Salesforce.com 2007 Annual Report Download - page 7

Table of Contents
As of January 31, 2008, our customer base had grown to approximately 41,000 worldwide, and we had approximately 1.1 million paying subscriptions.
We provide our service to organizations through our proprietary, scalable, and secure on-demand, multi-tenant application architecture, which allows us to
serve large numbers of customers cost-effectively by leveraging a single application code base.
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 more quickly achieve higher productivity from, and a lower
total cost of ownership for, their on-demand application solutions.
Key advantages of our solution include:
• 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. We have built and continue to invest in 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. In
addition, all of our customers' data is replicated in near real-time to help protect the data and ensure service continuity in the event of a major
disaster. We built and maintain a multi-tenant application architecture that has been designed to enable our service to scale securely, reliably, and
cost-effectively. 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 customers to segment access privileges across
their user bases.
• Rapid deployment. Our service can be deployed rapidly 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 enterprise software
deployments. We also offer consulting, training services, and online resources to assist customers in rapidly deploying and optimizing their use of
our service.
• Ease of integration and development. Our platform is designed to enable IT professionals to integrate our service with existing applications
quickly and seamlessly. Our Force.com platform provides a set of application programming interfaces, or APIs, that enable customers and
independent developers to both 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 Force.com API 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. Other customers and
partners have, for example, developed their own talent management solution and procurement solution on the Force.com platform.
• Lower total cost of ownership. We enable customers to achieve significant upfront savings relative to the traditional enterprise software model.
Customers benefit from the predictability of their future costs since they pay for the service on a per subscriber basis for the term of the
subscription contract. 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.
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