The 2022 Salesforce Economy - 3.3 million new jobs, $859 billion new revenues

With Dreamforce just around the corner, Salesforce has today published the third Salesforce Economy report, compiled by research firm IDC to look at the economic contribution of the Salesforce ecosystem to national economies around the world.

As with all things Dreamforce-related, big numbers are the order of the day with this year’s report predicting 3.3 million new jobs and more than $859 billion in new business revenues worldwide by 2022. That’s up considerably on last year’s prediction of 1.9 million jobs and $389 billion in new revenues by 2022. In addition to the direct new jobs total, add in a further 5 million indirect jobs.

According to IDC’s number crunching, the business sector most likely to benefit will be financial services, with an anticipated 584,995 new jobs and estimated $164 billion in new business revenues by 2022. Manufacturing comes in next, $159 billion in new revenues and 638,296 new jobs, followed by retail on $92.6 billion in new revenues and 401,355 new jobs. The government and public sector comes in with the lowest numbers, but even here these are impressive - $50.9 billion in new revenues and 221,640 new jobs.

In terms of global markets, the domestic US market is set to benefit most - 408,760 new jobs and $411 billion in new business revenues. Japan, where Salesforce has put a lot of sales focus, comes in at $108.4 billion in new revenues and 153, 387 new jobs.

In Europe, another strategic focus for expansion by Salesforce, France is predicted to generate $24.3 billion and 37,115 new jobs while Germany sits on $17.0 billion and 26,291 new jobs.

The period under review in this report covers the scheduled Brexit deadlines for the UK’s departure from the European Union. While the free trade discussions with Brussels have yet to get underway, the UK government might take some comfort from a currently predicted boom of 114, 545 new jobs and new revenues of $65.6 billion.

Of course, all that might change once Brexit terms are finally made public, at which point Salesforce will, in common with other non-UK providers, have to make some investment decisions, while the impact on the UK economy of whatever deal is struck is impossible to predict right now. (One thing you can guarantee at Dreamforce - no execs will be making any Brexit predictions or comments if they know what's good for them...)

The report find that the Salesforce ecosystem in 2017 is nearly four times bigger than Salesforce itself, while by 2022 it will be more than five times bigger. IDC estimates that in 2017 for every dollar Salesforce will make, partners in the the ecosystem will make $3.67 and will reach $5.18 by 2022.

Based on a survery of 75 partners carried out in 2016, IDC reports that specific benefits from being part of the Salesforce Ecosystem include:

• Using the Salesforce Platform development tools cut their development time 40% compared with traditional development methods.
• Using the Salesforce Platform allowed them to cut the cost of quality assurance by 45% and decrease time to market by 39%.
• Using the Salesforce AppExchange allowed them to increase market reach 13% and improve their sales closing rate by 39%.

Overall, IDC concludes that cloud computing in general is empowering organizations in their digital transformation strategies, noting:

The breadth and variety of cloud applications and development platforms available today mean that most of an organization's business processes and workflows can be migrated to the cloud. Legacy systems — the large enterprise applications installed in past decades — can become part of the digital transformation.

IDC's forecasts show a significant payback from investments in cloud computing out to 2022. But even by then, spending on public cloud computing will be less than 13% of spending on IT. We are still on the ground floor of cloud computing, with lots of headroom for more payback.

My take

We’ll doubtless be having stats from this report dropped into conversations and presentations across Dreamforce. It’s a canny study that provides some strong talking points for Salesforce. Inevitably there will be some ‘think of a number’ cynicism about any research report sponsored by a vendor and certainly anyone could pick out niggles here and there. For the record, IDC says of its methodology for the report:

The study relies on IDC's forecasts of job creation from organizational use of cloud computing, IDC's understanding of Salesforce's market share, IDC's published research on the number of ancillary products and services that accompany cloud computing implementations, and a custom economic model that estimates the size of the Salesforce ecosystem.

But now that this report and the earlier State of Salesforce from Bluewolf have been published, it’s clear that it’s Dreamforce-eve.