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Whenever I look at client’s Salesforce setups, I always wonder in the back of my mind what they will do if Salesforce has a significant down-turn? The lock-in

Whenever I look at client’s Salesforce setups, I always wonder in the back of my mind what they will do if Salesforce has a significant down-turn? The lock-in to the platform appears to be very fierce. Are there viable routes to exit Salesforce if anyone ever needed to? (Note: I’m not saying Salesforce is doomed or anything, just the layoffs got me thinking in that direction theorically).

spamizbad 4y ago
My company is currently undergoing this and I have the same feeling. But I think the business model behind it is you hire a "Salesforce consultant" to steer your integration with the understanding that you can replace a small team of developers doing a home-rolled solution with a single developer who runs your SF integration. And Salesforce slurps up 60% of the labor cost savings and you keep the 40% and declare success.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  And lose in-house knowledge experts. Lose the people with buyin on projects success. Lose the people and department that had built the interdepartmental relationships to push big ambitious changes forward (because no 'consultant' is going to recreate those relationships with their seagulling). You have to be a completely shallow business when it comes to business practices for this model to benefit you. But the lost opportunity cost of not having these resources isn't immediately visible so it's ignored. Until a company that gets it comes along and eats your lunch because they are nimble and their own entity, not a Salesforce franchise posing as a business.
  - spamizbad 4y ago
    Oh, I agree. For what it's worth, nobody got "cut" -- those devs are now buried in a different pile of work. Really so much problematic SaaS (or PaaS) stuff all boils down to crude hacks to work around labor shortages.
dsaavy 4y ago
While the lock-in is real, there are other platforms that are catching up fast. My firm does Salesforce to HubSpot migrations as part of our services, and it's getting easier and easier to switch. Still takes time to retrain and shift business processes to a different philosophy, but we almost always see better usage of the platform, better data, and happier users. HubSpot is not a replacement for hugely complex organizations that needs to dump tens of millions or more into a Salesforce instance (software + labor), but for mid-size and below it's great.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  What I like about Hubspot is it doesn't try to eat half your org. Salesforce is the ERP of the product world.
  - zippergz 4y ago
    I agree, but Salesforce didn't start out that way, and I'm willing to bet that Hubspot wants to be like Salesforce when they grow up.
    - dshah 4y ago
      I'm Co-founder/CTO of HubSpot. There are many things I admire about Salesforce. But, we decidedly don't want to become like Salesforce when we grow up. We have been committed to SMBs for 16+ years now, and not planning to change that anytime soon. They have grown through a lot of M&A, we built our platform from the ground-up for SMBs. There is room in the market for both Salesforce and HubSpot to succeed. Salesforce for large enterprises (the Fortune 1000) and HubSpot for SMBs.
      - robertlagrant 4y ago
        I forget where I am sometimes! Of course you're on here. Good job on the product - at my last place the sales people were very keen on it, and kept it extremely up to date. At some point IT forced them to transition to Dynamics, and they were not happy :)
nzoschke 4y ago
For data in Salesforce my company (GRAX) offers a backup product that will write data to your data lake in standard formats like Parquet. This offers a strategy to read old SFDC data BI tools or in parallel with using a new CRM. However the real SFDC lock-in is around business process. If your global Sales or Support team lives in SFDC it’s not easy to retrain them to another system.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Out of curiosity, what do SFDC data export costs currently look like? Not my area, but I was under the impression Salesforce was trying to pinch continual-export by jacking up prices on bulk data exports.
  - nzoschke 4y ago
    The APIs are convoluted and weird and have rate limits and daily quotas all over the place but no service costs to syphon data out afaik. Perhaps increased limits are bundled into other license costs. Their pricing and permissions models are both hard to understand too :)
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Thanks! Was honestly curious to hear from someone who probably spends more time in the space. I've only been exposed to it on ad hoc projects, but I've heard customers say they limit the amount of what they stream into their warehouses for (reasons). I wouldn't be surprised if their pricing model hits it, even obliquely. They've built a nice "Salesworld" toll-bridged garden. Everything sales needs must be transferred in. Everything sales has that everyone else needs must be transferred out. :/
browningstreet 4y ago
