ISV Partnership Programs: Salesforce Platform
The Salesforce platform is a Cloud platform previously known as force.com, and is used by consulting partners, independent software vendors (ISV), and resellers who use the platform to integrate their solutions and expertise to solve customer challenges.
The Salesforce Commerce Cloud is an e-commerce platform that offers integration possibilities built around Salesforce’s for customer relationship management (CRM) software
Salesforce reports that its solutions are used by over 150,000 businesses of all sizes. In 2022 Salesforce reported $26.5 billion in revenue, which is up 25% year over year but its partner ecosystem is estimated to be 5x bigger than Salesforce itself; moreover, by 2026, the (partner) ecosystem is projected to grow to be 6x larger compared to what it is today according to a 2021 IDC Study.
Product Development Benefits
The Salesforce Platform enables partners to built apps that can leverage and complement the existing solutions for marketing, sales, service, partner management, and community management.
In Development, the Salesforce Lightning Platform is a component based framework developed by Salesforce that helps businesses simplify the app development process by automating business operations across all departments without coding experience. Forrester states that Salesforce lightning platform users experience:
- 57% shorter development time
- 29% higher work efficiency
- 72% fewer applications bugs
Other benefits of the Salesforce Platform are very similar to what most Cloud Platform providers offer, eg:
- Scalability, flexibility, and uptime are enabled through a global network fabric and Virtual Private Clouds
- premium-grade data protection,achieved through federated identity and security context
- quick and simple implementation for different locations and different languages
- simple and intuitive interaction for all levels of users.
- Infrastructure is completely abstracted and automated, resulting in negligible maintenance overhead
- Upgrades and changes to software are fully automated
- Connectors and APIs for integrating with other popular cloud and on-premise technologies
Revenue Growth Benefits
An IDC Study states that for every dollar that Salesforce made in 2021, its ecosystem made $4.96, and this number is expected to grow to $6.19 by 2026. The Salesforce Cloud ecosystem created $308 billion in revenue in 2021, and is expected to double to $724 billion by 2026. Salesforce Lightning Platform partners specifically experience on average 48% year-over-year growth, and a 545% five year ROI.
Forrester’s TEI for Salesforce Commerce Cloud conducted in 2017, and based on interviews with 4 companies of different sizes, ranging from 50$ million to 3$ billion in revenue, showed that revenue performance for partners have a 35% increase over three years. With Salesforce Commerce Cloud deployment, businesses saw a 5% increase in average order value (AOV) and a 28% increase in conversion rates. The overall numbers showed that over the course of three years, businesses saw $4.6 million in benefits vs $1.6 million in costs, resulting in a total return of $3 million (all figures in US dollars) and a ROI of 184 percent.
Salesforce’s Appexchange, which is Salesforce’s cloud marketplace, contains thousands of ISVs already developing and selling their apps on the AppExchange with over 9 million installs. These partner apps provide (add-on) solutions for 91% of Salesforce customers which are 90% of Fortune 500. Between 2016 and 2021,after the company acquired DemandWare, the Salesforce ecosystem contributed $398 billion to worldwide GDP in 11 important countries for the corporation
Cost Reduction Benefits
Moving from legacy development platforms and solutions to a cloud-based development platform reduces cost. These cost savings, according to IDC, are worth $4,900 per 100 users per year ($365,700 per business) for Salesforce Lightning Platform users
A similar model developed by Forrester shows the following cost savings for their “composite organization” using the Salesforce Commerce Cloud:
- $65,000 in front-end feature licensing fees.
- $320,000 in infrastructure, hosting, and security expenditures.
- $190,000 in new site implementation and upgrade expenditures.
- and, savings of $23,625 in third-party consulting fees over three years.
Lastly, Salesforce Commerce Cloud implementation also manages to save costs in areas such as Subscription fees, Ongoing customer training, project cost savings with faster time-to-market and IT costs associated with maintaining an on-premises solution (e.g., infrastructure costs, DBAs)
Risk Mitigation Benefits
Salesforce Lightning Platform Users experience less productivity losses and business interruptions as a result of higher-quality programs and fewer release errors. The value of these losses have been quantified by IDC, and are estimated at $9,800 per 100 users (on average $737,900 per organization) on an annual basis.
In the case of Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform migrations, businesses were able to reduce downtime risks and enhance system stability. This directly resulted in the digital team's operational efficiency improving and cutting costs from missed sales. Scalability and the capacity to control traffic spikes were two other important risk mitigation benefits.
Read more about ISV partnerships in our next blog posts from this series, and hop on the ISVWorld Platform to find the right ISVs to partner with.
In case you missed our latest post on tech partnerships:
Google Cloud Services by clicking on the link or head to the ISVWorld Blog for more.
What’s next:
#6 Oracle Partners
#7 SAP PartnerEdge
#8 Sage Partners
#9 RedHat Partners
#10 Acumatica the Cloud ERP
#11 Twinfield Partners