Salesforce.com 2014 Annual Report Download - page 11

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 attrition. Our goal is to have all of our customers renew their subscriptions at 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 markets globally. We also believe that there is a substantial market
opportunity for our service globally. We plan to continue to aggressively market to customers worldwide
in our top global markets by recruiting local sales and support professionals and by building partnerships
that help us add customers in the largest enterprise software markets around the world. Additionally, we
plan to increase data center capacity by opening additional data centers in our top global markets.
Encouraging the development of third-party apps on our cloud computing platforms. The
Salesforce1 Platform enables existing customers, ISVs and third-party developers to create and deliver
cloud apps they have built on our multi-tenant platform. 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 potential
customers.
Technology, Development and Operations
We deliver our service as a highly scalable, multi-tenant app. We use commercially available hardware and a
combination of proprietary and commercially available software to provide our service. We have optimized our
service to run on specific databases and operating systems using the tools and platforms best suited to serve our
customers rather than providing software that must be written to different hardware, operating system and database
platforms, or that depends upon a customer’s unique systems environment. As part of our business strategy, we
periodically acquire companies or technologies, and we incorporate the acquired technologies into our service while
maintaining the quality and security standards that are consistent with our brand and reputation. Performance,
functional depth and the usability of our service drive our technology decisions and product direction.
Our service treats all customers as separate tenants in central applications, databases and other resources. As
a result, we are able to spread the cost of delivering our service across our user base. In addition, because we do
not have to manage thousands of distinct applications with their own business logic and database schemas, we
believe that we can scale our business faster than traditional software vendors. Moreover, we can focus our
resources on building new functionality to deliver to our customer base as a whole rather than on maintaining an
infrastructure to support each of their distinct applications.
Because of our multi-tenant architecture, we are able to provide all of our customers with a solution based
on a single version of our apps.
Our research and development efforts are focused on improving and enhancing the features, functionality
and security of our existing service offerings as well as developing new features, functionality and services. In
addition, from time to time we supplement our internal research and development activities with outside
development resources and acquired technology.
Our customers access our service over the Internet via all of the major Internet browsers and on most major
mobile device operating systems.
We provide our services to our customers from third-party data center hosting facilities located in the United
States and other countries.
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