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Cayenta, Inc. Picks Salesforce.com over Siebel Systems for Customer Support Success

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - April 22, 2003 - Salesforce.com®, the technology and market leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM), today announced that Cayenta, Inc., a leading provider of customer information systems, financial software, and operations management systems, has standardized on salesforce.com Enterprise Edition. After initially considering Siebel Systems [NASDAQ: SEBL], Cayenta chose to implement salesforce.com as the fastest, safest and most cost-effective way to ensure success throughout all four operating units. Currently sales and support personnel use Enterprise Edition to access a comprehensive profile of customer information, while internal IT staff track employee support issues and IT tickets through a different instance of the same application. Customers also use self-service functionality to track and manage their own cases, increasing the company's efficiency and also providing Cayenta with sharper insight as to what is most important to their customers.

"By automating key processes and providing visibility into inquiries, issues, and cases, salesforce.com really helps us get on the same page as our customers," said Paul Needham, vice president of support operations at Cayenta. "We no longer have to rely on disconnected information or someone's memory of an interaction - either of which can unfortunately be a point of failure - so we are now able to improve our quality of service and reallocate internal resources to address persistent problems more swiftly, more cost-effectively and much more successfully."

Prior to implementing salesforce.com, Cayenta was using a variety of systems to track sales and customer support activity. The support organization considered standardizing on Siebel Systems' software, but the difficulty and expense of implementing a single-vendor client-server product across four departments that are responsible for customer touch points led Cayenta to select salesforce.com's on-demand service instead. Cayenta elected for salesforce.com service partner Acetta to deploy Enterprise Edition, and to evaluate and reengineer support and sales processes to ensure optimal results. Benefits to date include clearer corporate visibility into the sales pipeline and support queue, active engagement of external customers via the self-service portal, and improved management of the business through rapid, proactive identification of potential customer issues.

"The market is shifting away from CRM software to CRM on-demand," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "Salesforce.com's profitable application utility model erases lengthy implementations, high maintenance costs, and unnecessary complexity to deliver immediate CRM success on the customers' terms, not those of a software company."

A recent Gartner survey found that 42 percent of all enterprise CRM software licenses purchased are never deployed (Gartner Group, March 2003). In contrast, salesforce.com's utility model delivers robust CRM technology on a pay-as-you-go basis for immediate success. Salesforce.com currently has over 6,000 customers and 80,000 users worldwide, making it the world's most successful application utility.