What I Learned at Salesforce.com

At first I was thinking the same thing, but you can definitely go a-la-carte with SAP (one could argue there is no other way), and it is totally possible (and largely done) to build your own reasonably competent and market-priced team to maintain it. Come to think of it, SAP does provide added value when it is well-managed and tailored to your business. SAP is quite an unique beast.

Well, you can definitely go a-la-carte with SF.com too, the point is that the sales people push you into kitchen-sinking it. SAP sales does this too, and usually leads to what we used to call "shelfware". I cannot tell you how many companies I worked with that had unused licenses laying around. (funny - most companies I met have no idea how many licenses to purchase..."oh we want the finance module. So we have 1,000 people in finance so gimme ummm 1,000 licenses") Also, both SF.com and SAP will add value if you use and maintain them properly. The biggest difference with Salesforce is that you don't have to manage a data center.

> Ever heard of a 'Salesforce Developer'?

Yes, and the good ones charge obscene amounts of money. A good niche if it interests you.

"Salesforce Developer/Architect" here.

My enterprise domain knowledge is far more valuable than my technical skills, and Salesforce is just a more fluid vehicle for delivering this value compared to traditional on-premise solutions from Oracle, SAP, and IBM.

Sure, the upstart CRM vendors have better UIs, but they aren't the real competition.

Salesforce is executing a classic innovators dilemma strategy of acquiring these upstarts (desk.com) and allowing them to operate independently in the SMB space as an on-boarding ramp to the enterprise-scale solution.

The amount of negative comments in this thread is as suspected when one brings up enterprise software to the world of HN where the community prefers "clean canvas" to draw the ideal world and call it elegant piece of art.

I would suggest people to view Salesforce from the perspective of the business users (or check this comment as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9184356)

The place I work for at the moment uses Salesforce and we're paying lots of money to them (company with 100 people employees, balanced between engineering, support, sales/bdr, marketing, hr). I've never heard our Sales/SE/Support complained about Salesforce. In fact, they continue to find better tools/vendors inside Appexchange that can help them to be more productive closing Sales.

Our software integrate with Salesforce to some extend w.r.t to tracking customer acquisition, license, and retention. I can't complain. Salesforce is better than any other Enterprise software I've dealt with before.

I had a chance to talk to the CTO of Salesforce1 yesterday while he was demo-ing the Salesforce1 platform on his iPhone. He showed me how Sys-Admins (sys-admins of Salesforce themselves) can write a small "module" that can be deployed and visible inside the Salesforce1 mobile app immediately.

That's probably one of the few "enterprise" mobile apps I've seen so far where you can allow your customer to develop a small-modular-app to be deployed within the _same_ Salesforce1 mobile app but only visible to your Organization (or to certain group/role within your Organization).

Our customers purchased our solution (we are an APM company) to monitor their Salesforce instances because they need a 3rd-party to ensure Salesforce does not break their SLA. (We're talking about Fortune 500 company that signed $10m contract with Salesforce; Salesforce will be held accountable if they break SLA).

I asked him how Salesforce test Salesforce itself (the whole thing, that big ball of mud if you want to call it that way). He went off and explain how they rigorously test the whole system in details. That includes testing the mobile app... and testing the "custom app" within Salesforce ecosystems.

So I got curious and asked him further: how do you test those custom apps written by the customers? His replied was as follows:

1. When the customer sign up, they agree to let Salesforce run test-automation of their custom app

2. Salesforce tries their best to educate "Salesforce Developer" to write automation test that will be executed as part of Salesforce update/deploy cycle

3. If the customer/vendor does not do that (or write tests that don't test properly), it's their fault.

That's insane! I've never seen an enterprise software company go that far!

During the event, I get the impression that Salesforce cares a lot of automation, automation testing, and to ensure "things don't break". Can't say the same thing with Facebook even though they're developing lots of "cool" cutting edge tech. But then again, Salesforce customers force Salesforce to not break things or else refund...

TLDR: Salesforce as an enterprise company is pretty good compare the rest. HN community is definitely not the target market so it's natural to see negative comments.