‘Salesforce hiring to increase by 1,500 by the end of this year’

How has India’s business grown and what are your hiring plans?

We have doubled our workforce in India alone in the last 18 months. When I came in the workforce was around 2,500 and now it is around 5,000. We plan to exit the fiscal year on about 6,500 people (Salesforce’s fiscal year ends Jan. 31). So, we are currently doing a lot of recruitments. We might not double, but then our plans are huge. And we’ll certainly be growing fairly quickly, even next year. Not only are our people selling and distributing, but we also have a very large team that supports our global operations. Like most other large MNCs, we have global innovation hubs in India covering engineering, R&D, support and all services. We are the largest Salesforce hub outside the US.

What skills and roles are you hiring for?

About 90% of the people we hire are for technical roles and they are basically engineers. Of course, there are people in other areas like sales and finance, but most of the roles are very technology-oriented. We see people who are Salesforce certified. Salesforce has a very good gamified platform which is already available in public domain and it is also free. It’s called a trailhead, and you can actually go to the trailhead and authenticate yourself. But even if someone isn’t Salesforce certified, that doesn’t stop them from coming in as long as they can do Java programming and things like that. We are also recruiting in the field of HR because if you are doing so many recruitments then you also need recruiters and employee success business partners. There will be roles in all areas of a rapidly growing organization, from general administration to technology to sales.

What are the opportunities from SMBs in India?

SMB is probably the biggest opportunity for Salesforce. When Salesforce was started 23 years back, it started with the SMB segment. The enterprise segment came only after 10 years. The idea was to solve SMB issues. For example, in India, most SMBs are not capital-rich, so they do not want to lock up their capital to get the best systems. We offer subscription-based solutions so they don’t need to set up their own hardware. And this is a monthly subscription, which also ensures that we stay on our toes to give them the best service possible by ensuring that those subscriptions keep renewing year after year. SMBs constitute three quarters of our customer base.

A recent report by Salesforce-IDC states that cloud-related technologies will account for 27% of all IT spending in India. What is driving the demand for the cloud?

India is a capital-poor country and on-premises systems can be very expensive as you not only have to have your servers in one place, but you will actually need them in three pieces because you need a business continuity plan on the site. as well as disaster recovery at a distant site. Therefore, getting the server itself is a lengthy process. Whereas, if you look at cloud applications and you do the same thing with a cloud service provider, the cloud service provider can provision you within a few hours. What could have taken days and a lot of money could actually be obtained in a matter of hours. It is not only a question of convenience, but also about cost as with the cloud, you are paying as you go.

When you are trying to strike a chord with your customer, you need a number of analytics and artificial intelligence tools. The larger the data set, the better the result. It would be very expensive to have this kind of elasticity in an on-premises system.