Introduction to Salesforce.
Salesforce is a cloud computing company which offers a variety of services (SaaS) and products (PaaS). Salesforce started as Software as a Service (SAAS) CRM company. Salesforce now provides various software solutions and a platform for users and developers to develop and distribute custom software.Below is an image of the power of Salesforce in today’s tech-savvy world.
Salesforce is (PAAS) platform as service. Year back somewhere in 1999 around Benioff and Parker Harris decided to write a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software but serve it on via cloud model allowing customer to subscribe this platform as service via internet and no installation required and all software maintained/upgraded by Salesforce thereby relieving customers from maintenance overhead and rather focus on writing business application rather than maintaining and supporting servers.
Benioff worked as CTO at Oracle, repeatedly tried to convince CEO to move to cloud model but later decided to take a venture in his own stands. It was bold step in 1999 asking client to host all business on Salesforce servers and they matured this technology very successfully.
Started as CRM, Salesforce allowed designing custom business process on cloud, 10 years back company started adopting this and started designing business process.
API release: After few Salesforce exposed their data through API allowing you to connect Salesforce and push/pull data to cloud with your legacy application written on .net and java.
With the increasing demand and complex challenges they later release Apex language, the run and compiles on cloud, and followed by Visualforce Page (just like JSP) that host and run on cloud offering customer to design powerful web pages.
Down the line platform grew dramatically well and earned much respects both in CRM world slowly gaining pace among developers.
Now Salesforce started as CRM on Cloud moved to Platform as Cloud allowing writing/hosting/maintaining application with no software evolved.
Besides Sales cloud, they launched Marketing Cloud, Service cloud, Analytics Cloud and Business IQ Cloud, acquired Heroku (offer PAAS for ruby/java/python/php) developers and now iOT (internet of this cloud) for plugging connected devices with Cloud.
This is brief history of what Salesforce is and what does it do, rest google is your friend.