Salesforce has moved ahead of SAP as the leading vendor is the world market for customer relationship management (CRM) software, according to a new report by IT analyst Gartner.
It says the overall market went up by 12.5% to $18 billion (£11.6 billion) in 2012, with Salesforce accounting for 14% of the total against SAP's 12.9%. Oracle was the only other company with a double digit share at 11.1%
Joanne Correira, VP at Gartner, said the market growth rate was three times the average for all enterprise software, as CRM is "at the eye of the Nexus of Forces storm".
"With corporate cash at all-time highs, many vendors are willing to pay high premiums to acquire specific technologies and expertise in an increasingly dynamic and competitive CRM market environment," she said.
Software-as-a-service CRM is becoming increasingly important, accounting for nearly 40% of the total business, while the growth has also been fuelled by vendors offering new features and functions in they systems.
Salesforce has announced a clutch of initiatives to speed up the development of specialised mobcompile apps using its cloud service Salesforce Platform.
They include an open source framework and tools, Salesforce Mobile SDK 2.0, to help enterprise developers connect data to any mobile app on any iOS or Android device. It also supports apps based on HTML5, and provides libraries for requirements such as authentication and secure offline storage.
This is joined by Developer Mobile packs, which can be used in building HTML5 or hybrid mobile apps to access real time data on Salesforce.
Salesforce has also set up a Mobile Accelerator Progamme, providing companies with access to its system integrators to help develop their ideas for apps.
Mike Rosenbaum, Executive Vice President of Salesforce Platform, said: "With these new mobile services, CIOs can immediately accelerate every mobile app development project in their backlog."
The enterprise software company, which is best known for its customer relationship management system, claims that more than 1 million developers and business analysts use the cloud platform to build apps for a range of devices.
The new initiatives suggest that customers get more value from the platform when it gives them the flexibility to build their own applications to meet specific requirements.
Salesforce has increased its emphasis on the virtues of "social intelligence" with two new tools for its Chatter enterprise social network.
Chatter Topics and Expertise will make it possible to analyse and categorise structured and unstructured information within the Salesforce platform. Details of experts, files, groups and other information can be compiled on a single topic page, which is then automatically curated through the Salesforce algorithms.
Salesforce claims they will help users discover insights, identify experts and find resources based on topics of interest. It is emphasising how this can help new employees to quickly find information that can help in the job.
The move follows the development of other social intelligence tools in Chatter, including Recommendations, Influence and Similar Files.
Salesforce cites Vanessa Thompson, Research Manager for IDC's Enterprise Social Networks and Collaborative Technologies, as commenting: "As social software grows into enterprise social networks, solution functionality like profiles, activity streams and blogs have quickly become assumed. Social intelligence will only make enterprise social networks more pervasive by adding context to the funnel of data available and providing insight into past, current and future actions."
The company claims there are more than 195,000 active social networks around the world built on Chatter, and that it is used for more than 200 million recommendations each month.
