It should be called "everythingforce" instead of Salesforce. The features have grown so wide and deep that even CRM is just a small sliver of what Salesforce is. It has its own server side language ( APEX ), a front end framework (Lightning), a community builder/site hosting thingy ( Community Cloud ), and "custom objects" and relationships (think a user defined schema ). If you wanted to you could use Salesforce as a hosting platform for any web application.
Yep, and the problem with that in my experience is it's enough rope for companies to hang themselves with. I've seen multiple cases of using Salesforce for things/applications for things that belong outside of it. I'm only a little sour about it :D
I am in the process of dealing with that myself. In my case, the leadership of our company was convinced by a consulting firm that Salesforce is capable of anything, including acting as IaaS for a huge SaaS application we are building. The result being that we have to make very expensive work arounds for API call limits.
The hard part about this is that it might function eventually, so "there is no reason to switch until we KNOW for sure". Salesforce can do a lot, but it can NOT do IaaS. Use AWS, GCP, or literally anything else if you want a 100% customizable autoscaling application with in depth monitoring.
EDIT: Pardon my cry for help, but if anyone has any business targeted material to present these ideas to company presidents who don't have a clue in the world, I implore you to point me to it.
I work for a small consulting company specializing in SF custom development. About 1/3 of our projects are coming in and fixing something other consultants screwed up. It's very expensive and I really feel for the position our clients are in. The governor limits are particularly nasty, you have to be constantly aware because they won't bite you in development since you're usually working on a limited set of data. It's only after a production deployment do they begin to show up and there's nothing you can do.
funny you mention Salesforce as IaaS, a buddy of mine works at one of the big firms and was telling me the other day he's on a project where the client is layering a multi-tenant architecture on top of Salesforce's Community Cloud product and basically reselling communities.
I'd kick such a consultancy out of the door on the first instance of such an advice. For this kind of stuff some tech strategy consultancies are required,not the ones that implement it. I'd stay away from the big ones(i.e. Accenture), irrespectively of the company size. Salesforce is great but it is definitely not for everything.
Its more of a development platform and data ecosystem than ERP. Salesforce has yet to acquire an Accounting system to perform general ledger functions.
