Salesforce Bulks Up Cybersecurity

Salesforce Hires Cybersecurity Expert

Salesforce is making a move to bolster its cybersecurity offerings with a new hire.

Reuters reported on Monday (June 13) that Salesforce is bringing well-known computer hacking expert Trey Ford on board as the company’s head of trust. He will be responsible for running Heroku, Salesforce’s cloud-based platform for creating and deploying software applications.

The company will also be investing, to the tune of $50 million, to help fund startups and create an incubator for cloud companies in their early phases.

CEO Marc Benioff notes that the move is intended to help the software firm push further innovation and development for an ecosystem of apps tailored for the Salesforce platform.

Salesforce already falls on the more active corporate venture investor side of the spectrum when it comes to software that helps big firms stay on track, and the pace of its investment expenditures has been on the upswing. All in, Salesforce has tossed $504.5 million in the last year — a big jump from the $158 million a year earlier. The hugeness of that jump is partially explained by a $100 million fund set up to bring its investment interests to Europe.

Last week, the company announced a major acquisition worth an estimated $2.8 billion.

It will create its Salesforce Commerce Cloud solution with the takeover of Demandware, an enterprise cloud commerce platform. Salesforce said it expects to finalize the deal in the second quarter of its fiscal year, ending July 31, 2016.

“Demandware is an amazing company,” Benioff explained.

“The global cloud leader in the multibillion-dollar digital commerce market. With Demandware, Salesforce will be well-positioned to deliver the future of commerce as part of our Customer Success platform and create yet another billion-dollar cloud.”

That billion-dollar cloud is the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which will run under the firm’s Customer Success Platform and provide an eCommerce-as-a-Service solution for corporations. According to the companies, Demandware clients will have access to Salesforce’s analytics, sales, IoT, platform and other enterprise solutions.