Marc Benioff, founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, may be running the world’s fourth-largest software firm, after Microsoft, Oracle and SAP AG, but his company’s presence in South-East Asia, including India, is being felt only now.

According to a recent edition of The Economist , only around a quarter of Salesforce‘s sales comes from outside the US. In an interview with BusinessLine , Sunil Jose, Senior Area, Vice-President & Country Leader for Salesforce India, said that perception is changing with the San Francisco-based company bridging the gap between businesses and customers in India.

He said by 2020, the company will hire 1,000 employees in Hyderabad alone. It already has 1,000 employees spread across its various centres in the country.

Job opportunity

Quoting an IDC data, Jose who took over his new job less than a year ago, said the Salesforce Economy would contribute to 1.1 million jobs directly and indirectly and $17.2 billion in new business revenues to the Indian economy by 2022.

Its ecosystem, as per the Salesforce Economy report compiled by research firm, IDC, is expected to create 3.3 million new jobs and more than $859 billion in new business revenues worldwide by 2022, which means one-third of these jobs will get created in this part of the world.

Benioff’s software-as-a-service model by putting CRM (customer relationship management that helps companies keep track of their clients apart from helping them with tools for analytics and digital commerce) online became an instant hit among large enterprises when it was launched initially that catapulted Salesforce.com into one of the most valuable companies in the world. This model does not need any investment upfront, but the software can be used by paying a subscription fee.

Jose said that while America continues to be their largest market to date, the pace of growth of other regions is seeing accelerated investments from Salesforce. “India is one of the fastest growing regions for the company and we’ve grown more than double year-on-year. India will continue to be a key market for us.”

He pointed out that recently at the World Economic Forum held in Davos some of their senior executives had the opportunity to interact with key stakeholders of the Indian government.

As of now, Salesforce counts Bajaj Finserv, Janalakshmi Financial Services, Tata Communications, HCL, United Breweries, Urban Ladder, Teach for India and InMobi as part of its client list.

Outlining the strategy for India, Jose said Salesforce will focus on customer-centric digital transformation to drive business value, growth and success for its customers. It recently launched, Ignite, an elite team of strategists focussed on the digital transformation of large businesses like never before. “We will look at completely re-imagining what technology can do for certain industries, delivering the power of the Salesforce platform to drive business growth with scalable industry solutions.”

Another innovative strategy, the company is working on is based on the fact that corporates realise a multi-cloud strategy can transform an enterprise’s capabilities and contribute to the bottom line. “As user confidence grows based on a series of positive experiences, the appetite of enterprises to consume ever more cloud services will become more evident and become the norm rather than a trend.”

Jose admitted that it does take some time for organisations to adopt the cloud model for their businesses as they can be conservative. Hence, it is necessary to have all stakeholders of all relevant departments actively on board.

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