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Salesforce.com IdeaExchange recognised by independent research firm for its innovative use of social technology

Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, has 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 recognise 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.

“When integrating ProspectFinder® with Salesforce, we used IdeaExchange to inspire our product development,” said Björn Sperling, co-founder, Enecto. “IdeaExchange gave us better insight into the needs of the salesforce.com community and their future requirements, which ultimately resulted in tighter product integration with Salesforce.com."
“The Apttus Contract & Proposal Management suite of applications and its functionality is reaching out to more and more customers as a direct result of the input we receive from IdeaExchange. Our business has grown rapidly this year and we are reliant on portals such as IdeaExchange to feed us valuable input and ideas to help us continue to respond quickly to the needs of our customers and the Salesforce.com user community” said Paul Nelmes, European general manager at Apttus.

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.

About The Forrester Groundswell Awards
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 recognised by the Forrester Groundswell Awards. More information about the Forrester Groundswell Awards is available at www.forrester.com/groundswell.