Salesforce.com 2013 Annual Report Download - page 9

Download and view the complete annual report

Please find page 9 of the 2013 Salesforce.com annual report below. You can navigate through the pages in the report by either clicking on the pages listed below, or by using the keyword search tool below to find specific information within the annual report.

Page out of 120

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • 14
  • 15
  • 16
  • 17
  • 18
  • 19
  • 20
  • 21
  • 22
  • 23
  • 24
  • 25
  • 26
  • 27
  • 28
  • 29
  • 30
  • 31
  • 32
  • 33
  • 34
  • 35
  • 36
  • 37
  • 38
  • 39
  • 40
  • 41
  • 42
  • 43
  • 44
  • 45
  • 46
  • 47
  • 48
  • 49
  • 50
  • 51
  • 52
  • 53
  • 54
  • 55
  • 56
  • 57
  • 58
  • 59
  • 60
  • 61
  • 62
  • 63
  • 64
  • 65
  • 66
  • 67
  • 68
  • 69
  • 70
  • 71
  • 72
  • 73
  • 74
  • 75
  • 76
  • 77
  • 78
  • 79
  • 80
  • 81
  • 82
  • 83
  • 84
  • 85
  • 86
  • 87
  • 88
  • 89
  • 90
  • 91
  • 92
  • 93
  • 94
  • 95
  • 96
  • 97
  • 98
  • 99
  • 100
  • 101
  • 102
  • 103
  • 104
  • 105
  • 106
  • 107
  • 108
  • 109
  • 110
  • 111
  • 112
  • 113
  • 114
  • 115
  • 116
  • 117
  • 118
  • 119
  • 120

social networking features, such as profiles, status updates and feeds; as well as the ability to extend apps
to mobile devices.
Professional Services
We offer consulting, deployment and training services to our customers to facilitate the adoption of our
social and mobile cloud solutions. Most of our consulting and deployment engagements are billed on a time and
materials basis. We offer a number of traditional classroom and online educational classes that address topics
such as deploying, using, administering and developing on our service. We also offer classes for our partners
who deploy our service on behalf of our customers. We bill the traditional classroom and some of the online
educational classes on a per person, per class basis. There is a selection of online educational classes available at
no charge to customers that subscribe to our service.
Business Benefits of Using Our Solution
The key advantages of our solution include:
Secure, private, scalable and reliable. Our service has been designed to provide our customers with
privacy and high levels of performance, reliability 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. We built and maintain a multi-
tenant application architecture that has been designed to enable our service to scale securely, reliably and
cost-effectively. 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.
Rapid deployment. Our service can be deployed rapidly since our customers do not have to spend time
procuring, installing or maintaining the servers, storage, networking equipment, security products, or
other infrastructure hardware and software necessary.
Ease of integration. IT professionals are able to integrate our solutions with existing applications quickly
and seamlessly. We provide a set of application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that enable customers
and independent software developers to both integrate our solution with existing third-party, custom, and
legacy apps and write their own application services that integrate with our solutions. For example, many
of our customers use our Force.com API to move customer-related data from custom-developed and
packaged applications into our service on a periodic basis to provide greater visibility into their activities.
High levels of user adoption. We have designed our solutions to be intuitive and easy to use. Our
solutions contain many tools and features recognizable to users of popular consumer web services, so
users are more familiar with our user interface than typical enterprise applications. As a result, our users
can often use and gain benefit from our solutions with minimal training.
Rapid development of apps using the Salesforce Platform. Our customers and third-party developers
can develop apps rapidly because of the ease of use and the benefits of a multi-tenant platform. We
provide the capability for business users to easily customize our applications to suit their specific needs,
and also a variety of programming language support so developers can code complex apps spanning
multiple business processes and deliver them to multiple mobile devices.
Increased innovation. By providing infrastructure and development environments on demand, we
provide developers the opportunity to create new and innovative apps without having to invest in
hardware and distribution. A developer with an idea for a new app can log onto our platforms, develop,
test and support their system on the Salesforce Platform and make the app accessible for a subscription
fee to his or her customers.
Lower total cost of ownership. We enable customers to achieve significant up-front savings relative to
the traditional enterprise software model. Customers benefit from the predictability of their future costs
since they generally pay for the service on a per subscriber basis for the term of the subscription contract.
5