Salesforce.com 2016 Annual Report Download - page 16

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Customers
We sell to businesses of all sizes and in almost every industry worldwide. The number of paying
subscriptions at each of our customers ranges from one to hundreds of thousands. None of our customers
accounted for more than five percent of our revenues in fiscal 2016, 2015 or 2014.
Digital Transactions
Our digital transaction volume, representing transactions processed through our solutions and platform,
excluding Marketing Cloud and one of our platform service offerings, Heroku, was 976 billion for fiscal 2016, an
increase of 67 percent as compared to fiscal 2015. A transaction is a retrieval or update within the Salesforce
database, which can be a page load, an information query or an API call, among other things.
Our transaction metrics are used to illustrate the growing usage of our service by our customers and to
highlight the scalability of our service. We do not believe such transaction metrics are key performance
indicators of our financial condition. Specifically, there is no direct correlation between the transaction activity
and our financial results, such as our revenue or expense growth and changes in our operating cash flow balances
and deferred revenue balances. Additionally, such transaction activity cannot be relied upon as an indicator of
future financial performance.
Sales, Marketing and Customer Support
We organize our sales and marketing programs by geographic regions, including the Americas, Europe and
Asia Pacific, which includes Japan. The majority of our revenue from the Americas is attributable to customers
in the United States. Approximately 26 percent of our revenue comes from customers outside of the Americas.
Strategic Investments
Since 2009, we have been investing in early-to-late stage technology and professional cloud service
companies across the globe to support our key business initiatives, which include, among other things, extending
the capabilities of our platform and CRM offerings, increasing the ecosystem of enterprise cloud companies and
partners, accelerating the adoption of cloud technologies and creating the next-generation of mobile applications
and connected products. Our minority investments in over 150 companies as of January 31, 2016 also help us
stay connected with the pace of innovation that is currently occurring within the technology industry. In some
cases, we have acquired companies in which we have previously invested.
Because of the inherent risk in investing in early-to-late stage technology companies, our individual
investments are subject to a risk of partial or total loss of investment capital.
Direct Sales
We sell our services primarily through our direct sales force, which is comprised of telephone sales
personnel based in regional hubs, and field sales personnel based in territories close to their customers. Both our
telephone sales and field sales personnel are supported by sales representatives, who are primarily responsible for
generating qualified sales leads.
Referral and Indirect Sales
We have a network of partners who refer sales leads to us and who then assist in selling to these prospects.
This network includes global consulting firms, systems integrators and regional partners. In return, we
typically pay these partners a fee based on the first-year subscription revenue generated by the customers whom
they refer. Also included in this network are ISVs, whom we typically pay a percentage of the subscription
revenue generated by their referrals.
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