Salesforce.com IdeaExchange Recognized by Independent Research Firm for its Innovative Use of Social Technology

SAN FRANCISCO - October 15, 2007 - Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced that the company has won a Forrester Groundswell Award in the category of "Embracing" for demonstrating the business effectiveness and value of its IdeaExchange at http://ideas.salesforce.com/.  Salesforce.com's IdeaExchange has changed the face of product development by giving the salesforce.com community a voice in shaping future product releases through an ongoing, live public debate. The Forrester Groundswell Awards are the first awards to recognize excellence in business uses of social technologies.

 "We are proud to receive a Forrester Groundswell Award for our innovative use of social technologies," said Clarence So, senior vice president of marketing, salesforce.com.  "The community-based innovation we've created with IdeaExchange benefits the entire salesforce.com community, not only by giving our customers the opportunity to shape the future direction of our service, but also by providing our partners and developers with qualified ideas for developing their own products."

Salesforce.com launched IdeaExchange a year ago with the goal of harnessing the power of community to drive business innovation.  It allows members of the salesforce.com community, including customers, partners, and industry watchers, to submit, vote, and comment on new product features.  To date, more than 5,300 ideas have been posted, with 98,000 promotions, and numerous ideas have been incorporated into salesforce.com and partner applications.

For example, a salesforce.com customer posted an idea for a Salesforce feature on IdeaExchange that was promoted by more than 7,000 members of the salesforce.com community.  Salesforce.com partner AppExtremes responded to this tremendous interest and delivered a fully-certified solution within only six weeks of the original posting.

"IdeaExchange truly benefits the entire salesforce.com ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers", said Mark Whiteside, COO, AppExtremes.  "We created Conga Courier in response to both the original posting and the many comments added by other members of the community, making this product a truly collaborative effort.  The strong demand for a solution provided the business justification for a crash development effort, and the resulting solution is a win-win for everyone."

"With IdeaExchange, we have gained unprecedented visibility into customer needs across the salesforce.com community," said Chris Barbin, CEO, Appirio.  "This visibility inspired our Google Gadget strategy last April, and we have since launched a Gadget Gallery with over 100 additional Gadgets, the Appirio Gadget Builder, Salesforce Edition, and have over 900 organizations leveraging this technology.  The IdeaExchange has been an essential accelerator to our business and success as a company." 

Based on the success of IdeaExchange, salesforce.com announced at its recent Dreamforce 2007 conference that it 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. For more information, please see http://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases/2007/09/070917-02.jsp.

The Forrester Groundswell Awards were presented at an awards ceremony held at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago on Thursday, October 11th.  The awards are an outgrowth of the book, Groundswell, to be published in 2008 by Harvard Business School Press. Written Forrester's Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li, Groundswell will focus on effective business strategies in a world transformed by social technologies, and will feature the types of case studies recognized by the Forrester Groundswell Awards. More information about the Forrester Groundswell Awards is available at www.forrester.com/groundswell.