Top 10 U.S. Bank Realizes Full Return on its Salesforce Investment in just Four Months

SAN FRANCISCO - July 9, 2008 - Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced that one of the ten largest commercial bank holding companies in the U.S. has standardized on Salesforce for Financial Services.  The organization realized a complete return on its investment in four months and, according to a commissioned TEI study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Salesforce.com, is projected to achieve a 177% return on investment over three years.

"More than 1,600 financial services companies have looked to Salesforce to strengthen customer relationships, improve operations, and increase profitability," said Renny Monaghan, vice president of financial services at salesforce.com.  "With the power of the Force.com platform and the strong ecosystem of additional applications available on AppExchange, Salesforce provides a completely customizable foundation upon which financial organizations of all sizes are optimizing their businesses."

Before Salesforce, the commercial bank holding company had two legacy systems that were used to capture, store, track, and analyze customer and vendor information.  Because information was stored in disparate locations, the company often struggled with duplicate or inaccurate data; gaining access to information needed for strategic business decisions was a manual and time-consuming process.

The bank holding company deployed Salesforce for Financial Services, and then used Force.com to integrate the legacy systems and customize its new solution.  The attractive and easy-to-use interface provided a single point of information access for the company's 1,300 Salesforce users.

According to the Forrester Consulting study, "Both the organization's CIO and the senior vice president of the Commercial Banking division … described the most significant benefit of Salesforce as allowing salespersons, relationship managers, and product specialists to make more effective use of their time spent on routine sales, contact tracking and reporting activities."

Forrester analyzed the time savings as well as other benefits using its Total Economic Impact methodology, and projects the company will reap annual savings of nearly $2.9 million:

• $1.11 million in time savings from sales activities
• $230 thousand in time savings from reporting activities
• $1.28 million in time savings from administrative activities
• $200 thousand in direct cost avoidance of maintaining legacy applications
• $108 thousand IT labor savings in overhead of supporting legacy systems
  

In its conclusion, the Forrester study states, "the organization will realize substantial benefits in the form of time savings from sales activities, reporting activities, and administrative activities.  These benefits are likely to increase net sales and profit earnings."

To view the Forrester Consulting report in its entirety, visit http://www.salesforce.com/assets/pdf/analysts/Forrester_FinServ_ROI.pdf.

Salesforce for Financial Services
More than 1,600 financial services firms around the globe are standardizing on Salesforce in Wealth Management, Banking, Capital Markets, Mortgage, and Insurance. Customers such as AON, BOK Financial Corporation, E-LOAN, Mizuho Financial Group and Travelex put their trust in the Salesforce on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) solution to support their most critical business relationships.  Salesforce.com customers have access to the largest ecosystem of partner solutions available via the AppExchange, including financial services mash-ups with more than 35 pre-integrated partner applications.  All of these solutions are built on the Force.com platform, the world's most powerful and trusted on-demand platform. For more information, please visit http://www.salesforce.com/fs.

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.