Emergence Capital Partners and Salesforce.com Announce the Force.com $1 Million Challenge

Financing innovation, not infrastructure in the age of Platform-as-a-Service

Winning startup building on the Force.com Platform receives opportunity to collect $1M in funding from leading SaaS venture capital firm

SAN FRANCISCO - salesforce.com Tour de Force Event -- January 17, 2008 -  Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service, and Emergence Capital Partners, a leading venture capital firm that specializes in investing in technology-enabled services companies and Software-as-a-Service, today announced the Force.com $1 Million Challenge - a venture competition for entrepreneurs and companies building on the Force.com Platform. Force.com delivers Platform-as-a-Service, enabling companies to develop and deliver any application on demand. 

The Force.com $1 Million Challenge will inspire a new generation of SaaS ISVs to develop and deliver on-demand applications on the Force.com Platform. The winner will have the opportunity to negotiate with Emergence Capital for a potential $1 million investment. The winner will also receive space in salesforce.com's AppExchange Incubator facility for one year.  Emergence Capital will announce the winner in November at Dreamforce 2008, salesforce.com's user and developer conference.

"The age of Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service needs new investment models to match the new technology and business models," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "Our partners at Emergence Capital understand what it takes to create the next salesforce.com. That's why they are investing in companies based on the Force.com Platform."

"We believe that SaaS is transforming the software industry and changing how people work," said Jason Green, General Partner, Emergence Capital. "The Emergence team has a uniquely successful track record of helping SaaS companies grow into market leaders. Many next generation SaaS entrepreneurs will build their businesses faster by exploiting the technical capabilities of the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service and the go-to-market advantages of the AppExchange and we hope to help enable that to happen."

Emergence Capital will judge the entries and select the winning entrepreneur or startup. Entrants in the Force.com $1 Million Challenge will be judged along seven main criteria:
  • Likelihood of long-term company success
  • Demonstration of customer success and user adoption
  • Market opportunity
  • Track record and passion of the entrepreneurial team
  • Adoption and innovative utilization of the Force.com Platform technology
  • Financial plan
  • Competition
For more information, contest rules, and to enter, please visit http://developer.force.com/challenge/.

Force.com Platform and the AppExchange
Force.com (http://www.force.com/) reinvents the traditional development, deployment and distribution of any business application with platform-as-a-service. Developers, customers and partners can use Force.com to easily create a new generation of on-demand applications and deploy them worldwide as a service.  Force.com allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace, enabling all the innovation that Force.com unleashes to be easily distributed to the entire on-demand community.
 
The AppExchange economy continues to expand, with thousands of customers installing applications via the AppExchange. Customers of all sizes can quickly and easily extend Salesforce with additional on-demand business applications available on the AppExchange, found at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.

About Emergence Capital Partners
Emergence Capital Partners, based in San Mateo, Calif., is the leading venture capital firm focused on early and growth-stage Technology-Enabled Services companies. Its mission is to help build market leaders in partnership with great entrepreneurs. Emergence partners have funded and helped build more than 35 TES companies, more than any other early-stage venture firm. Emergence Capital has assets of over $325 million under management. Prior investments include companies such as Salesforce.com (CRM), SuccessFactors (SFSF), HireRight (HIRE), Genius, Intacct, inQ and InsideView, For more information, visit www.emcap.com.

About Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company's Salesforce suite of on-demand applications enables customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. AppExchange, salesforce.com's on-demand platform, allows customers and partners to build powerful new applications quickly and easily, customize and integrate the Salesforce suite to meet their unique business needs, and distribute and sell on-demand apps at http://www.appexchange.com. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com's world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.

Salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 27,100 customers and approximately 556,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), America Online (AOL), Avis/Budget Rent A Car (Cendant Rental Car Group), Dow Jones Newswires, Polycom and SunTrust. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.