Salesforce.

com CRM Review An Independent Assessment

http://www.crmsearch.com/salesforce-review.php
Salesforce.com is both the pioneer and poster child for the SaaS CRM movement. Founded in 1999 in a small San Francisco apartment, the company has become the category leader that other on-demand CRM providers seek to challenge. Because of its current size, it no longer leads the industry in terms of revenue growth, however, in absolute terms of SaaS CRM revenues, customer acquisitions and user subscriptions the company is a market share leader. Salesforce.com has steadily been transitioning from a best of breed sales force automation (SFA) software as a service (SaaS) provider to an application development platform as a service (PaaS) company. The company's strategy is to continue its core SFA and CRM software growth while at the same time acquire non-CRM software users with complimentary solutions such as social CRM tools (Chatter, Radian6 and BuddyMedia), platform development tools (Force.com, Heruko, Database.com) and an online ecosystem of integrated third party solutions (AppExchange). Salesforce.com CRM Products Salesforce.com groups its products into cloud suites, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Chatter Cloud, Force.com, RemedyForce and Heroku. Ironically, none of the Salesforce.com clouds are actually clouds (as traditionally understood in the cloud computing sense) but instead are SaaS applications and PaaS services. Sales Cloud This cloud most notably includes the sales force automation (SFA) modulethe company's namesake solution which was its first product introduction and continues to represent the highest revenue contribution. SFA functionality is not materially different than other SaaS CRM products. In fact, in many areas it has fewer feature sets than several competitors. However, what makes this solution competitive and gives it differentiation in a crowded market is its simple and rewarding user experience. The application user interface (UI) is uncomplicated, intuitive and leverages consumer technologies. This is an innovative UI that was designed to satisfy users, and not data management goals. Several CRM competitors are steadily mimicking the Salesforce.com user experience in their own CRM applications, however, nobody has matched the original at this point. Sales includes traditional account/contact/activity/opportunity management along with basic marketing campaign management. Unfortunately, marketing is limited to basic subsets of SFA. Marketing includes simple campaign capabilities such as account segmentation, target list generation, lead source tracking and packaged reports. Salesforce.com marketing is competitively weak in the SaaS CRM industry. To achieve lead management or marketing software capabilities such as digital prospect tracking, lead scoring, progressive profiling, nurture campaigns or rich marketing analytics requires a separate product acquisition. Many Salesforce.com customers revert to third party marketing automation software products from vendors such as Aprimo, Eloqua, Marketo or Pardot. Sales Cloud also includes basic Partner Relationship Management (PRM). This application sync's communication between brand owners and indirect channels and gives brand management performance visibility into both direct and indirect channels. PRM includes routine process support for lead distribution, deal registration, content sharing, partner attribute data tracking and partner portals. Unfortunately, more advanced PRM functions such as partner capacity planning, lead routing based on partner scoring, approval processing for special pricing requests, automated partner approved discount thresholds, co-op or MDF (Marketing 1

