Two years ago, in response to questions about his ambitions as vice chairman at Salesforce, former Oracle exec Keith Block emphatically stated that he wants to help the company get to $10 billion worth of revenue. In a follow-up session at DreamForce this year (disclosure, Salesforce covered my travel and expenses to attend the event and is, at the time of writing, a client of Diversity Analysis), Block gave some more detail about how he intends to achieve that aim. Much of the growth is going to come from the creation of vertical-specific solutions built on the Salesforce platform.
This is already happening to an extent – Veeva recently IPOd and was the first company built entirely on a third-party platform to do so. Recently, Salesforce introduced two verticals of its own – health and wealth – and Block indicated that a new vertical – public sector – would be introduced soon. At Dreamforce, I too had the opportunity to spend some time talking with Rip Gerber, who heads up marketing for an interesting third-party vendor, Vlocity. Vlocity’s entire business is built around the premise that there is value in building specific vertical solutions built on top of Salesforce. The company…
