We at Salesforce are thrilled to now offer general availability of Salesforce Identity. Much has happened since the product was first introduced a year ago. We’ve worked with hundreds of customers, produced hours of video, briefed dozens of reporters and analysts, trained hundreds of employees and Integration partners, launched a new web presence, built out some amazing partnerships, and, of course, shipped the 46th major release of Salesforce. While this represents the culmination of years of work by our Authentication and Identity teams, it’s been an even longer personal journey, one that started in the middle of the last decade.  

I was at a little startup called Sxip Identity, which, like most startups, was trying to change the world. As best articulated by our founder’s inspired presentation on Identity, we were on a mission to turn Identity on its head, and put users back in control. At the same time, we noticed a similar inversion of control. A new trend called software as a service (SaaS) was starting to challenge customer’s notions of how they consumed and managed software. We partnered up with salesforce.com, the pioneer in the space, and spent a good deal of time talking with their product managers, and hearing about customer challenges. Not long after, Sxip Access was born.

Here’s a photo taken on June 12th, 2005, of what I believe to be the first shipment of any cloud specific Identity system. Two things really stand out for me when I reflect on this photo. The first, is that being five or so years early to market is generally a recipe for disaster. We clearly got the trend of where Identity was headed right, but we were pretty miserable on the timing. The second, is how quickly the world has actually changed in that time. For one, FedEx is substantially less important when it comes to delivering software to our customers. This is probably best illustrated by the fact that there are two boxes being shipped here. You know… for redundancy.

Juxtapose this with today. The fact that overnight we’ve shipped Salesforce Identity to over 100,000 customers, built on a platform that is handling well over one-billion transactions a day is pretty remarkable on its own. That not one customer will be waiting for FedEx to show up really illustrates how quickly the opportunity to innovate and create value for customers at cloud scale has changed for both large companies and startups alike.  

And so begins the next phase of Identity at Salesforce. As we prepare for another amazing Dreamforce, the rather loud message from customers is similar to the whispers we heard back in 2005; they are finding their existing Identity systems ill-equipped for the modern demands being placed on IT. The information, applications, and devices they are trying to protect are no longer neatly contained behind their firewall, and the business has moved beyond just employees, demanding connections to its customers, partners, and products.  

When looking to Cloud Identity solutions to help address these challenges, our customers want to avoid deploying new point solutions. With Salesforce Identity built directly into the Salesforce Platform, they are ready to manage relationships, without a new silo of Identity plumbing. They can get focused on delivering a single Identity across any application, pre-integrated into the apps they use to sell, service, and market, and run their entire businesses.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.

Learn more about platform as a service with the new ebook  8 Core Services of a Cloud Platform.