Salesforce.com 2016 Annual Report Download - page 14

Key elements of our strategy include:
Strengthening our market-leading solutions. We offer multiple editions of our solutions at different
price points to meet the needs of customers of different sizes and we have designed our solutions to easily
accommodate new features and functionality. We intend to continue to extend all editions of our solutions
with new features, functions and increased security through our own development, acquisitions and
partnerships. We also provide solutions for certain vertical industries.
Expanding strategic relationships with customers. We see significant opportunity to deepen our
relationships with our existing customers. As our customers realize the benefits of our services, we aim to
upgrade the customer to premium editions and sell more subscriptions by targeting additional functional
areas and business units, ultimately becoming our customers’ trusted advisors, inspiring enterprise-wide
transformation and accelerating strategic engagements, including through direct engagement with the
highest levels of our customers’ executive management.
Extending distribution into new and high-growth product categories. As part of our growth strategy,
we are delivering innovative solutions in new categories, including analytics, communities and the
Internet of Things. We drive innovation both organically and through acquisitions, such as our February
2016 acquisition of a company that has a next generation quote-to-cash solution delivered 100 percent
natively on our platform.
Expanding our world-class sales organization. We believe that our offerings provide significant value
for businesses of any size. We will continue to pursue businesses of all sizes in top industries and major
regions, 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.
Reducing customer attrition. Our goal is to have all of our customers renew their subscriptions prior to
the end of their contractual terms. We run customer success and other related programs in an effort to
secure renewals of existing customers.
Building our business in top software markets globally, which includes building partnerships that
help add customers. We believe that there is a substantial market opportunity for our solutions globally.
We plan to continue to aggressively market and sell to customers worldwide via local sales and support
professionals with deep expertise in target industries and through partnerships with other enterprise
software vendors, ISVs and system integrators. Additionally, we plan to increase the capacity that we are
able to offer globally through data centers and third party infrastructure providers.
Encouraging the development of third-party applications on our cloud computing platforms. The
App Cloud enables existing customers, ISVs and third-party developers to create and deliver cloud-based
apps. 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 developers and software vendors will address the business
requirements of both current and future customers.
Technology, Development and Operations
We deliver our Salesforce solutions as highly scalable, cloud computing application and platform services
on a multi-tenant technology architecture.
Multi-tenancy is an architectural approach that allows us to operate a single application instance for multiple
organizations, treating all customers as separate tenants who run in virtual isolation from each other. Customers
can use and customize an application as though they each have a separate instance, yet their data and
customizations remain secure and insulated from the activities of all other tenants. Our multi-tenant services run
on a single stack of hardware and software, which is comprised of commercially available hardware and a
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