Grant Gross
Senior Writer

Salesforce.com announces IPO

news
Dec 18, 20031 min

Hosted CRM provider takes first steps toward public offering

Salesforce.com Inc. took the first step toward offering stock in an initial public offering (IPO) by filing paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the company announced Thursday.

Salesforce.com, a vendor of comprehensive customer relationship management services based in San Francisco, will use Morgan Stanley & Co. Inc. as the sole book runner for the IPO. Co-managers will be Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., UBS Securities LLC, Wachovia Capital Markets LLC and William Blair & Co. LCC.

Saying the company was in its SEC-mandated quiet period before the IPO, a Salesforce spokeswoman declined to discuss the date of the IPO.

Salesforce.com, founded in 1999, has approximately 8,400 customers and approximately 120,000 paying subscribers running its services in 11 languages, according to a company press release.

Grant Gross

Grant Gross, a senior writer at CIO, is a long-time IT journalist who has focused on AI, enterprise technology, and tech policy. He previously served as Washington, D.C., correspondent and later senior editor at IDG News Service. Earlier in his career, he was managing editor at Linux.com and news editor at tech careers site Techies.com. As a tech policy expert, he has appeared on C-SPAN and the giant NTN24 Spanish-language cable news network. In the distant past, he worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. A finalist for Best Range of Work by a Single Author for both the Eddie Awards and the Neal Awards, Grant was recently recognized with an ASBPE Regional Silver award for his article “Agentic AI: Decisive, operational AI arrives in business.”

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