Salesforce.com 2004 Annual Report Download - page 7

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Table of Contents
delivery model for CRM. The emergence of on-demand application services, combined with the deficiencies associated with traditional CRM software
applications, have created an opportunity for a vendor that can provide on-demand CRM application services that have been specifically designed and built to
be delivered over the Internet.
Our Solution
We are the leading provider of on-demand CRM, helping companies better track, manage and share information regarding their sales, customer service
and support, and marketing operations. We provide our service to businesses through our proprietary, scalable and secure multi-tenant application
architecture, which allows us to serve large numbers of customers cost-effectively by leveraging a single instance of our application for multiple customers.
By subscribing to our service, our customers do not have to make large and risky upfront investments in software, additional hardware, extensive
implementation services, and additional IT staff. As a result, our service enables businesses to achieve higher productivity from, and a lower total cost of
ownership for, their CRM solutions.
Key advantages of our solution include:
• Rapid deployment. Our service can be deployed rapidly and provisioned easily, since our customers do not have to spend time installing or
maintaining the servers, networking equipment, security products or other infrastructure hardware and software necessary to ensure a scalable
and reliable service. We believe the average time that a customer requires to deploy our service is significantly shorter than typical, traditional
CRM software deployments. We also offer complementary consulting and training services to assist customers in rapidly deploying and
optimizing their use of our service.
• Enable high levels of user adoption. We have designed our service to be easy-to-use and intuitive. Since our service contains many tools and
features recognizable to users of popular websites such as those of Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo!, it has a more familiar interface than typical
CRM enterprise applications. As a result, our users do not require substantial training on how to use and benefit from our service. We conduct
extensive surveys of our users to gauge their experiences with our service so that we may determine potential areas of improvement. In addition,
because of the nature of our service, we receive automatic feedback as to which features customers use.
• Lower total cost of ownership. We enable customers to achieve significant savings relative to the traditional enterprise software model. Our
service enables customers to automate sales, customer service and support and marketing processes without having to make large and risky
upfront investments in software, hardware, implementation services and additional IT staff. In addition, because all upgrades are implemented by
us on our servers they automatically become part of our service and therefore benefit all of our customers immediately.
• Extensive features, functionality and configurability. We offer a comprehensive array of CRM features that meet the needs of businesses of any
size. Our service supports the three key functional areas within CRM—sales, customer service and support, and marketing automation. We also
offer additional functionality such as file and document management capabilities, which enable businesses to centralize the storage and retrieval
of customer-related documents. Furthermore, most features of our service can be accessed through a variety of devices, including laptop
computers, PDAs and wireless devices. For example, we offer an offline version of our service that can be used on any PC or laptop and a
wireless version for mobile access via wireless devices. Finally, through our introduction of Customforce, our service is highly configurable in a
short amount of time, enabling our customers to tailor its appearance, policy settings, language, workflow, reports and other characteristics
without the use of significant IT resources or consultants.
• Secure, scalable and reliable delivery platform. The delivery platform for our service has been designed to provide our customers with high
levels of reliability, performance and security. The IT systems within our data center have fail-over redundancy. We have built and continue to
invest in a comprehensive security infrastructure, including firewalls, intrusion detection systems and encryption
4