Salesforce expands UK operations, invests in startups

Salesforce is increasing its investments in the UK, including a plan to take on additional space at its UK headquarters at Salesforce Tower in London.

This follows the company’s recent announcement to hire more than 1,200 people in EMEA this year – many of them in the UK – to support its growing customer base.

The company is this week holding its Salesforce World Tour London event at the ExCeL, with more than 15,000 registered attendees.

“Salesforce is seeing phenomenal momentum in the UK and we are excited to increase our investment in this region to support our growing customer base as well as our thriving partner ecosystem,” said Andrew Lawson, UK and Ireland managing director, Salesforce.

The expanded Salesforce UK headquarters will include a new executive briefing centre and will showcase the company’s focus on creating a “unique workspace for employees that promotes sustainability and employee wellness”.

Last year, Salesforce Ventures announced that it had allocated $100 million to invest in European start-ups to “fuel cloud innovation”. Since that announcement, Salesforce Ventures has now invested in ten enterprise cloud start-ups, with three of them in the UK.

Salesforce Ventures has invested in UK-based DigitalGenius, NewVoiceMedia and Qubit.

While Salesforce continues to struggle to make any real profits – despite being the world’s largest CRM firm – it continues to concentrate on building up its customer base instead, with all the heavy sales and marketing costs which that entails in the cloud  CRM arena. It has however just reported its fifth consecutive quarterly operating profit though – albeit, just $50 million on a turnover of almost $2 billion.

@AntonySavvas