Software for Rent

Marc Benioff has never been modest in his dreams for Salesforce.com, the business software company he founded in 1999. Marc Benioff wants his company, Salesforce.com, to become a platform for outside developers' tools.

Mr. Benioff, whose appetite for brash publicity and business growth matches his bulk, declared several years ago that Salesforce would be “the Microsoft of the 21st century.” Never mind that his company brought in over a year what Microsoft garners in a few days. Or that another company, Google, seems more likely to wear that label.

Salesforce promised to revolutionize the way businesses buy software, and to a large extent it has accomplished that in one market niche: customer tracking. Its innovation was in turning software into a service that is leased over the Internet, instead of something bought and installed on company computers.

And yet for Mr. Benioff, the company’s chief executive, that is not enough. He wants to turn Salesforce into a platform like Microsoft’s Windows operating system, a product so popular that it is the foundation for a veritable ecosystem of software developers.

“In our industry,” he said, “the only companies that really make it big move from being a killer app to being a platform.”

But whether he can pull off that strategic leap is unclear. Salesforce has started to look less revolutionary as larger, more established companies have adopted its leasing model. And as Mr. Benioff himself notes, few software companies successfully make the move to platform status.

Yet that jump is critical to Salesforce’s long-term success. Its share price has tripled in three years, showing that investors are counting on success beyond the market for customer-tracking software.

“It’s been very impressive what Salesforce has pulled off,” said J. Bruce Daley, editor of The Enterprise Software Observer, an industry newsletter. “But I think this is a company about to hit a wall.”

Like others, Mr. Daley declared it “logical” that Mr. Benioff would try to use its beachhead in managing customer information to establish itself as a platform, a kind of holy grail of the software world. The plan is to persuade outside programmers to do what Salesforce cannot afford to do on its own: round out the company’s offering of products so that customers can lease a greater range of business tools, like payroll and accounting software.

“But the jury is still out on whether ultimately it will be successful,” Mr. Daley said.