Salesforce.com 2006 Annual Report Download - page 8

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Table of Contents
CRM applications 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. Also, all upgrades are included in our
service, so customers are not burdened or disrupted by the need to upgrade systems. Because all upgrades are implemented by us on our servers,
new features and functionality automatically become part of our service on the release date and therefore benefit all of our customers
immediately.
• 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 or don't use, allowing us to improve our service
based on this information.
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 is a growing trend in the technology industry. We enable customers of all sizes to benefit from the capabilities of enterprise
software applications. We believe we have established a leadership position in this new industry both as a successful vendor of on-demand CRM
application services and also as an enabler for third parties to create their own on-demand applications through our platform. We seek to extend
our leadership position in this industry by continuing to innovate and bring new on-demand CRM application services and value-added
technologies to market, as well as by providing the tools needed by third parties to develop their own on-demand applications on our platform.
• Strengthen and extend our flagship CRM service offering. We designed our service to easily accommodate new features and functions as well as
the release of entirely new application services. We intend to continue to add CRM features and functionality to our core service that we will
make available to customers at no additional charge. We offer advanced modules for an additional subscription fee to customers that require
enhanced CRM capabilities. We recently announced the developer preview of Apex code, allowing customers to write their own code onto our
servers, thus increasing the customization possibilities of their CRM solution. We also evaluate acquisition or investment opportunities in
complementary companies, services and technologies in an effort to strengthen and extend our service offering. 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 January 31, 2007, we offer our service in 14 languages.
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