Startups are building businesses out of DevOps tools for existing sales platforms

The growing market for sales tools has given rise to a curious cottage industry: DevOps startups specifically targeting the software used in sales and marketing functions.

(Here, “DevOps,” refers to tools that automate processes between software development and IT teams.) It’s become a blossoming sector all its own, with vendors selling DevOps platforms for software including Salesforce purporting to make sales tech easier to integrate into a company’s existing workflows.

But wait, you might say: Wasn’t the promise of sales software to minimize the need for custom coding to accomplish sales-related tasks? Well, yes — up to a point.

Take Salesforce, for example. Built to be a customer relationship management platform, it evolved over time into a development platform — but without many of the components required to adapt it to organizations’ particular needs.

Startups are building businesses out of DevOps tools for existing sales platforms by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch