With the industry reeling from the financial crisis and businesses still facing uncertainty about their futures, the need to rationalize cost is the top priority on a CEO’s agenda. And one of the areas that is identified to rationalize the cost is IT. With developments like cloud computing becoming a very natural reflex to the CIO’s who were challenged to do more with less, a new wave of opportunity has opened up for Salesforce.com. In an exclusive conversation with The SmartTechie, Jeremey Cooper, VP – Marketing (Asia Pacific & Japan), Salesforce.com talks about the trends, market opportunities, new products, challenges and more.

What are the factors that helped Salesforce.com to grow rapidly in India? What were some of the initial hurdles?
Salesforce.com has been present in India over a decade through our customers, which include US and European companies that have their presence in India. We first launched our direct presence in India in 2006 as we saw the market has a huge potential for Salesforce. India today is one of our fastest growing markets worldwide and we are actively investing accordingly. For Salesforce India holds humungous promise due to following reasons:
1. Cloud computing represents the first opportunity for companies of any size in India to be able to use technology because it’s not costly.
2. Provides a large opportunity for India to leap frog the initial hardware investments the companies have to make and go straight to mobile devices.
3. The reaction that we are getting from the developer community. Cloud computing provides the first real opportunity to create globally recognized Indian software brands.

In the past entrepreneurs have tried to bring U.S. business models in India and at times it had failed, how do you make sure that you succeed in this? What are the innovations that you are bringing to this market?
We have observed two things that are happening at macro level in India; first, the bandwidth is getting better and second, several small or medium size companies in India do not have a lot of hardware or data centers and can get into Cloud computing easily with a very low budget in contrast to that needed for loading a data center.