Development Funds) financial management, partner reimbursement for approved expenditures, configure/price/quote (CPQ), partner sales order processing and the like are not available. While PRM delivers process consistency, automation and information in largest part for brand owners, actual implementation is a double edged sword. Delivering PRM through the cloud removes the need for partners of varying sophistication and resources to deploy hardware, software and staffing simply to communicate with their brand providers. Nonetheless, getting partners to actually use the brand owners PRM system, particularly when they already have their own CRM system, is a significant cultural challenge that often trumps good intentions. Salesforce.com PRM is therefore ideally suited for partners who already use Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com Customer Service Review Service Cloud As the growth of online SFA has slowed, Salesforce.com looks to customer service as the next billion dollar opportunity. This cloud focuses on customer service delivery, is designed around traditional case management processes and includes key support features such as live chat, knowledge base, customer portal, online communities and industry-best social tools. The Service Cloud allows agents to answer questions on a company's Facebook page as well as convert Facebook wall posts and comments into cases within Service Cloud. The same functionality exists for Twitter and allows agents to create cases and share knowledge from Tweets and conversations. Service Cloud 3 allows companies to embed the Social Agent into their web site for live chat between agents and customers. Service Cloud best fits B2B (Business to Business) contact centers already using Salesforce SFA and seeking to reduce labor intensive human services with more diversifiedand more timely and less expensivechannels such as customer self service, online communities, public knowledge-bases and crowdsourcing. Social tools such as Chatter, Ideas, Answers and social network integration provide new methods and channels for engagement between agents and customers. Radian6 adds additional value in social monitoring and gives Salesforce.com uplift in more automated social customer engagement over more channels. Basic service contracts and entitlement capabilities can align customers with designated levels of service. However, this functionality will generally fall short for inventory-carrying organizations whose service contracts must specify product SKUs or who require serial and lot tracking, product registration, warranty management, return merchandise authorization (RMA) or service level agreements. Salesforce Service Cloud lacks next-best-action and real-time analytics capabilities commonly requested for agent support. Also, because the Service Cloud is only available from the cloud, it is rarely deployed in larger, high volume B2C contact centers. Social CRM Salesforce.com continues to demonstrate innovation with its social media and social CRM releases. Salesforce.com's approach to social media is to embed tools and capabilities within its platform and application software. The result is that social is both synergistic and indistinguishable from the core applications. Making social integral to core systems, as opposed to linking or integrating to third party social products, delivers a more seamless user experience and avoids the risk of layered complexity. Chatter was released in June 2010 as a real-time internal collaboration platform that brings together people and data in a secure, private social environment. Rather than making people search for data and documents, 2

information is proactively fed to them via a real-time activity stream. Users can subscribe to follow important sale opportunities, top customer accounts, open support cases and other coworkers to receive broadcast updates as they occur. Users can form groups and post messages on each others' profiles to collaborate on projects and even subscribe to Twitter and Facebook feeds to track comments about the company or a prospect. Salesforce.com Ideas is an online community application that allows members to submit, discuss and promote ideas and empowers the community organizer with the frequently cited but seldom achieved wisdom of the crowds. Participants can comment, share, rank and vote on ideas. What Ideas lacks in collaboration and functionality when compared to standalone ideation tools, it makes up in integrating the experience with the rest of the CRM suite. This is useful tool for companies which seek to harvest user generated content for innovation and other purposes. Additional Key Salesforce.com Capabilities The Visual Process Manager creates workflows and approvals to deliver greater control over routine activities, eliminate redundant tasks, automate approvals, and encourage widespread adherence to your business processes. This is a useful tool to reduce manual activities and improve process consistency. Salesforce.com mobile CRM products include Chatter Mobile, Mobile Lite and Salesforce Mobile for both the Sales Cloud and the Service Cloud. Chatter Mobile is an app that displays self-subscribed Chatter feeds. The free Mobile Lite app enables simple viewing of account and service records. It fulfills a basic mobile need, but has limitations such as not supporting custom objects, only allowing editing of activity records and requiring an Internet connection. The Salesforce Mobile app comes with the Unlimited Edition or an additional fee and provides access to any app and any record, including custom fields, objects and tabs. The mobile CRM apps are effective and well designed for mobile form factors, however, if would be helpful if Chatter Mobile were integrated with the other two mobile apps. At Dreamforce 2011, Salesforce.com introduced its HTML5 application direction. This technology strategy is designed to supplement the native iOS and Android apps, which the company says it will continue. In conjunction with HTML5, the company also introduced touch.salesforce.com a mobile strategy that will render Salesforce.com and native Force.com applications on touch enabled devices such as the iPad. This 'write once, read everywhere' HTML5 technology supports cross-platform adaptability and both read and write permissions and will certainly tap into the burgeoning iPad and tablet market. Salesforce.com provides an integration component for Microsoft Outlook called Salesforce for Outlook. This tool replaces the older Outlook Connector. Unlike previous versions of Outlook Connector which run as Outlook add-ins the new software also has a system tray configuration component. Salesforce.com has dropped email integration from some lower-end CRM editions. Email support is still available with the Outlook Connector but no longer in all editions when using Salesforce for Outlook. The offline edition keeps SFA users connected to their account information even when they're not connected to the Internet. The newest version supports custom objects and master-detail custom lists offline as well as data encryption and simple conflict resolution rules for when the offline laptop reestablishes connectivity with the network CRM system. This capability is included with the Enterprise and Unlimited editions. The company enjoys a strategic relationship with Google. Salesforce was the first to integrate its marketing function with Google Adwords in order to increase lead tracking and calculate ROI for adwords. Salesforce is also a reseller of Google Apps for Business, and has created good integration to these apps. However, competing CRM vendors such as SAP, NetSuite and others also offer integration with Google Apps. In fact, taking Google integration a step further, NetSuite's product can use Single Sign On within the Google environment.

