Salesforce Car at the Indy 500

Salesforce has a car in the Indy 500 this year. They recently announced their sponsorship of car number 66 driven by JR Hildebrand. The Indianapolis 500 is May 27, 2018.

If you have found this page via a search, you may be wondering what Salesforce even is, or why they would be sponsoring a car in the Indianapolis 500. I've written this post to help those of you who are asking "What is Salesforce?" and "Why is there a Salesforce Indy car?"

I have instructed over 52,000 students on the Salesforce platform, with a primary focus on getting you certified and launching a career "in the Cloud". (The 'Cloud' is just another term for the Internet, btw.)Salesforce is leading the way on this journey to the "Cloud". With this tsunami of technological change comes opportunities galore for Cloud Careers. Helping normal people launch their careers in the cloud is what I am passionate about.

Salesforce is software that runs on the Internet (i.e. "the Cloud"). The beauty of Salesforce, and what drew me to it is that you don't have to know how to code in order to build apps.

Many people think that Salesforce is just Sales software, due to its name, but it is so much more than that. You can manage your customer relationships on Salesforce, you can run your Call Center on Salesforce, you can automate your Marketing on Salesforce. If you have an idea for an app, you can build it on Salesforce.

I will stop there but suffice it to say, Salesforce is the most attainable path to a cloud career for you.

So why would Salesforce have a car in the Indianapolis 500?

I don't have an official word from Salesforce, and I am not even an employee of Salesforce. But if I had to guess, there are two primary reasons that Salesforce is sponsoring an Indy Car.

The first would be visibility/brand recognition. Salesforce is starting to take name recognition seriously (finally). One way they are doing this is by reshaping various city skylines with Salesforce Towers popping up in San Francisco, New York, London, and yes, Indianapolis.

The second reason is that Salesforce has quite a significant presence in the city of Indianapolis. This began when they acquired a Marketing Automation company known as Exact Target in 2013. The technology that they acquired via Exact Target now comprises Salesforce's B2C (Business-to-Consumer) component of their Marketing Cloud offering.

The other acquired technology firm for B2B Marketing (Business to Business) in Salesforce's Marketing Cloud came by way of a company known as Pardot.

Since Salesforce acquired Exact Target, which was headquartered in Indianapolis, they have a large employee base and now a Salesforce tower in the city.

It only makes sense that they would leverage the largest sports spectacle that Indianapolis is known for by sponsoring a car in the Indy 500.

Here is a video I shot outside of the Salesforce Tower in Indy recently:

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Update: 05/14/2018