Salesforce.com 2011 Annual Report Download - page 12

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The majority of our subscription and support revenue comes from subscriptions to our core CRM
application and Force.com application development platform. In order for customers to install and run custom
applications, whether built by themselves or by our partners, they must be a subscriber to our service.
By subscribing to our service, our customers do not have to make large and potentially risky upfront
investments in software, hardware, implementation services and IT staff as they would with traditional software
solutions. We believe that our service enables businesses to rapidly achieve the benefits of higher productivity,
and lower their total cost of ownership for their business application.
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 performance, reliability, 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. 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.
•Rapid deployment. Our service can be deployed rapidly since our customers do not have to spend time
procuring, installing or maintaining the servers, storage, networking equipment, security products, or
other infrastructure hardware and software necessary to ensure a scalable and reliable service.
•Ease of integration. 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 solutions and procurement solutions on the Force.com platform.
•Rapid development of applications using the Force.com platform. Our customers and third party
developers can develop applications rapidly because of the ease of use and the benefits of a multi-
tenant platform. We provide the capability for business users to easily customize our applications to
suit their specific needs, and also powerful programming language support so developers can code
complex applications spanning multiple business processes.
•Increasing innovation. By providing infrastructure and development environments on demand, we provide
developers the opportunity to create new and innovative applications without having to invest in hardware
and distribution. A developer with an idea for a new application can log onto our platform, develop, test
and support their system on Force.com and make the application accessible for a fee to our customers.
•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. All
upgrades are included in our service, so customers are not burdened or disrupted by the periodic need
to perform system upgrades. Because we implement all upgrades 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 intuitive and easy to use. Since our
service contains many tools and features recognizable to users of popular websites such as those of
Amazon, Facebook, Google and Twitter, it has a more familiar user interface than typical enterprise
CRM applications. As a result, our users do not require substantial training on how to use and benefit
from our service.
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