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Salesforce.com Executive Vice President, Technology Steve Fisher has been with the company nearly a decade, but his connection to the organization goes back much further. Fisher and Salesforce CEO and Co-Founder Marc Benioff wrote video games together in high school and founded Liberty Software.
With Salesforce’s 15th birthday almost here, Fisher spoke to us about that early history, organizational milestones, and how “The World’s Most Innovative Company” will retain its title.
“I remember even talking to my parents and we just knew that he was going to be hugely successful. There was just no doubt he had that magic that you could tell. He had that drive and he knew how to make things happen and he wasn’t going to give up. He took these video games that we built in a weekend, that in hindsight weren’t very good by today’s standards, and he got them published by a real software publisher, and he made a lot of money. Very impressive.”
“What I did for the first four years was sort of create and lead our platform team. Now people talk about platform category and there are players in it, but at the time we basically invented the whole space and we really brought in what are still honestly the most popular capabilities for salesforce.com, things like Apex, Visualforce, and AppExchange. If we hadn’t done those things, honestly the company would be not be what it is today because that’s what really allowed our customers to model their business exactly the way they wanted it to be. We sort of created the category of Platform as a Service, that was our term, we made it up. And we created the idea of directory of applications, before there was an App Store, with the AppExchange, and we created the idea of a cloud platform. And now it’s not just a huge platform business, its also really what people use for CRM.”
“I think the biggest we release ever did was Apex in 2006. Apex is the object-oriented programming language that gives customers the power to customize Salesforce CRM and build and run non-sales applications in the cloud. Apex was significant because it was the precursor to introduction of the now Salesforce1 Platform. Letting our customers write code was breakthrough. It’s been eight years and nobody else has done that. At least among the cloud guys. That really turned us from being kind of a low-end basic application to really serious enterprise software. Visualforce was a huge one. AppExchange was a huge one. Our APIs were huge. I think those were the transformative technologies that really made us what we are today. The ability for people to take this technology and build whatever business process they want. I think last year with Salesforce1, that was really quite an effort to rebuild our entire product to be mobile first. No other enterprise company has really done that. And we really brought the whole platform, it wasn’t just an app. It’s pretty sophisticated technology that looks easy but it’s not easy. Customers can now take the apps they’ve built on the platform and with a few admin setting clicks, they can be made mobile and accessible automatically in the Salesforce1 Mobile App. That is pretty cool.”
“Our first acquisition, Sendia in 2006, which was a mobile product and continues to be. The technology is now totally different, but that team continues to drive our mobile strategy. In my mind that was maybe our best acquisition. It was small but it was pretty important. There’s no doubt another one of our most important acquisitions by far was Instranet in 2008, because it moved us into a new business: service.”
“When I think about the major trends, I basically buy into it, like the Internet of Things, everything’s going to be connected. I’m not the only one saying that. I think its pretty conventional wisdom that when everything is connected, that’s going to have profound implications on technology. So that would be an important thing for us to build a strategy around and start making the appropriate technology. We are just beginning understand what it means for businesses when everything is connected. This is an exciting new world. We call it the Internet of Customers.”
“I think at that level of scale, and that amount of data, that it’s going to be very different. Instead of the universe being the relational database or the application server, which it’s been for a very long time. The massive data repositories, which are a whole new generation of algorithms. Figuring out how to turn that into actionable events is going to be very rich. They may or may not pan out, but something about having massive amounts of data, most of which is uninteresting, will be a whole new area of mainstream computer science.”
“Here’s something I learned a long time ago. Inertia is the most powerful form in the universe. But it’s not just about the physical world. I’ve known a lot of CEOs and senior managers, and executives, and almost all of them, when it comes right down to it, it takes a powerful force to get them to change. And in a big organization, they all keep doing the same thing, and that’s why startups come along to displace them. But not Marc, I’ve just never seen anybody like him. He’s the opposite. He can’t stand having everything be the same. He would risk the whole company, continually, to build something new to help our customers achieve levels of success. Unlike any other CEO I’ve ever seen, he is pushing the change."
“When I was 15, nobody had computers back then, so I guess at the time, I didn’t really see it as a career, I just knew it was something I liked working on. I got lucky that it turned out to be a huge opportunity. I didn’t really plan it. I didn’t anticipate the revolution that occurred. I was just in the right place at the right time.”
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