Salesforce.com has exceeded expectations and forged new ground in the past, but a future crisis looms that will test it once again. Just as the pioneer of on-demand software is working to expand into new markets, some very powerful companies are moving into its territory. The question is whether Salesforce.com will meet the upcoming challenges, or whether it will turn out to be a one-hit wonder. For the time being, things are well for Salesforce.com, which boasts 35,000 clients for its customer relationship software, and revenues growing at 50 percent per quarter and headed toward $700 million this year. Yet both Microsoft and SAP are breathing down its neck. Later this year Microsoft intends to launch a competitor to Salesforce.com's customer-relations software at about half the price. Meanwhile, SAP--which already dwarfs Salesforce.com's market share--recently announced an online service which packages accounting, human resources, and sales-tracking software for the small to midsize market. Salesforce.com has been working to expand in the reverse direction, offering technologies upon which, for a fee, other companies can build their own programs. This would make it the first software-as-a-service company to attempt a 'platform' strategy. Whether it will succeed in this venture is uncertain, but one liability is that it is primarily existing Salesforce.com customers who are likely to adopt the new platform. Time will tell whether CEO Marc Benioff will have to eat his frequent words of scorn for larger, more-established software companies.