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

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.