Salesforce.com 2005 Annual Report Download - page 8

Table of Contents
Additionally, 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. Also, because all upgrades are implemented
by us 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. Customers are not burdened or disrupted by the need to upgrade systems.
• 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. Most of the
features of our service can be accessed through a variety of devices, including laptop computers and PDAs. For example, we offer an offline
version of our service that can be used on any PC or laptop. Additionally, through our introduction of the AppExchange Builder (previously called
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. We have built and continue to invest in a comprehensive security infrastructure, including firewalls,
intrusion detection systems and encryption for transmissions over the Internet, which we monitor and test on a regular basis. In addition, all of our
customers' data is replicated in near real-time to help protect the data and ensure service continuity in the event of a major disaster. 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 customers to segment
access privileges across their user base.
• Ease of integration. Our platform is designed to enable IT professionals to integrate our service with existing applications quickly and seamlessly.
Our AppExchange 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 AppExhange 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. We want to manage more than CRM data.
However, we believe that CRM still presents a significant growth opportunity. 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 enable customers of all sizes to be able to
benefit from the capabilities of enterprise software applications. 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 core service that we will make available to
customers at no
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