Proud Contributor to the Salesforce Ecosystem

By Brian Schnack, Director of Product Management

IDC recently measured the sheer breadth of the Salesforce ecosystem, sharing the milestone achievements from customers and partners. As a proud partner and cloud leader, Five9 is ecstatic about this news.

The IDC report offers some mind-blowing stats related to the enormous size of future opportunities for cloud-based partnerships. For a company that was also born in the cloud, Five9 can most definitely relate:

-By 2020, Salesforce's ecosystem will have created $389 billion in positive GDP impact

-Growing at 4.5 times the rate of IT spending since 2009, cloud computing is expected to grow more than 6 times the rate of IT spending from 2015 through 2020

-More than 70% of IT spending is tied up with maintenance of legacy systems and routine upgrades

-By 2020, for every $1 earned by Salesforce, the company's ecosystem will gain $4.14

Five9 has been a partner of Salesforce nearly as long as our two respective cloud leaders have been in business. For 15 years, not too long after Salesforce started, Five9 has stood apart as the premier cloud contact center solutions provider for enterprises to engage their customers smarter, simpler, with greater results - in the cloud.

Every day for 15 years, our team has woken up, grabbed a pot of coffee, and challenged ourselves: What can we do better so that our customers can unleash THEIR business on this awesome world of ours? That's an excellent job to wake up to, and Salesforce is an excellent partner to do that with.

The cloud is our heart and soul, and we are on course for nearly four billion customer engagements running through our veins this year. But we didn't get here simply with the right technology or the right features. We've landed where we are today by doing what our customers do best - listening, empowering, and engaging.

Five9 is an innovative company that respects the agents and businesses that drive the economy, respects the growing pace and variety of customer and business demands, and respects the infinite varieties of those demands - inbound or outbound, sales or service, consumer or enterprise, high volume or high touch, one channel or omnichannel. As a product manager and a product leader, I'm not here to simply put a product on the shelf - I'm here to unleash my customers' services on their customers. That only happens with the right culture, built by the right people who in turn build the right products. That's us.

Companies don't become leaders by accident. Five9 has embraced the "No Software" and no on-premise philosophy nearly as long as Salesforce has. We're both evangelists of the power of the cloud - but more importantly, we both build with empathy - empathy for administrators who simply want drama-free updates, empathy for agents who want to simply engage their customer, empathy for customers who simply want to be understood, and empathy for businesses that simply want to deliver and compete in their markets. When you invest in listening, and when you invest in empowering the right stuff to solve the right business needs - amazing results follow.

Waking up, getting moving, and changing the game are what Salesforce and Five9 work towards every day. And what better platform for Five9 to change the game with for omnichannel engagement than Lightning? It's no accident that our respective Salesforce Lightning Experience and Five9 Freedom Platforms are complementary. The combination of the two empowers us to deliver an enterprise-class cloud contact center solution, purpose built with the user in mind - whether you are an administrator who demands turnkey deployment, an agent who deserves a seamless, simple, insightful experience, or a customer who expects to be known and engaged across all channels.

Sure, even I get excited about AI, IOT, and plenty of other acronyms (not to mention rugby and the Iowa Hawkeyes...). But my favorite Salesforce acronym right now is Open CTI for Lightning, Salesforce's next step in bringing customer engagement to the cloud - and I have nearly four billion reasons to humbly suggest that there's no cloud leader better placed for that than Five9.