Salesforce.com vertical market solutions are available for communications, financial services, healthcare and life sciences, high tech, manufacturing, media, government and retail. Industry solutions must be vetted particularly carefully as they differ greatly in terms of third party software reliance, integration and support. Salesforce.com Platform as a Service Review From SaaS to PaaS Salesforce.com pioneered the cloud expansion strategy whereby the publisher delivers a comprehensive platform suite with accompanying tools and then embraces partners to deliver industry, process and niche solutions through an organized online ecosystem. Force.com is Salesforce.com's cloud computing platform as a service (PaaS) development framework. It facilitates developers in building multi-tenant applications to be hosted by and presumably integrated to Salesforce.com. The company pushes the tag line "development as a service", however that phrase has not gained acceptance outside its own marketing context. Other vendors and the industry at large continue to describe this type of service within the "platform as a service" cloud category. Force.com development is performed using nonstandard, purpose-built tools and a proprietary development language called Apex. Specialized tools are designed for the presentation layer, application layer and data model. For example, Visualforce uses an XML-like syntax for building user interfaces in HTML, Ajax or Flex. The Apex language mimics a C-style syntax and is a pseudo-combination that resembles Java and SQL (structured query language). To maintain integrity, extensibility and continued evolution, custom developed code is positioned in layers of abstraction whereby Force.com's runtime engine can interpret the metadata at the point of execution. Force.com accelerates development time for cloud-based applications that tap into the core Salesforce.com application and hosting delivery network. Developers inherit cloud infrastructure components such as a strong multi-tenant architecture, security and scalability as well as consumer benefits such as mobility and social media tools. On the flip side, many ISVs (independent software vendors) are reluctant to commit to a proprietary development environment that does not have the maturity, depth, tools or market acceptance as compared to more mainstream products such as Microsoft .NET or Java/J2EE. Also, as Salesforce.com's CRM application does not offer cloud portability programmers become locked-in to Salesforce.com's technology, application and hosted delivery network. When considering Force.com, developers often find themselves balancing the sale opportunity from the sizable Salesforce.com captive customer base versus the broader industry at large. Salesforce.com is continuing its PaaS push. In December 2010, the company acquired Herokua Ruby-based PaaS that supports a global development community and powers many social and mobile cloud applications. The company has most recently introduced database.coma language-independent hosted database seemingly on the path to compete with Microsoft SQL Azure. How these tools strategically compliment Force.com has yet to be fully understood. There's an App For That AppExchange is an online marketplace of integrated third party applications built for the Salesforce.com community, managed by Salesforce.com and delivered by partners or third-party developers. The AppExchange solutions are either developed natively on Force.com or built with non-Salesforce.com technologies and hosted externally by the provider. The majority are not native Force.com applications. AppExchange has filled core software gaps as well as expanded Salesforce.com's reach and extensibility into new business processes, vertical 4

