Salesforce.com 2015 Annual Report Download - page 13

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regions, 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.
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 software markets globally. We believe that there is a substantial market
opportunity for our solutions globally. We plan to continue to aggressively market and sell to customers
worldwide via local sales and support professionals with deep expertise in target industries and through
partnerships with ISVs and system integrators. 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. 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 Salesforce solutions as highly scalable, cloud-computing application and platform services
on a multi-tenant technology architecture.
Multi-tenancy is an architectural approach that allows us to operate a single application instance for multiple
organizations, treating all customers as separate tenants who run in virtual isolation from each other. Customers
can use and customize an application as though they each have a separate instance, yet their data and
customizations remain secure and insulated from the activities of all other tenants. Our multi-tenant services run
on a single stack of hardware and software, which is comprised of commercially available hardware and a
combination of proprietary and commercially available software. As a result, we are able to spread the cost of
delivering our services 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. Multi-tenancy also allows for faster bug and security fixes, automatic software updates and the
ability to deploy major releases and frequent, incremental improvements to our services, benefiting the entire
user community.
Our services are optimized to run on specific databases and operating systems using the tools and platforms
best suited to serve our customers rather than on-premise software that must be written to the different hardware,
operating systems and database platforms existing within a customer’s unique systems environment. Our
developers build and support solutions and features on a single code base on our chosen technology platform.
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. From
time to time, we supplement our internal research and development activities with outside development resources
and acquired technology. As part of our business strategy, we periodically acquire companies or technologies,
and we incorporate the acquired technologies into our solutions. Performance, functional depth and the usability
of our solutions influence our technology decisions and product direction.
Our customers access our services from any geography over the Internet via all of the major Internet
browsers and on most major mobile device operating systems.
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