Salesforce.com is a cloud computing company headquartered in San Francisco, California, with regional headquarters in Morges, Switzerland, India, and Tokyo. The company was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive, Marc Benioff, and his partners, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez. The company specializes in SaaS – Software as a Service – a licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted.

In June 2004 the company’s initial public offering was listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol CRM and raised $110 million. Today, Salesforce is one of the most highly-valued, American cloud computing companies with a market capitalization above $55 billon. It has nearly 20,000 employees and revenues of $7 billion per year. Salesforce.com has its services translated into 16 different languages and has over 2.1 million subscribers.

Salesforce’s main product is a CRM (Client Relationship Management) system that helps companies automate such tasks as customer information, contact and case management, communication tracking and scheduling, and sales opportunities and forecasting. It gathers, organizes and disseminates everything there is to know about which products are selling, which customers are buying, and how the sales force is performing. With all of a business’s information on customers, prospects, and leads stored on a single online platform, everyone in the company has access to the latest information.

And because Salesforce is in the cloud, it can grow and scale as needed. It’s full-on CRM product starts at $65 per user per month and the most expensive version goes for $300. Features can be added without adding costly infrastructure and upgrades are instantly implemented as soon as they’re available, without disruption. Salesforce’s CRM system is fully mobile, so that data is available on any connected device, at any time – desktops, laptops, tablets, and smart phones. In addition, its common platform works across all channels, including social, Web, email, and customer call centers.

Salesforce.org is the philanthropic arm of Salesforce.com. Salesforce.org donates one percent of the company’s resources (defined as profit, equity, and employee time) to support organizations that are working to “make the world a better place. Salesforce.org provides a full-featured, ten-seat user license available to nearly all United States 501c3 non-profit organizations or overseas equivalents. Additional licenses are deeply discounted for public interest groups. As of March 2014, Salesforce.org supported 20,000+ higher education and non-profit customers, and has donated $53+ million in grants. In addition, as of July 2015, Salesforce employees have collectively donated more than 1,000,000 hours in volunteer labor to thousands of charitable organizations worldwide.