salesforce.com, Inc. - CRM Software -  Category Directory

(415) 901-7000

The Landmark @ One Market, Suite 300
San Francisco, California 94105

www.salesforce.com 

Sales

$96 million

Business Description

Salesforce.com is the leading provider, based on market share, of application services that allow organizations to easily share customer information on demand, according to a March 2004 report by Forrester Research, Inc. We provide a comprehensive CRM software service to businesses of all sizes and industries worldwide. By designing and developing our service to be a low-cost, easy-to-use application that is delivered through a standard Web browser, we substantially reduce many of the traditional expenses and complexities of enterprise software implementations. As a result, our customers incur less risk and lower upfront costs. Our service helps customers more effectively manage critical operations including: sales force automation; customer service and support; marketing automation; document management; analytics; and custom application development. We market our service on a subscription basis, primarily through our direct sales efforts and also indirectly through partners. From the introduction of our service in February 2000 through April 30, 2004, our customer base had grown to approximately 9,800, and these customers had purchased an aggregate of over 147,000 paying subscriptions for use by their employees and other customer-authorized users in approximately 65 countries.

The pervasiveness of the Internet, along with the dramatic declines in the pricing of computing technology and network bandwidth, have enabled a new generation of enterprise computing in which substantial components of information technology, or IT, infrastructure can be provisioned and delivered dynamically on an outsourced basis. This new computing paradigm is sometimes referred to as utility computing, while the outsourced software applications are referred to as on-demand application services. On-demand application services enable businesses to subscribe to a wide variety of application services that are developed specifically for, and delivered over, the Internet on an as-needed basis with little or no implementation services required and without the need to install and manage third-party software in-house. The market for on-demand application services is projected to grow from $425 million in 2002 to $2.6 billion in 2007, which represents a compounded annual growth rate of 44 percent, according to a May 2003 report by International Data Corporation, or IDC, an independent market research firm.

We believe that the CRM software applications market, which was approximately $7.1 billion in 2002 according to a July 2003 report by IDC, is one of the first to benefit from on-demand application services. CRM software applications are intended to enable businesses to automate sales, customer service and support, and marketing. Despite the significant potential benefits that can be attained from CRM software and solutions, many enterprises have failed to successfully deploy the CRM software / solutions applications that they have purchased for a variety of reasons including the difficulty and relatively high cost of implementing and maintaining enterprise applications, as well as the historically low rates of user adoption and lack of ubiquitous access that have contributed to lower returns on investment in CRM software / solutions deployments.

From inception, our service has been specifically designed to provide customers with robust CRM software / solutions on an outsourced basis through our proprietary, scalable and secure multi-tenant application architecture. Key benefits of our solution include:

Rapid deployment. Our service can be deployed rapidly and provisioned easily, since our customers do not have to spend time installing or maintaining the servers, networking equipment, security products or other infrastructure hardware and software necessary to ensure a scalable and reliable service.

Enable high levels of user adoption. We have designed our service to be easy-to-use and intuitive. Since our service contains many tools and features recognizable to users of popular websites such as those of Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo!, it has a more familiar interface than typical CRM applications. As a result, our users do not require substantial training on how to use and benefit from our service.

Lower total cost of ownership. We enable customers to achieve significant savings relative to the traditional enterprise software model. Our service enables customers to automate sales, customer service and support, and marketing processes without having to make large and risky upfront investments in software, hardware, implementation services and additional IT staff.

Extensive features, functionality and configurability. We offer a comprehensive array of CRM capabilities across sales, customer service and support, and marketing that meet the needs of businesses of any size. We also enable customers to tailor important characteristics of our service to meet their unique requirements without the use of significant IT resources.

Secure, scalable and reliable delivery platform. We built and maintain a multi-tenant application architecture that has been designed to enable our service to scale securely, reliably and cost-effectively to tens of thousands of customers and millions of users.

Ease of integration. We have developed a set of application programming interfaces, or APIs, which we provide on a platform we call sforce, that enable customers and independent developers to integrate our service with existing third-party, custom and legacy applications, and write their own application services that integrate with our service.

Our objective is to be the leading provider of application services for businesses worldwide. To achieve this objective we intend to:

· continue to lead the industry transformation to on-demand application services;

· strengthen and extend our service offering;

· pursue new customers and new territories aggressively;

· deepen relationships with our existing customer base; and

· encourage the development of third-party applications on our sforce platform.

