PRESS AND NEWS

 

Salesforce.com Sets Sail for Success With Summer '09

Sydney, Australia – May 12, 2009 – Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced Summer '09, the company’s 29th generation release. Summer ’09 will deliver new features across the Service Cloud, the Sales Cloud and the Force.com platform – delivering innovation to every department and every user. The real time cloud infrastructure enables salesforce.com to deliver approximately three major releases a year, ensuring that all of salesforce.com’s 55,400 customers can leverage the latest cloud computing innovations to grow their business.

\"The power of salesforce.com's real time cloud infrastructure is that it lets customers run their business, not their software,\" said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO at salesforce.com. \"Salesforce.com is the only company that can instantly and reliably provide the latest innovations to all of our customers, without the hassles of upgrades and maintenance. Summer ’09 proves the value of the cloud computing model for customers once again by bringing major product breakthroughs to everyone at no additional cost.”

\"Like clockwork, Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform just get better,\" said Ed Romson of Plantronics. “It’s what separates the value of the cloud model from traditional software, and we love it. How often do you buy something that consistently gets better over time?”

\"With Summer '09, salesforce.com is delivering the Salesforce to Salesforce revolution to the Service Cloud. Now, in just a few clicks, companies can share case information in real-time with their partners, maintaining the validity of their own business processes while ensuring that customers receive the best service, regardless of which company they contact first,\" said Sheryl Kingstone, Yankee Group.

Service Cloud: Join the Conversation with the Leader in Customer Service
The Service Cloud transforms customer service through the power of cloud computing, and brings together industry leading cloud computing platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter with traditional contact center channels like phone, email and chat to capture every conversation and leverage every community expert in the cloud. Some of the new features that will be introduced for the Service Cloud with Summer '09 include:

• Real Time Partner Collaboration: For the first time, customer service agents will be able to collaborate in real-time with third party service partners on a single version of every case - ensuring that everyone has access to the same information. Companies gain a competitive edge by delivering a consistent and measurable service experience to every customer, regardless of the channel the customer chooses.
• Case Workflow Optimization: With Summer '09, customer service agents will be able to automatically trigger an email alert to the appropriate person based on a change in the comments section of a case. Now, companies can respond even faster to customer requests and issues.
• Community Management Tools: Online communities have grown in popularity, so much so that many companies have multiple communities to serve a diverse set of audiences. Summer '09 will provide companies with the robust set of tools they need to scale as the size and number of online communities grow.

Sales Cloud: The World's Most Complete Sales Application
The Sales Cloud is the world's most complete and popular sales application on the market today. In the Sales Cloud, sales professionals are driving more sales, generating more leads, and helping sales people increase productivity. In fact, a recent customer satisfaction survey of more than 3,000 global salesforce.com customers found that business executives surveyed are growing their businesses using Salesforce CRM, with a reported 52 percent increase in lead volume, 27 percent increase in win rates, and 30 percent increase in customer retention. Summer ‘09 will deliver new features to the Sales Cloud focused on helping companies close more deals and grow their business including:

• Visual Charting: Sales reps and managers will be able to leverage more powerful analytic tools with the release of Summer '09, including new displays, colors and two entirely new chart types. Being able to access this information in real-time and in a host of customizable displays, will enable companies to make quicker and more well informed business decisions.
• Triggered Emails: With Summer '09, a sales rep will be able to set up an automated email alert based on prospect behavior, and create custom campaign fields to manage marketing offers and campaigns more effectively. Companies will be able to generate more leads by creating these sophisticated marketing campaigns.
• Deal Team Management: Colleagues that sales reps bring in to assist in closing a deal will now have access to the deal information in the opportunities tab with Summer '09. When the right people have access to the opportunity's information, companies can close more deals and grow their business.

Your Cloud: Build and Run your Custom Apps on the Force.com Platform
The Force.com platform lets customers and partners build and run enterprise applications in salesforce.com's real time cloud, without the need for complex infrastructure. The introduction of Summer '09 makes it even easier to build and run custom applications on Force.com. New features will include:

• Workflow Visualizer: As company approvals and procedures get more complex, Summer '09 simplifies the process by making it completely visual, interactive and easy-to-use. Companies can now map their business processes through a visual representation, which will make managing complex workflows simple.
• Visualforce for Dashboards: Visualforce for Dashboards will allow developers to leverage Visualforce to create rich, customized dashboards and help pages for the first time.
• Advanced Application Tracking: With Summer '09, salesforce.com partners can now manage and upgrade custom applications, while maintaining backwards compatibility, just like salesforce.com.

The Only Enterprise Solution Built on Real-Time Cloud Infrastructure
Salesforce CRM and the Force.com platform are the only enterprise solutions built and run on a real-time cloud infrastructure, which represents the most economical way to run a business. With a real-time infrastructure, upgrades can be delivered instantly and all data processed immediately without any batch processing. Customers also get real-time visibility into the status of the system's high performing reliability, speed, and security.

Pricing and Availability
Salesforce.com's Summer ‘09 release is currently scheduled to be available to all 55,400 salesforce.com customers in June 2009. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Please visit www.salesforce.com/community/summer09/index.jsp for more information.

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’s real-time, multi-tenant architecture, Salesforce CRM and Force.com offer the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing.

As of January 31, 2009, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 55,400 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.

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