Salesforce hones in on services and ISV growth

Salesforce has bold ambitions to grow the size of its partner ecosystem, the company confirmed today during its annual Dreamforce event in San Francisco.

There are two key focus areas for this growth: services and ISVs, Tyler Prince, Salesforce's worldwide executive vice president of alliances and channels told assembled delegates during the show's opening keynote, which was totally partner-focused.

Citing a soon-to-be-released IDC study, Prince said that the service opportunity linked to the Salesforce platform was circa $135 billion. He referenced a similar IDC study from last year that predicted Salesforce would be likely to be five times the size of SAP in terms of service opportunity come 2018.

"If you’ve made your bets on Salesforce, you’ve placed an excellent bet. If you have other choices to make within your ecosystem, I strongly encourage you to shift those dollars and focus on this incredible opportunity and look for ways to take advantage of that," Prince said.

Outside of this massive services prize on offer, Salesforce also wants to expand its ISV reach. And Prince has been given a mandate to go for 5x growth over the next five years.

"To do that we need to do a number of things we have to do and a number of investments we have to make. We need to continue to enable you and get you to market quicker to help you be successful in the field," Prince said.

"We need to continue to innovate and build incredible features and products you can take advantage of and leverage those into the solutions you take to market. We also need to invest in joint customer success and make our customers successful as our joint business model is predicated on that."

Stay tuned to Channel Pro and its sister sites Cloud Pro and IT Pro this week for more news, views and updates from Salesforce's Dreamforce this week.