Salesforce.com 2012 Annual Report Download - page 13

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•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 on to our
platforms, develop, test and support their system on Force.com or Heroku 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 deploy 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.
Our Go-To-Market Strategy
Our objective is to help companies put customers and employees at the center of their businesses and
transform themselves into social enterprises by the use of our applications and platforms. Not only do we want to
be the leading provider of the social enterprise solution, we also want to offer additional social applications and
have the leading cloud computing platforms upon which our customers and partners build applications.
Key elements of our strategy include:
•Strengthening our existing Sales Cloud and Service Cloud applications and extending into new
functional areas within the social enterprise. We designed our service to easily accommodate new
features and functions. We intend to continue to add features and functions to our core service that we
will make available to customers at no additional charge. We offer advanced editions for an additional
subscription fee to customers that require enhanced CRM capabilities. We have a growing portfolio of
cloud applications that serve different customer segments and markets. We have acquired several
companies in complementary businesses, entered joint ventures and added services and technologies in
an effort to strengthen and extend our Sales Cloud and Service Cloud application offerings. We expect
to continue to make such investments and acquisitions in the future.
•Leading the industry transformation to the social enterprise. We believe that the market transformation
to cloud applications and platforms continues to be a growing trend in the information technology
industry and that the next generation of enterprise computing is what we call the social enterprise. We
believe the world is experiencing a social revolution. The number of social networking users has
surpassed e-mail users, and people access the Internet more from mobile devices than from desktops. A
core component of our business strategy is to enable companies to transform themselves into social
enterprises through the use of our services.
•Pursuing new customers and new territories aggressively. We believe that our social enterprise
solution, cloud applications and cloud platforms provide significant value for businesses of any size.
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 and by building partnerships that help us add customers
in these regions.
•Deepening relationships with our existing customer base. We believe there is significant opportunity to
deepen our relationships with existing customers. As our customers realize the benefits of our service,
we aim to either upgrade the customer to higher priced editions or sell more subscriptions by targeting
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