Salesforce.com 2004 Annual Report Download - page 8

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Table of Contents
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 to tens of thousands of customers and millions of users. 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. Our architecture also enables us to segment access privileges across our user base.
• Ease of integration. Our platform is designed to enable IT professionals to integrate our service with existing applications quickly and
seamlessly. Our sforce platform provides a set of application programming interfaces, or APIs, that enable customers and independent developers
to 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 sforce APIs 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.
Our Strategy
Our objective is to be the leading provider of on-demand application services for businesses worldwide. Key elements of our strategy include:
• Continue to lead the industry transformation to on-demand application services. We believe that the market transformation to on-demand
application services enabled by utility computing is a growing trend in the technology industry. We believe we have established a leadership
position in this new industry both as a successful vendor of on-demand application services and also as a key thought leader helping to define the
architecture and vision of utility computing. We seek to extend our leadership position in this industry by continuing to innovate and bring new
on-demand application services and value-added technologies to market.
• Strengthen and extend our service offering. We designed our service to easily accommodate new features and functions as well as the release of
entirely new application services. We intend to continue to add CRM features and functionality to our service that we will make available to
customers at no additional charge. We may also offer advanced modules for an additional subscription fee to customers that require enhanced
CRM capabilities. In addition to accommodating new CRM features, we believe that our technology infrastructure is able to support entirely
different, non-CRM application capabilities.
• Pursue new customers and new territories aggressively. We believe that our on-demand CRM application service provides significant value for
businesses of any size, from small businesses to the largest Fortune 500 corporations. 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, building partnerships that help us add customers in these regions and increasing the number of languages we support.
As of January 31, 2005, we offered our service in 11 languages and had paying subscriptions in over 70 countries.
• Deepen relationships with our existing customer base. We believe there is significant opportunity to leverage our relationships with existing
customers. We seek to attract more users from existing customers by targeting additional functional areas and business units within the customer
organization, pursuing enterprise-wide deployments and providing consulting offerings that are complementary to our service. In addition, by
continuously enhancing the functionality of our service, we believe that customers will find more uses for our service and therefore purchase
additional subscriptions, continue to renew their existing subscriptions and upgrade to more fully featured versions such as our Enterprise
Edition.
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