Salesforce.com 2005 Annual Report Download - page 16

Table of Contents
We believe that as enterprise software application vendors shift more of their focus to the hosted applications market, particularly for CRM and the
small to medium sized business market, these vendors will be a greater competitive threat.
We believe the principal competitive factors in our market include the following:
• speed and ease of implementation;
• ease of use and rates of user adoption;
• low total cost of ownership and demonstrable cost-effective benefits for customers;
• product functionality;
• performance, security, scalability, flexibility and reliability of the service;
• ease of integration with existing applications;
• quality of customer support;
• availability and quality of implementation, consulting and training services;
• vendor reputation;
• sales and marketing capabilities of the vendor; and
• financial stability of the vendor.
While some of our competitors offer CRM applications with greater complexity than our service, we believe none of them addresses all of the
limitations of traditional CRM applications adequately. In many cases, we believe CRM applications with greater complexity have a higher total cost of
ownership, take significantly more time to implement and are harder to use than our service. However, many of our competitors and potential competitors
have greater name recognition, longer operating histories, larger marketing budgets and significantly greater resources. They may be able to devote greater
resources to the development, promotion and sale of their products than we can to ours, which could allow them to respond more quickly than we can to new
technologies and changes in customer needs. Additionally, our competitors may offer or develop products or services that are superior to ours or that achieve
greater market acceptance.
Our professional services organization competes with a broad range of large systems integrators, including Accenture Ltd., BearingPoint, Inc. and IBM
as well as smaller independent consulting firms specializing in CRM implementations. We have relationships with many of these consulting companies and
frequently work cooperatively on projects with them, even as we compete for business in other customer engagements.
Intellectual Property
We rely on a combination of trademark, copyright, trade secret and patent laws in the United States and other jurisdictions as well as confidentiality
procedures and contractual provisions to protect our proprietary technology and our brand. We have U.S. and international patent applications pending and no
issued patents. We also enter into confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements with our employees, consultants and other third parties and control access
to software, documentation and other proprietary information.
The following are some of our registered trademarks in the U.S. and elsewhere:
salesforce.com
"No Software" logo
The End of Software
Success. Not Software
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