markets and geographies. There are about 1000 AppExchange apps, however, it appears that about 10% of those make up the lion's share of customer purchases. Salesforce.com Software Review Deployment Considerations Salesforce.com offers professional services, however, relies on business partners for the vast majority of CRM implementation projects. Salesforce.com business partner programs fall into the two broad categories of ISVs and consulting partners. Most consulting partners are then categorized into Registered, Select or Premier programs. Premier partners (Accenture, Deloitte) and global system integrators (Capgemini, Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems, HCL, IBM, Infosys, Wipro) generally assist with larger or more complex implementations. Despite an indirect channel of about 1000 partners serving middle market businesses, Salesforce.com does not support the traditional value added reseller (VAR) channel as do primary competitors such as Microsoft, NetSuite, SAP and Sage. Instead of tapping into the volumes of business software VARs for increased feet on the street and highly competent local services delivery, Salesforce.com leans toward a direct sales model, but also gets some representation from large account resellers such as Ingram Micro, CSC and Dell. This is clearly more of a supplemental sales strategy than an omnipresent services delivery network and limits professional services options in largest part for small and midsize business (SMB) customers. Integration and Customization Force.com offers several integration tools ranging from off-the-shelf native ERP connectors to web services, email, syndicated feeds and HTTP-based REST calls. SOAP/REST Web services APIs enable integration with legacy systems using other languages such as Java, .NET and PHP. The primary APIs include the Force.com SOAP and REST-based Web Service APIs, the Bulk API, and the Metadata API. Each of these integration interfaces can be called from a number of client-side languages and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). Presentation layer integration can also be accomplished with simple HTML. Flash access to the Salesforce platform is available through a partnership with Adobe and there is an AJAX toolkit that provides the basis for inbrowser mashups. To create custom user interfaces you can either use Visualforce, a component-based framework for creating custom presentation layer interfaces, or use the dynamic, metadata-driven, auto-generated user interfaces and page layouts. For application level customization, developers can use or modify the Apex code, formulas, approval processes and business processes. Apex is a strongly-typed development language used for controllers, database triggers and web services. The Visual Process Manager permits developers to define business processes atop of the Salesforce.com application. At the data model, Force.com database services aid developers in creating objects to store data and tap into existing data logic functionality. All the feature sets of Database Services are available to applications running on Force.com, whether they are built with the declarative application framework, extended with Force.com Apex Code and Visualforce pages, or simply exposing data through the Web services API. The metadata approach is largely developed in Java for in-memory computing and uses the Oracle database. The single biggest benefit of Force.com for most organizations incurring software customization is time savings. By starting with Force.com's common objects, forms and workflow functionality, developers spend less time custom coding, actually write fewer lines of custom code and accelerate project timelines. Further, as 5

developers are working within a predefined framework, they can get to work faster as they are freed of many time consuming up front planning decisions such as database structure, database connectivity, security protocols, and infrastructure planning for items such as application servers, web servers and load balancing. The downsides of this approach are of course licensing costs and vendor lock-in. Salesforce.com's integration and customization tools are feature rich and purpose built for scenarios most common in CRM software integration and customization. This is an area where Salesforce.com clearly leads the cloud CRM pack. Salesforce.com Hosting Review Hosting and Software Delivery Salesforce.com is only available in the software as a service (SaaS) model. There is no option for a private cloud or on-premises installation. Salesforce.com runs its products from tier 4 data center hosts managed by collocation companies, such as Equinox, Inc. The hosting structure is a shared multi-tenant architecture, subdivided into nine hardware clusters knows as pods, with each pod made up of about 35 multi-processor Unix and Linux servers running the Oracle database. Pods are mirrored for high-availability and fail-over purposes. Taking a lesson from some early days of repeated downtime, Salesforce.com created trust.salesforce.com to publicly display uptime performance. This delivers both uptime/downtime visibility as well as transparency, although it would be helpful to potential prospects if the company chose to display more than just the last 30 days of performance visibility. Salesforce.com data center operations are heavily concentrated in the California facility, with customer data mirrored to an East Coast location. The company also operates smaller data centers in Singapore and Japan to address the Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Japanese markets. Notably, there are no data centers in Europe, which may cause concern for European companies with cultural or regulatory data privacy requirements which advocate data residing in an in-country or regional (EU) data center. This is mostly likely limited to European organizations in the financial services, health care and government sectors. Salesforce.com data center operations have received ISO 27001 and SAS70 Type II audit attestations as well as SysTrust and EU Safe Harbor certifications. Surprisingly, Salesforce.com provides the least effective Service Level Agreement (SLA) in the SaaS CRM industry. In fact, Salesforce.com generally doesn't even provide an SLA unless the customer requests or negotiates it. Even then, the SLAs are not strong as their uptime thresholds fall below competitors and their maintenance windows are plentiful. For business continuity purposes, Salesforce says it supports disaster recovery with a dedicated team and a 4 hour recovery point objective (RPO) and 12 hour recovery time objective (RTO). Salesforce.com Pricing Review CRM Software Pricing Salesforce.com pricing is largely based on the per user per month subscription model. The Salesforce.com pricing model is relatively straight-forward, although can get more complex when considering add-on products and options such as the logon-based pricing for the customer portal. 6

