Comment by Eridrus

Companies need databases lol.

I don't know how you think a b2b company could run sales without a CRM like Salesforce.

To give your question a generous interpretation, Salesforce is more valuable than Apptio or your home grown CRM because it already has all the features any sales org needs, and all the fragmented sales and marketing tooling are already integrated with it.

And Sales is a very expensive and also high ROI activity. You don't want your sales team hung up trying to figure out how to get the random CRM to do something. You're not looking to cut costs in this area, you're looking to enhance the overall productivity of the org. Sales tooling overall is very expensive for this reason, any marginal edge is worth a lot.

It's also worth noting that a big value of things like Salesforce is that it lets management check up on what people are doing, because as much as HN doesn't like to admit it, people are often not very careful or diligent, and you need to perform supervision on the vast majority of people to improve their performance.

Jira is similar, in that eng is very expensive, and its probably better than what these companies were doing beforehand, even if it is suboptimal.