Almost all enterprise software platforms are exited, not upgraded/evolved. It's already the current state.
rawgabbit 4y ago
I have personal experience with other ERPs and Salesforce is the best of the lot in my opinion. With my current company, we have employees in Singapore, Europe, USA, and South Africa etc. who all interact with Salesforce on a daily basis. We use it for CRM, service support (VOIP with call tracking), marketing, financials (questionable decision), and analytics (Tableau). Where it shines in my opinion is that does automate 75% of business processes and if you pay the right fee, it's all seamless. The flow automation low code tool is a step in the right direction. Where it falters, is (a) its own hype machine gets in the way -- your customers are already locked-in, please stop the bullshit, SF is not easy to learn -- its data model requires experience to understand and architect properly (b) Mulesoft sucks, please stop pushing it (c) its web portal (lightning experience communities) needs work -- the security permissions model is hopeless convoluted like the fabled Gordian knot.
- Dwolb 4y ago
  How do you run financials in SF?
  - erpNerdThrAway 4y ago
    SF doesn’t do ERP level financials natively, but there is an industry of apps built on top of SF. Some try to turn SF into an ERP. Examples I’ve worked with in the last year: -Rootstock -Accounting Seed -FinancialForce That said, I design ERP integrations for a living. SF based ERPs are consistently the lowest quality and most limited ERPs we deal with. I would highly recommend that any finance professional seriously considering implementing a SF based ERP take the following steps: -Burn a large pile of money -Tell 2-5 of your finance employees to waste 30% of their work hours for 3-6 months -Implement an non-SF based ERP The end results will be identical.
    - Dwolb 4y ago
      Hilarious, thanks for the chuckle. I'd like to ride along on an ERP integration some day. I've been a part of a scaling start-up and it just feels like the kludge of tools small teams buy would be better served by a more integrated system. So I'd like to see what a big implementation looks like and figure out what pieces might be usable for small teams.
tiffanyh 4y ago
> The lock-in to the platform How is this different than any other SaaS?
- Zigurd 4y ago
  Git-based SaaS has weak lock-in, unless you waded too deep into platform-specific integrations. Agile-oriented project management, while it tries to have platform specific ways of grouping, labeling, etc. is also weakly sticky because task descriptions are (or should be) what matters. This is good, especially for small new teams at startups that want to shop different tools before having a lot of stuff to move around. All SaaS aspires to be sticky because investors told them to be that way. Almost all SaaS with institutional investors has to make stickiness noises. But it is easier for some than others.
- ensignavenger 4y ago
  I the SaaS is Open Source, you can always host it yourself, or pay some one else to host it, or fork it, or any number of other solutions if the current provider does not fit anymore. Open Source is the best way to fight vendor lock-in. If not Open Source, it should use open standard APIs and data models, with free or cheap data export.
ivan_gammel 4y ago
Just like with anything else, exit route is a function of time and budget and the migration cost is always proportional to the previous customization effort. If you pay 100k per year in license costs and spent 200-300k in 2-3 years to build current setup, you may need another 0.5-1M to get off this hook and jump to another one (which will be hard to pick). I doubt anyone seriously considers this scenario, because risks are too low and rewards are too high (it is a really good product, for which in many scenarios it is hard to find cost-efficient alternative).
cosmodisk 4y ago
Salesforce spends tons of money on sales people. If they'd want to make a pile if cash, they could fire them all and could still live off the existing contracts for years. As the market penetration will increase, they should technically require fewer sales people.
jwitthuhn 4y ago
Anyone unhappy with salesforce could always migrate to a SAP-based solution for all their business software needs ;)
xtrohnx 4y ago
I had a 2021 situation where a consultant had convinced the executive level of the non-profit I work at to move to SF with their Non-Profit Success Package. It ultimately failed to launch because it seemed like every week was a new meeting where "SF doesn't do this, but if you use Platform X it will integrate with SF." Currently, we are moving forward with Odoo, which has its own quirks but has better functionality than Salesforce IMO. No transition is fun, but an ETL from SF to Odoo is very doable (odooable), and the feature sets are pretty equivalent.
nitwit005 4y ago
If they're already paying for Salesforce, they're presumably okay with the current feature set. Why worry about the company having economic issues, unless it means degraded service or it getting shut off?
illumego 4y ago
There are no viable alternatives. Their business model is monopolistic vendor lock-in. If you don't like it, administer your own database.

