Salesforce.com Introduces New Salesforce Ideas Application for Innovation Management
Salesforce.com enables the wisdom of crowds to drive business innovation
New application revolutionizes how companies develop communities of employees, customers, and
partners to bring ideas to innovation
Salesforce Ideas powers customer Dell's groundbreaking IdeaStorm community
Dramatic expansion of salesforce.com product portfolio made possible by Force.com
Platform-as-a-Service
"Just like Digg enables people to discover, share and rank content from anywhere on the web, Salesforce Ideas will enable this same level of community driven success for businesses," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "We experienced breakthrough innovation based on the ideas that were living and breathing in our community and surfaced through the wild popularity of IdeaExchange. Now, we're giving customers the ability to tap into all of their own communities to accelerate their own innovation."
Salesforce Ideas is the power behind customer Dell's groundbreaking IdeaStorm (www.ideastorm.com), which launched in February of this year, as well as its employee website, EmployeeStorm. IdeaStorm is Dell's customer-facing website for gathering suggestions regarding its products, services and operations. One of the most recent examples of customers' ideas being put into action was Dell's decision to pre-install the Ubuntu Linux operating system on select consumer desktops and notebooks in the U.S, UK, France and Germany. The idea for Linux on the desktop had quickly become a top idea on IdeaStorm and was followed up by a survey of the Linux community that had over 100,000 participants.
"Dell has always prided itself in building direct relationships with our customers," said Kevin Kettler, chief technology officer of Dell. "IdeaStorm has allowed Dell to more efficiently scale our direct customer interactions through an online tool that automatically captures customer product and service ideas. This approach provides quick and accurate feedback to Dell that ensures we focus on customer relevant issues quicker than previously possible during our product design process."
Salesforce Ideas - Bringing the Power of Innovation Management to Businesses
Salesforce Ideas is the world's first on-demand application that enables the wisdom of crowds to drive business innovation. Based on the idea popularized by the consumer Web on the power of the collective ideas of a group, salesforce.com launched its own live community called IdeaExchange a year ago, sparking a new era of transparent community collaboration. Salesforce.com's IdeaExchange has changed the face of product development by empowering the salesforce.com customer and partner community to shape future product releases through an ongoing, live public debate. To date, more than 5,000 ideas have been posted, with 92,000 promotions, and numerous ideas have been incorporated into salesforce.com and partner applications.
"I posted my workflow idea on IdeaExchange in May 2007, and salesforce.com delivered its Summer '07 release - that's rapid delivery!" said Rochelle Glover, Fronde Systems Group. "It's great to partner with a company who works as we do: Salesforce.com not only listens to its customers, but is also quick to follow that up with action."
Now salesforce.com is bringing this same power of community-based innovation to its customers with Salesforce Ideas, enabling them to build their own on-demand communities with their employees, customers, partners or prospects. Every company has internal and external communities that know the business, generate ideas, and can serve as a company's innovation engine. Salesforce Ideas allows companies to unleash the power of these communities to improve their business and to deepen valued relationships. For the first time, companies can tap into customers, employees and partners across divisions, organizations, and boundaries to drive the best ideas and innovations for their business.
"Salesforce.com is unique in the creative openness and transparency it has with its online community - and the community has responded by spurring innovative ideas for all involved," said Sheryl Kingstone, director and principle analyst, CRM, at The Yankee Group. "This concept of innovation management that salesforce.com is now delivering to its customers is creating a powerful new application category for maximizing the value of a company's community."
Just like all Salesforce applications, Salesforce Ideas is delivered as a service, alleviating the pain and complexity of traditional software so that customers can focus on innovation, not infrastructure. Salesforce Ideas will allow companies to:
- Build Communities - Companies will be able to build online communities to share and vote on ideas spanning from product development, pricing, market research, branding, training courses, internal employee ideas, and beyond.
- Post Ideas - Every community member small or large will be able to post ideas, including rich graphical content, and start an open and direct public dialogue with other members of the community and the business directly.
- Vote on Ideas- As with the consumer Web, Salesforce Ideas enables an environment where the best ideas bubble to the top as community members vote and promote what's most valuable. Companies will have instant focus groups on whatever topic they choose and be able to test their ideas in real-time with targeted audiences.
Built on the Force.com Platform
Salesforce Ideas is built on the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service, a new way to create and deploy business applications that makes companies and developers successful by letting them focus on what their applications do, rather than the software and infrastructure to run them. By replacing the complexity of software platforms with a complete, scalable service, the multi-tenant Force.com platform provides developers the fastest path to turn ideas into success.
Availability
Salesforce Ideas is currently scheduled to be available to customers during the fourth quarter of salesforce.com's current fiscal year. It will initially be available in limited release, and is scheduled to be fully delivered in 2008. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.
Force.com Platform and the AppExchange
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 thousands of 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 Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company's portfolio of Salesforce CRM applications, available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that companies collaborate and communicate with their customers across sales, marketing and service. The company's Force.com Platform (http://www.salesforce.com/platform/) enables customers, partners and developers to quickly build powerful business applications to run every part of the enterprise in the cloud. Based on salesforce.com <http://salesforce.com> 's real-time, multi-tenant architecture, Salesforce CRM and Force.com offer the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing.
As of July 31, 2009, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 63,200 customers including Allianz Commercial, Dell, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and SunTrust Banks.
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.
###
“Safe harbor” statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This press release contains forward-looking statements about expected revenue and GAAP earnings per share for the third fiscal quarter of 2010 and for the full fiscal year 2010, and our expected tax rate, stock based compensation expense, amortization expense, noncontrolling interest expense, and shares outstanding, the achievement of which involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the assumptions prove incorrect, our results could differ materially from the results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make.
The risks and uncertainties referred to above include - but are not limited to - risks associated with possible fluctuations in our financial and operating results, rate of growth and anticipated revenue run rate; errors, interruptions or delays in our service or our Web hosting; breaches of our security measures; the financial impact of any future acquisitions; the nature of our business model; our ability to continue to release, and gain customer acceptance of, new and improved versions of our service; successful customer deployment and utilization of our existing and future services; changes in our sales cycle; competition; various financial aspects of our subscription model; unexpected increases in attrition or decreases in new business; the emerging market in which we operate; our ability to hire, retain and motivate our employees and manage our growth; changes in our customer base; technological developments; regulatory developments; litigation; unanticipated changes in our effective tax rate; and fluctuations in the number of shares we have outstanding, the price of such shares, foreign currency exchange rates, interest rates, and general developments in the economy, financial markets, and credit markets.
Further information on these and other factors that could affect our financial results is included in the reports on Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K and in other filings we make with the Securities and Exchange Commission from time to time, including our Form 10-Q that will be filed for the quarter ended July 31, 2009 and our Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2009. These documents are available on the SEC Filings section of the Investor Information section of our website at www.salesforce.com/investor.
Salesforce.com, inc. assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Copyright (c) 2009 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce and the "no software" logo are registered trademarks of salesforce.com, inc., and salesforce.com owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.