As a major vendor of cloud services, Salesforce accounts for a significant share of the benefits to the general economy from cloud computing.
That share is enhanced by other contributions to the economy by companies that sell cloud services in concert with Salesforce cloud services, by professional services firms that help organizations migrate to cloud computing, and by companies that sell hardware, software, services, and networking to organizations to support cloud computing.
The Salesforce Economic Impact Model is an extension to IDC's IT Economic Impact Model.
It estimates Salesforce's current and future share of the benefits to the general economy generated by cloud computing, and it also estimates the size of the ecosystem supporting Salesforce using IDC's market research on the ratio of spending on professional services to cloud subscriptions; the ratio of sales of hardware, software, and networking to spending on public and private cloud computing; and the ratio of spending on application development tools to applications developed.
Note that the ecosystem may include companies that are not formal business partners of Salesforce but that nevertheless sell products or services associated with the Salesforce implementations.
Key Definitions in Support of Tables and Figures
The following contains definitions of terms used in tables and figures throughout this White Paper: