Salesforce.com

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Salesforce.com

Type	Public
Founded	California 1999
Headquarters	San Francisco, California
Key people	Marc Benioff
Revenue	$309.857 million USD (2005)
Operating income	$20.102 million USD (2005)
Net income	$29.508 million USD (2005)
Employees	1300+
Website	www.salesforce.com
*Figures as of January 2006.^[1]

Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) is an on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution vendor.

The company was founded in 1999 by former Oracle executive Marc Benioff. In June 2004, the company went public on the New York Stock Exchange. Salesforce.com is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with regional headquarters in Dublin (covering Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Singapore (covering Asia Pacific less Japan), and Tokyo (covering Japan). Other major offices are in Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, and San Mateo, California. Salesforce.com has its services translated into 14 different languages and currently has 29,800 customers and 646,000 subscribers.

1 Awards
2 AppExchange
3 Apex
4 See also
5 Notes
6 External links

[edit] Awards

The company has received industry recognition for its application suite, including:

Technology of the Year (InfoWorld, 2004, 2005, 2006)
Editors' Choice Award (PC Magazine, 2002, 2003, 2004)
Visionary Award (SDForum, 2004)
Best of the Web (Forbes, 2003)
CRM Excellence Award (Customer Interaction Solutions, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006)
Top 100 Innovators Award (Business Week, 2006)
Innovation Award (AMR Research, 2005)
Webby Business Award (2003), and
CODIE Award for Best CRM (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006), others.

[edit] AppExchange

Launched in 2005, AppExchange is a way for external developers to create add-on applications that will link into the main Salesforce.com system. Typical applications would include things like email marketing tools, sales analysis tools, and finance tools. Currently there are over 500 applications available. Developers can sell/distribute their applications through the AppExchange website (http://www.appexchange.com).

The AppExchange platform also allows current Salesforce.com (Enterprise and Unlimited Edition) customers to develop their own in-house applications on top of Saleforce.com's hosted platform.

Strategically, AppExchange represents Salesforce.com's branching out from a position as a CRM only company to being a provider of an application platform for all types of on demand solutions, adding value as a platform company and leveraging the efforts of numerous partners in the App Exchange eco-system. Salesforce.com's latest move in the platform direction is through their proprietary platform, Apex (see below).

[edit] Apex

Launched in October 2006, Apex is an on demand programming language and platform, and represents a new tool for developers interested in building business applications. Apex application can be packaged and shared through the AppExchange directory. (http://www.salesforce.com/landing/apex.jsp)

Apex hopes to provide applications built for it with basic SaaS tenets, thereby empowering developers with the benefits of SaaS without requiring that they participate in defining those benefits. Some have expressed apprehension with Apex because of its supposed highly proprietary design^[2], even being met by a mock protest staged by SugarCRM employees at Apex's launch^[3].

Apex is now available as a part of the Spring '07 release in the Salesforce.com Developer Edition.