CRM Software & Services Solution

We are the leading provider of on-demand CRM delivered over the Internet as an application service, helping companies better track and manage their sales, customer service and support, and marketing operations. We provide our service to businesses through our proprietary, scalable and secure multi-tenant application architecture, which allows us to serve large numbers of customers cost-effectively by leveraging a single instance of our application for multiple customers. By subscribing to our service, our customers do not have to make large and risky upfront investments in software, additional hardware, extensive implementation services, and additional IT staff. As a result, our service enables businesses to achieve higher productivity from, and a lower total cost of ownership for, their CRM solutions.

Key advantages of our solution include:

Rapid deployment. Our service can be deployed rapidly and provisioned easily, since our customers do not have to spend time installing or maintaining the servers, networking equipment, security products or other infrastructure hardware and software necessary to ensure a scalable and reliable service. We believe the average time that a customer requires to deploy our service is significantly shorter than typical traditional CRM software deployments. We also offer complementary consulting and training services to assist customers in rapidly deploying and optimizing their use of our service.

Enable high levels of user adoption. We have designed our service to be easy-to-use and intuitive. Since our service contains many tools and features recognizable to users of popular websites such as  those of Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo!, it has a more familiar interface than typical CRM enterprise applications. As a result, our users do not require substantial training on how to use and benefit from our service. We conduct extensive surveys of our users to gauge their experiences with our service so that we may determine potential areas of improvement. In addition, because of the nature of our service, we receive automatic feedback as to which features customers use.

Lower total cost of ownership. We enable customers to achieve significant savings relative to the traditional enterprise software model. Our service enables customers to automate sales, customer service and support and marketing processes without having to make large and risky upfront investments in software, hardware, implementation services and additional IT staff. In addition, because all upgrades are implemented by us on our servers they automatically become part of our service and therefore benefit all of our customers immediately.

Extensive features, functionality and configurability. We offer a comprehensive array of CRM features that meet the needs of businesses of any size. Our service supports the three key functional areas within CRM—sales, customer service and support and marketing automation. We also offer additional functionality such as file and document management capabilities, which enable businesses to centralize the storage and retrieval of customer-related documents. Furthermore, most features of our service can be accessed through a variety of devices, including laptop computers, PDAs and wireless devices. For example, we offer an offline version of our service that can be used on any PC or laptop and a wireless version for mobile access via wireless devices. Finally, our service is highly configurable, enabling our customers to tailor its appearance, policy settings, language, workflow and other characteristics without the use of significant IT resources or consultants.

Secure, scalable and reliable delivery platform. The delivery platform for our service has been designed to provide our customers with high levels of reliability, performance and security. The IT systems within our data center have fail-over redundancy. We have built a comprehensive security infrastructure, including firewalls, intrusion detection systems and encryption for transmissions over the Internet, which we monitor and test on a regular basis. We built and maintain a multi-tenant application architecture that has been designed to enable our service to scale securely, reliably and cost-effectively to tens of thousands of customers and millions of users. Our multi-tenant application architecture maintains the integrity and separation of customer data while still permitting all customers to use the same application functionality simultaneously. Our architecture also enables us to segment access privileges across our user base.

Ease of integration. Our platform is designed to enable IT professionals to integrate our service with existing applications quickly and seamlessly. Our sforce platform provides a set of APIs that enable customers and independent developers to integrate our service with existing third-party, custom and legacy applications and write their own application services that integrate with our service. For example, many of our customers use the sforce APIs to move customer-related data from custom-developed and legacy applications into our service on a periodic basis to provide greater visibility into their activities. In addition, through our relationship with TIBCO Software, our salesforce.com Integration Server enables our customers to quickly integrate their existing software applications with our service using custom-built connectors.

Our Strategy

Our objective is to be the leading provider of on-demand application services for businesses worldwide. Key elements of our strategy include:

Continue to lead the industry transformation to on-demand application services. We believe that the market transformation to on-demand application services enabled by utility computing is an emerging trend in the technology industry. We believe we have established a leadership position in this new industry both as a successful vendor of on-demand application services and also as a key thought leader helping to define the architecture and vision of utility computing. We seek to extend our leadership position in this industry by continuing to innovate and bring new on-demand application services and value-added technologies to market.

Strengthen and extend our service offering. We designed our service to easily accommodate new features and functions as well as the release of entirely new application services. For example, while our service in 2000 offered only sales force automation functionality, by 2002 we had added marketing automation and customer support functionality. More recently, we added file and document management capabilities and enhanced analytics tools to enable businesses to track and analyze data to better understand the health of their customer relationships. We intend to continue to add CRM features and functionality to our service that we will make available to customers at no additional charge. For example, in our most recent release, we added contract management, dashboards and workflow automation. We may also offer advanced modules for an additional subscription fee to customers that require enhanced CRM capabilities. In addition to accommodating new CRM features, we believe that our technology infrastructure is able to support entirely different, non-CRM application capabilities.