spamizbad 4y ago

My company is currently undergoing this and I have the same feeling. But I think the business model behind it is you hire a "Salesforce consultant" to steer your integration with the understanding that you can replace a small team of developers doing a home-rolled solution with a single developer who runs your SF integration. And Salesforce slurps up 60% of the labor cost savings and you keep the 40% and declare success.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ROTMetro 4y ago
And lose in-house knowledge experts. Lose the people with buyin on projects success. Lose the people and department that had built the interdepartmental relationships to push big ambitious changes forward (because no 'consultant' is going to recreate those relationships with their seagulling). You have to be a completely shallow business when it comes to business practices for this model to benefit you. But the lost opportunity cost of not having these resources isn't immediately visible so it's ignored. Until a company that gets it comes along and eats your lunch because they are nimble and their own entity, not a Salesforce franchise posing as a business.
- spamizbad 4y ago
  Oh, I agree. For what it's worth, nobody got "cut" -- those devs are now buried in a different pile of work. Really so much problematic SaaS (or PaaS) stuff all boils down to crude hacks to work around labor shortages.

dsaavy 4y ago

While the lock-in is real, there are other platforms that are catching up fast. My firm does Salesforce to HubSpot migrations as part of our services, and it's getting easier and easier to switch. Still takes time to retrain and shift business processes to a different philosophy, but we almost always see better usage of the platform, better data, and happier users. HubSpot is not a replacement for hugely complex organizations that needs to dump tens of millions or more into a Salesforce instance (software + labor), but for mid-size and below it's great.

robertlagrant 4y ago
What I like about Hubspot is it doesn't try to eat half your org. Salesforce is the ERP of the product world.
- zippergz 4y ago
  I agree, but Salesforce didn't start out that way, and I'm willing to bet that Hubspot wants to be like Salesforce when they grow up.
  - dshah 4y ago
    I'm Co-founder/CTO of HubSpot. There are many things I admire about Salesforce. But, we decidedly don't want to become like Salesforce when we grow up. We have been committed to SMBs for 16+ years now, and not planning to change that anytime soon. They have grown through a lot of M&A, we built our platform from the ground-up for SMBs. There is room in the market for both Salesforce and HubSpot to succeed. Salesforce for large enterprises (the Fortune 1000) and HubSpot for SMBs.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      I forget where I am sometimes! Of course you're on here. Good job on the product - at my last place the sales people were very keen on it, and kept it extremely up to date. At some point IT forced them to transition to Dynamics, and they were not happy :)

nzoschke 4y ago

For data in Salesforce my company (GRAX) offers a backup product that will write data to your data lake in standard formats like Parquet. This offers a strategy to read old SFDC data BI tools or in parallel with using a new CRM. However the real SFDC lock-in is around business process. If your global Sales or Support team lives in SFDC it’s not easy to retrain them to another system.

ethbr0 4y ago
Out of curiosity, what do SFDC data export costs currently look like? Not my area, but I was under the impression Salesforce was trying to pinch continual-export by jacking up prices on bulk data exports.
- nzoschke 4y ago
  The APIs are convoluted and weird and have rate limits and daily quotas all over the place but no service costs to syphon data out afaik. Perhaps increased limits are bundled into other license costs. Their pricing and permissions models are both hard to understand too :)
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    Thanks! Was honestly curious to hear from someone who probably spends more time in the space. I've only been exposed to it on ad hoc projects, but I've heard customers say they limit the amount of what they stream into their warehouses for (reasons). I wouldn't be surprised if their pricing model hits it, even obliquely. They've built a nice "Salesworld" toll-bridged garden. Everything sales needs must be transferred in. Everything sales has that everyone else needs must be transferred out. :/

browningstreet 4y ago

Almost all enterprise software platforms are exited, not upgraded/evolved. It's already the current state.

