Salesforce.com 2013 Annual Report Download - page 10

Because we deploy all upgrades on our servers, new features and functionality automatically become part
of our service on the upgrade release date and therefore benefit all of our customers immediately.
Our Strategy
Our objective is to deliver solutions that help companies transform the way they sell, service, market and
innovate. Not only do we provide enterprise cloud apps, we also provide an enterprise cloud computing platform
upon which our customers and partners can build apps.
Key elements of our strategy include:
Strengthening our market-leading core solutions. We designed our solutions to easily accommodate
new features and functions. We intend to continue to extend our core solutions with new features and
functions. We also offer advanced editions for an additional subscription fee to customers that require
enhanced CRM capabilities. Through our own development, acquisitions and partnerships, we have
strengthened and extended our Sales Cloud and Service Cloud application offerings. We expect to
continue to make such investments in the future.
Innovating in high-growth markets. As part of our growth strategy, we are delivering innovative
solutions in new categories, including marketing, collaboration and human capital management. We are
expanding our footprint in these areas to offer new social and mobile cloud innovations to our customers.
Improve renewal rates. Our goal is to have all of our customers renew their subscriptions at the end of
their contractual terms. We run customer success and other related programs in an effort to secure
renewals of existing customers.
Deepening relationships with existing customers. We see a significant opportunity to deepen our
relationships with our 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 additional
functional areas and business units within the customer organization, and ultimately pursue enterprise-
wide deployments.
Pursuing new customers aggressively. We believe that our offerings 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.
Building our business in top markets globally. We also believe that there is a substantial market
opportunity for our service globally. We plan to continue to aggressively market to customers worldwide
by recruiting local sales and support professionals and by building partnerships that help us add
customers in the largest enterprise software markets around the world.
Encouraging the development of third-party apps on our cloud computing platforms. The Salesforce
Platform enables existing customers, ISVs and third-party developers to create and deliver cloud apps they
have built on our multi-tenant platform. It is a platform on which apps can be created, tested, published, and
run. In addition, these apps can be marketed and sold on the AppExchange, our online marketplace for
business apps, or sold directly by software vendors. We believe our ecosystem of cloud developers and
software vendors will address the business requirements of both current and potential customers.
Technology, Development and Operations
We deliver our service as a highly scalable, multi-tenant app. We use commercially available hardware and
a combination of proprietary and commercially available software to provide our service. We have optimized our
service to run on specific databases and operating systems using the tools and platforms best suited to serve our
customers rather than providing software that must be written to different hardware, operating system and
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