Pursue new customers and new territories aggressively. We believe that our on-demand CRM application service provides significant value for businesses of any size, from small businesses to the largest Fortune 500 corporations. As a result, we will continue to aggressively target businesses of all sizes, primarily through our direct sales force. We have steadily increased and plan to continue to increase the number of direct sales professionals we employ, and we intend to develop additional distribution channels for our service. We have created several editions of our service to address the distinct requirements of businesses of different sizes. We also believe that there is a substantial market opportunity for our service outside of North America. We plan to continue to aggressively market to customers outside of North America by recruiting local sales and support professionals, building partnerships that help us add customers in these regions and increasing the number of languages we support. As of April 30, 2004, we offered our service in 11 languages and had paying subscriptions in approximately 65 countries.

Deepen relationships with our existing customer base. We believe there is significant opportunity to leverage our relationships with existing customers. We seek to attract more users from existing customers by targeting additional functional areas and business units within the customer organization, pursuing enterprise-wide deployments and providing consulting offerings that are complementary to our service. In addition, by continuously enhancing the functionality of our service, we believe that customers will find more uses for our service and therefore purchase additional subscriptions, continue to renew their existing subscriptions and upgrade to more fully featured versions such as our Enterprise Edition.

Encourage the development of third-party applications on our sforce platform. Our sforce platform enables existing customers and third-party developers to develop and deliver applications complementary to our core service offering. Sforce enhances the attractiveness of our service, particularly to enterprise customers, by enabling them to accelerate the integration of our service with their existing applications. We plan to continue to augment the sforce tools and services we provide to developers and foster their development of new applications.
 

The salesforce.com Service

We provide a comprehensive array of on-demand CRM software  services for businesses of all sizes and industries worldwide. These services enable companies and individuals to systematically record, store and act upon customer data, helping businesses manage their customer accounts, track sales leads, evaluate marketing campaigns and provide post-sales service. We also enable companies to generate reports and summaries of this data and share them with authorized employees across functional areas. CRM includes sales, customer service and support and marketing automation:

Sales force automation enables salespeople to be more productive by automating manual and repetitive tasks and providing them with better, more organized data about their current and prospective customers. It permits companies to establish a system and a process for recording, tracking and sharing information about sales opportunities, sales leads, sales forecasts, the sales process and closed business.

Customer service and support automation allows companies to interact better, more efficiently and professionally with their existing customers in a variety of areas, such as requests for repairs, advice about products and services, complaints about faulty goods, warranty management and the need for additional goods and services.

Marketing automation enables companies to manage marketing campaigns from initiation through the development of leads that are passed to the sales team and enables them to determine the effectiveness of each campaign by quantifying the revenue generated as a result of specific marketing activities.

We offer three principal editions of our service: Enterprise Edition, Professional Edition and Team Edition.

Enterprise Edition. Enterprise Edition is our most fully featured service offering and is targeted primarily at large companies that have several different divisions or departments. It includes many administrative features that are particularly useful to large companies, such as workflow, the ability to customize views for different departments and a set of controls that allows a system administrator to designate which users have access and modification rights to the different types of information within the system. It also includes a Web services-standard XML API that enables companies to readily integrate our CRM service with ERP applications, Web services and other data sources and a weekly export service that permits a customer to download all data input by users into the service in a machine-readable format. It also includes our offline and wireless features that permit users to access information through laptops, PDAs and wireless devices.

Professional Edition. Professional Edition is targeted primarily at medium-sized and large businesses that need a robust CRM solution but do not need some of the more advanced administrative features and integration capabilities of Enterprise Edition. The offline and selected other features of Enterprise Edition that are not included in Professional Edition are available to Professional Edition customers for an additional charge.

Team Edition. Team Edition is targeted primarily at small businesses that seek a robust sales force automation solution without the more sophisticated features that are required by larger companies, such as integration, analytics and workflow. Team Edition includes sales force automation and case management but does not include customer service and support or marketing automation features.

Enterprise Edition, Professional Edition and Team Edition offer customizable fields and pick lists, customizable reports and customizable list views. Enterprise Edition and Professional Edition also offer multi-language support and multi-currency support. The amount of storage offered for each edition also varies. We derived more than 90 percent of our revenues in fiscal 2002 and 2003 and 89 percent of our revenues in fiscal 2004 and the three months ended April 30, 2004 from subscriptions to and support for our service.

 

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