rawgabbit 4y ago

I have personal experience with other ERPs and Salesforce is the best of the lot in my opinion. With my current company, we have employees in Singapore, Europe, USA, and South Africa etc. who all interact with Salesforce on a daily basis. We use it for CRM, service support (VOIP with call tracking), marketing, financials (questionable decision), and analytics (Tableau). Where it shines in my opinion is that does automate 75% of business processes and if you pay the right fee, it's all seamless. The flow automation low code tool is a step in the right direction. Where it falters, is (a) its own hype machine gets in the way -- your customers are already locked-in, please stop the bullshit, SF is not easy to learn -- its data model requires experience to understand and architect properly (b) Mulesoft sucks, please stop pushing it (c) its web portal (lightning experience communities) needs work -- the security permissions model is hopeless convoluted like the fabled Gordian knot.

Dwolb 4y ago
How do you run financials in SF?
- erpNerdThrAway 4y ago
  SF doesn’t do ERP level financials natively, but there is an industry of apps built on top of SF. Some try to turn SF into an ERP. Examples I’ve worked with in the last year: -Rootstock -Accounting Seed -FinancialForce That said, I design ERP integrations for a living. SF based ERPs are consistently the lowest quality and most limited ERPs we deal with. I would highly recommend that any finance professional seriously considering implementing a SF based ERP take the following steps: -Burn a large pile of money -Tell 2-5 of your finance employees to waste 30% of their work hours for 3-6 months -Implement an non-SF based ERP The end results will be identical.
  - Dwolb 4y ago
    Hilarious, thanks for the chuckle. I'd like to ride along on an ERP integration some day. I've been a part of a scaling start-up and it just feels like the kludge of tools small teams buy would be better served by a more integrated system. So I'd like to see what a big implementation looks like and figure out what pieces might be usable for small teams.

tiffanyh 4y ago

> The lock-in to the platform How is this different than any other SaaS?

Zigurd 4y ago
Git-based SaaS has weak lock-in, unless you waded too deep into platform-specific integrations. Agile-oriented project management, while it tries to have platform specific ways of grouping, labeling, etc. is also weakly sticky because task descriptions are (or should be) what matters. This is good, especially for small new teams at startups that want to shop different tools before having a lot of stuff to move around. All SaaS aspires to be sticky because investors told them to be that way. Almost all SaaS with institutional investors has to make stickiness noises. But it is easier for some than others.
ensignavenger 4y ago
I the SaaS is Open Source, you can always host it yourself, or pay some one else to host it, or fork it, or any number of other solutions if the current provider does not fit anymore. Open Source is the best way to fight vendor lock-in. If not Open Source, it should use open standard APIs and data models, with free or cheap data export.

ivan_gammel 4y ago

Just like with anything else, exit route is a function of time and budget and the migration cost is always proportional to the previous customization effort. If you pay 100k per year in license costs and spent 200-300k in 2-3 years to build current setup, you may need another 0.5-1M to get off this hook and jump to another one (which will be hard to pick). I doubt anyone seriously considers this scenario, because risks are too low and rewards are too high (it is a really good product, for which in many scenarios it is hard to find cost-efficient alternative).

cosmodisk 4y ago

Salesforce spends tons of money on sales people. If they'd want to make a pile if cash, they could fire them all and could still live off the existing contracts for years. As the market penetration will increase, they should technically require fewer sales people.

jwitthuhn 4y ago

Anyone unhappy with salesforce could always migrate to a SAP-based solution for all their business software needs ;)

xtrohnx 4y ago

I had a 2021 situation where a consultant had convinced the executive level of the non-profit I work at to move to SF with their Non-Profit Success Package. It ultimately failed to launch because it seemed like every week was a new meeting where "SF doesn't do this, but if you use Platform X it will integrate with SF." Currently, we are moving forward with Odoo, which has its own quirks but has better functionality than Salesforce IMO. No transition is fun, but an ETL from SF to Odoo is very doable (odooable), and the feature sets are pretty equivalent.

nitwit005 4y ago

If they're already paying for Salesforce, they're presumably okay with the current feature set. Why worry about the company having economic issues, unless it means degraded service or it getting shut off?

illumego 4y ago

There are no viable alternatives. Their business model is monopolistic vendor lock-in. If you don't like it, administer your own database.