Pandora moved its infrastructure to the cloud for 5X the savings.

Music is often described in human characteristics — emotional, intelligent, yearning — and Pandora Radio takes that a step further by ascribing a “genetic code” to every piece of music, collecting hundreds of attributes on every track. Social interaction is an important part of the Pandora experience, too, as users “like” songs, share their own stations, and follow other listeners with similar tastes. All this helps Pandora fulfill its mission of playing only the music that each listener will love. Pandora’s innovative model has driven dramatic growth. With nearly 80 million active listeners a month on an increasing number of platforms — Web, mobile, and now automobiles — many businesses would struggle to continue delivering a great customer experience. Not Pandora — the company went social to connect its team to customers and to each other.

With Salesforce, Pandora’s teams easily collaborate to come up with ideas to enhance the listener experience and create new ad products and placements. Detailed customer profiles are another great source of new ideas — and also serve to match ads to relevant listeners to maximise the impact and response. Even the ad sales team works better with social tools, so they can find and connect to ad buyers more quickly — and profitably. Pandora’s sales, service, finance, HR, and operations systems are all built around a central platform from Salesforce.com. “Putting our infrastructure in the cloud just makes sense,” says Chris Record, VP Sales Technology Operations. “You have a lot less to worry about as you scale, and it costs us 5 times less than on-premises, which keeps our CFO happy.”