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Salesforce.com IPO to help the needy
All about 'Compassionate Capitalism', says CRM vendor

By Tony Hallett

Published: Thursday 22 January 2004

The upcoming flotation of hosted CRM provider Salesforce.com is likely to result in a windfall of over a million dollars for a charitable organisation.

While it is not uncommon for companies and their employees to give away some of the money they make from an IPO, Salesforce.com has built in philanthropy by making sure the Salesforce.com Foundation owns 1 per cent of its equity.

The vendor is expected to raise over $100m from its IPO.

In a similar vein, while rubbing shoulders with industrial titans in Davos, Switzerland, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff today released Compassionate Capitalism, billed as 'How corporations can make doing good an integral part of doing well'.

Speaking to silicon.com earlier this week, Benioff said: "We want to influence others to adopt this [philanthropic] model."

He also predicted - contrary to some industry views - that few other technology companies will go public this year. A number of IPOs have been slated, most notably Google and Salesforce.com, and others are thought likely to happen. He said: "It's a tough battle: hard, expensive and the regulatory bar is higher than before."

An ongoing poll of silicon.com readers has found that, Google aside, just over 22 per cent deem Salesforce.com 'the most exciting IPO of 2004'.

On the subject of CRM giant Siebel, Benioff maintained that around 95 per cent of Salesforce.com implementations are successful, as opposed to around half that proportion for Siebel and the CRM industry more widely, going by Gartner figures.

Salesforce.com is the most visible survivor of the application service provider (ASP) boom of the late 1990s, differentiating itself with its hosted service model, though today Siebel also - to a point - endorsed that model.

Compassionate Capitalism was co-authored with CNET journalist Karen Southwick. CNET is the publisher of silicon.com.