CRMSalesforce, Inc.

Salesforce is the largest customer-relationship platform, sold by subscription per seat.

The core product tracks deals and customers for sales teams, and around it grew marketing, service, the Tableau analytics arm and the Slack messenger. Per-seat subscription makes revenue recurring and highly predictable, but ties growth to headcount at its customers: layoffs in client companies show up immediately in the numbers.

After several years of expensive acquisitions the company shifted priority from growth at any cost to profitability: cost cuts, buybacks and the first dividend in its history. For investors that turned it from a growth story into a margin story, and operating margin is now the first thing the market checks.

The current bet is embedded AI assistants working over the customer's accumulated data, sold as a separate tier and expected to restore growth. The main competition is Microsoft, which offers comparable functionality inside an enterprise bundle customers have already bought.