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Red Herring Names Salesforce.com One of 2004's Top 100 Innovative Companies

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — December 23, 2004 — Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the market and technology leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM), today announced that it has been named one of the Top 100 Innovators by Red Herring, a media company whose mission is to cover innovation and entrepreneurial activity. The award honors 100 companies that have made their mark with critical contributions in technology, marketing, sales, service, financing or human relations. Salesforce.com has helped to create a tipping point for on-demand computing with its award-winning CRM service and approximately 12,500 customers and 195,000 subscribers worldwide.

Red Herring's editorial staff evaluated over 1200 submissions from 900 companies, using a careful analysis of financial data as well as subjective criteria, including quality of management, execution of strategy, and dedication to research and development. Other companies named on the Top 100 Innovators list include Cisco Systems [NASDAQ: CSCO], Hewlett Packard [NYSE: HPQ], IBM [NYSE: IBM], Google [NASDAQ: GOOG], and Sun Microsystems [NASDAQ: SUNW].

"Selection for the Innovation 100 puts a company in an elite group. The editors worked hard to identify the companies who will benefit from the important technology trends in the coming year," said Joel Dreyfuss, Editor-in-Chief of Red Herring.

"Everything we do revolves around driving customer success," said salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff. "Their needs drive our innovation. Our customers needed integration and we responded with sforce, the world's first on-demand integration platform. They wanted customization, they asked to create whole new on-demand application and we introduced the Customforce toolkit so that anyone can customize CRM without any program experience required. Right now we're working on the 18th generation of our service as we continually innovate to meet our customers' requirements."

For more than five years, salesforce.com has been executing on its vision of the "End of Software" and the beginning of the era of customer success. With the release of its Winter '05 product suite, including the new Customforce on-demand customization toolkit, salesforce.com has created a new standard for building and delivering on-demand applications to track and manage customer information. Customforce enables authorized users to customize CRM or service solutions to track and manage unique data and processes without having to learn complicated programming commands.

The Red Herring Top 100 Innovators Award adds to an impressive list of industry accolades earned by salesforce.com. Salesforce.com has won the PC Magazine Editor's Choice award and the Codie Award for Best CRM Solution for the past three years and was a recipient of the Gartner CRM Excellence Awards in 2003. Aberdeen Group honored salesforce.com with three consecutive Top 10 CRM Implementation awards from 2001-2003. InfoWorld previously named salesforce.com a 2004 Technology of the Year, as well as Best Hosted Application. CRM Magazine also named salesforce.com a 2004 market leader across enterprise, mid-market and small business CRM.