecast for 2017 global spending for enterprise software will be $357 billion, with growth of 7.2 per cent over 2016. The computer software and hardware vertical had FDI inflows of $5.9 billion, in the 2016 fiscal year, a 150 per cent increase over the previous year. Gartner expects these investments to gather further momentum toward the end of 2016, largely driven by the government's digital push.

Salesforce expects fintech, manufacturing, e-commerce, retail and consumer packaged goods to adopt newer technologies. It counts Snapdeal, InMobi, Go Ibibo as some of its recent clients.

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