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Altium Improves Lead Processing and Support Case Management with Salesforce.com

San Francisco — July 10, 2006 — Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the technology and market leader in on-demand business services, today announced that Altium Limited (ASX: ALU), an Australia-based global developer of electronics design software, has implemented the salesforce.com AppExchange platform to replace existing business software, streamline customer management processes and provide an underlying IT infrastructure for company growth. Using salesforce.com, Altium developed and deployed new quoting, purchase order, project management, inventory management, campaign management and support management systems across its 270 employees globally in less than four weeks.

Altium is one of the 22,700 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that is a part of the salesforce.com customer base as of April 30, 2006. Revenue and subscribers will be recognised as the service is delivered.

A vital element in this rapid deployment was salesforce.com's AppExchange, the first online service for sharing business applications. Altium used several of the applications available on the AppExchange Directory (www.appexchange.com) as a base from which to develop six highly customised solutions. The wealth of components available on the AppExchange allows customers to take their use of on-demand computing far beyond CRM. Notably, Altium used a procurement application as a basis for a streamlined purchase ordering system with multiple approval levels. Altium also extended a project management system from the AppExchange to meet the company's complex software development project requirements.

"I'm still amazed we achieved what we did in the timeframe we had," said Alan Perkins, Chief Information Officer at Altium. "The fact that we were able to create such a comprehensive business platform in such a short amount of time is testament to salesforce.com and the AppExchange concept."

"While Altium had the complex IT requirements of a large company, we only had a small business budget. This put solutions from vendors such as Oracle, SAP and Siebel out of the equation. We evaluated applications from several vendors, but nothing met the high standards of internally developed solutions until we discovered salesforce.com," said Alan Perkins, CIO, Altium. "Salesforce.com is a simple yet sophisticated platform that can be extensively customised to fit a company's individual needs without the pain, cost and timelines associated with the traditional on-premise solutions we evaluated."

In total, Altium transferred around 120,000 active accounts, 190,000 contacts, 300,000 assets and 200,000 contracts to the new system. All this was completed within four weeks by Perkins and his team of five full-time developers, with another two employees assisting with data transfer.

Altium also used salesforce.com's extensive range of online materials to provide training on the new system to staff around the world.

"Morale across the company has been boosted by the new system, as staff enjoy faster system performance and an intuitive, web-based interface. Our turnaround on lead processing is lower and customers are happier with the new support case tracking. We are processing more cases in less time and can say that no cases are being dropped. For the first time we have a strong picture of the quality of our customer support."

"Hosting the entire solution with salesforce.com cures many of my headaches as CIO," says Perkins. "It reduces the stress of keeping our systems up and making sure there's no downtime. It gives us a strong platform for growth and lets us focus our attention on getting products to market."