Salesforce.com 2012 Annual Report Download - page 12

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Professional Services
We offer consulting, deployment and training services to our customers to facilitate the adoption of our social
enterprise services. We expanded our ability to provide these services to our customers in our acquisition of Model
Metrics in December 2011. Consulting services consist of services such as business process mapping, project
management services and guidance on best practices in using our service. Deployment services include systems
integration, technical architecture and development, configuration and data conversion as well as developing and
delivering customized education programs for our customers. Most of our consulting and deployment engagements
are billed on a time and materials basis. We offer a number of traditional classroom and online educational classes
that address topics such as deploying, using, administering and developing on our service. We also offer classes for
our partners who deploy our service on behalf of our customers. We bill the traditional classroom and some of the
online educational classes on a per person, per class basis. There is a selection of online educational classes
available at no charge to customers that subscribe to our service.
As the reach of our enterprise cloud computing services has grown, partners and other third-party consulting
and professional service providers play an integral part in providing these services to our customers.
Business Benefits of Using Our Solution
The key advantages of our solution include:
•Secure, private, scalable and reliable delivery platform. The delivery platform for our service has been
designed to provide our customers with privacy and 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 platforms are designed to enable IT professionals to integrate our service with
existing applications quickly and seamlessly. Our platforms provide a set of APIs that enable
customers and independent software 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.
•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
applications. As a result, our users do not require substantial training on how to use and benefit from
our service.
•Rapid development of applications using the Force.com and Heroku platforms. 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 a variety of programming language support so developers can code
complex applications spanning multiple business processes and deliver them to multiple mobile
devices.
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