When we think of the cloud in 2016, our thoughts invariably turn to Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, the three pillars of the public cloud infrastructure market. But Salesforce.com is arguably the original cloud computing company, and as it closes in on its 17th year of existence, it is showing plenty of signs that it remains a power broker in enterprise computing.
Two separate stories regarding Salesforce.com’s investments in the future of the cloud caught my eye this week. First,
The Wall Street Journal reported that Salesforce wants to invest $50 million in enterprise cloud computing startups and create an incubator for the discipline, which doesn’t always translate as well to other incubator programs. Then
Fortune reported that CEO Marc Benioff -- as original a character as Silicon Valley has created in a generation -- thought about investing in cloud consigliere Pivotal, despite owning two companies that pretty much compete directly with Pivotal.
It’s no secret that Benioff is as gifted a marketer as we’ve seen in tech since the first dot-com boom, a masterful speaker who can deploy spot-on technical knowledge and sophisticated world observations within the same sentence. But it’s not just for show; Salesforce has been a tireless advocate for cloud computing for an extremely long time now, and its willingness to bet on promising enterprise computing founders (so long as it gets a piece, of course) is another welcome source of investment for a market category that lacks the buzz of its social-platform-wannabe counterparts.
As the easy money recedes in the tech industry, investor enthusiasm for boring-yet-vital enterprise technology becomes even more important. Whatever the challenges of the broader financial market, there is no dispute that computing is becoming a greater part of life each year, and the fundamental technologies required to support that growth take longer to develop than the sexier social media apps that promise low overhead and quick returns for venture capitalists.
Being part of the cloud revolution is a little like turning back the clock to the early 2000s, when despite the excesses of the dot-com boom it was clear to a small but dedicated number of people that tech was going to change the world. The golddiggers and charlatans that gave HBO’s
Silicon Valley so much material to work with didn’t really dive in until the hard work had been done in building out the cloud, paving the way for the minimal investment required to create their apps and “platforms.”
The next wave of technology -- whether it’s virtual reality, bots powered by artificial intelligence, or self-driving cars -- is going to rely on the breakthroughs that enterprise computing companies are developing in the shadows as we speak. We’re proud to highlight the best of those companies later this year at Structure, and hope that Saleforce makes some wise investments in the technology plumbing of the future.
