January 14, 2014
In world economic news, one reads and hears mostly about the negative: slow global economic recovery and lagging unemployment figures. Living in an urban area I see firsthand that there is still pain and suffering related to the global economic slowdown. However, when I walk into work I almost seem to enter a parallel universe. The economy that surrounds cloud infrastructure and services is nothing short of on-fire: skilled cloud development resources are in heavy demand, organizations are growing their commitments and investments, and real transformation and innovation is abundant. I count myself incredibly fortunate to live, at least professionally, in this thriving cloud ecosystem.
I’ve spent the last seven years working on Bluewolf’s Marketing team. This past summer when we embarked on the collection of data for our Annual State of Salesforce Report we noticed a stark contrast in the qualitative and quantitative data we were receiving.
First, let me explain a bit about our report and the process that Bluewolf undergoes to produce it. The goal of Bluewolf’s State of Salesforce report is to separate current customer data and trends from the marketing hype. This year, we made a conscious effort to broaden the overall scope of the report and enrich the data.
For The State of Salesforce 2013-2014, Bluewolf:
- Collaborated with MIT Sloan on data collection and analysis
- Broadened the customer sample size with 50% more respondents
- Doubled the goal for international responses to 10% of total participants
We definitely expected to digest more data from this year’s report, but we did not expect the story that this data would bring to life. 2013 seemed to mark the tipping point—in a Malcolm Gladwell sort of way—on how customers perceive and utilize Salesforce and the Salesforce1 Platform.
The single biggest validation of any corporate initiative is how budgets are allocated. When it comes to Salesforce and the Salesforce1 Platform, 2014 looks to be an incredible year. Key budget trends include:
- 69% of global customers plan to increase their Salesforce budgets in 2014, up from 29% in 2013
- 90% of customers say Salesforce is more valuable to their company today than it was a year ago
- 60% are increasing budgets dedicated to custom app development on the Salesforce1 Platform
- 52% are planning to build a custom mobile applications on the Salesforce1 Platform
Each of these stats show the strong demand and commitment companies are making to salesforce.com’s products and platform. As a macro trend, the data suggests that organizations are increasingly standardizing on Salesforce and the Salesforce1 Platform for their customer management and engagement needs. The marketing machine of salesforce.com has been telling us for two years about the need to shift away from traditional CRM into a new phase of customer relationship management. 2013 seemed to be the year where the customer's view of the Salesforce1 Platform caught up to the market message.
Arguably the strongest single data point we collected through our report was that 73% of customers are reallocating budget away from on-premises applications towards the cloud [tweet this]. Not only are cloud investments growing, but they are stealing budget directly from traditional application investments—and at a startling rate. Even Forrester projects 2014 to be the year where cloud computing formally joins the IT portfolio.
The full 26 pages of our State of Salesforce report tell the complete story in greater detail: about the corporate shifts taking place in response to the new customer economy, the many ways companies are investing in employees to unlock and deliver engagement, and how adoption across departments and within the Salesforce AppExchange are growing rapidly. I am obviously proud of Bluewolf’s effort to produce a report of this scale, and consider it a validation of the work we are doing to show how companies can leverage the cloud to transform and organize their businesses around a lense of customer obsession.
As we embark on 2014, analysts and press are predicting cloud computing to continue to outpace the rest of the global economy. At this point, it seems like less of a question of “if”, and more a question of “by how much.”
Join our CEO, Eric Berridge in live webcast, January 21st: How the Best Companies Use Salesforce. Register now