There is a strong onus on customers to fully understand the functional capabilities and supported use cases among the Salesforce.com editionsin order to avoid version-creep and the all too frequent surprise of discovering the software functionality you need is actually only available in the higher up, and much more costly editions. Within the Sales Cloud the company offers five separate editions. The Contact Manager Edition costs $5 per user per month, manages contacts and tasks, integrates with Outlook and Google Apps and offers mobile access. Group Edition costs $25 per user per month and tracks opportunities, contains pre-built dashboards and provides web to lead and Google AdWords integration. Professional Edition is $65 per user per month and offers more granular security, email marketing, custom dashboards, forecasting, basic customer service, rules based workflow configuration and improved reporting. At $125 per user per month, Enterprise Edition adds sales team collaboration, territory management, a sales genius function, offline access and API access. The final pricing tier of $250 per user per month gets the Unlimited Edition which adds 24x7 Premier support, developer sandboxes, customizable mobile products, third-party apps and increased storage. The Service Cloud is separately priced at $65 for the Professional Edition, $135 for the Enterprise Edition and $260 for the Unlimited Edition. With both clouds, there may be additional charges for products such as Jigsaw, Force.com and Salesforce Mobile as well as services such as customer portal access, storage and customer support. Although not widely known by prospects and customers, Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs) are becoming much more popular with Salesforce.com. Salesforce also introduced Social Enterprise License Agreements (SELA) in 2011, which further includes social tools such as Heroku and Radian6. These all you eat subscription agreements can be attractive for rapidly growing customers or customers looking to rapidly deploy the bulk of Salesforce.com's software portfolio. However, buyers should recognize that if they fail to scale or adopt the volume of software apps in the timeframe anticipated, the ELA or SELA may result in a materially higher cost than standard subscription pricing. For reasons that are unclear, non-US customers seem to pay about a 45% premium. For example, the Enterprise Edition in the European Union, Australia and Japan is priced at about 135/user/month; AU$180/user/month and 15,000/user/month respectively. The Salesforce.com sales model is largely based on inside telesales (internally referred to as corporate sales) with field sales pursing middle market and enterprise sale opportunities. The company also supports a channel program, however, it's primarily a referral and consulting network as opposed to the Solution Provider or reseller channels more common in the business software industry. Multi-national and larger businesses are likely to discover that the standard Master Service Agreement (MSA) is insufficient for a lot of enterprise organizations. Many negotiate the MSA to incorporate items important to them, however, such negotiation may impact pricing. Obviously the larger the sale opportunity, the more flexibility you can expect. Salesforce.com is known to show pricing flexibility when negotiating deals at 100+ users and when competing with primary competitors. Vendor Viability Salesforce.com is a growing, profitable company with strong intellectual property, a solid brand and impressive 7

executive leadership. However, pricing pressures are inevitable, customer exit costs are low compared to prior software publisher models, the market is fluid and the company faces significantly increased competition. Salesforce.com confronts more direct threats now than anytime prior and is increasingly vulnerable in the cloud markets which it helped to create. The company is diversifying from a product perspective which has the effect of reduced focus and investment in each product area. This is significant as Salesforce.com is a fraction of the size of its primary CRM competitors such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP and its PaaS competitors such as Amazon, IBM and Google. While Salesforce.com achieved first mover advantage, any of these much larger competitors can out-invest Salesforce.com by a multiple factor, and in fact each claims they intend to do just that. Salesforce.com also competes against an increasing list of innovative start-ups. The top four CRM software companies, of which Salesforce.com is ranked number three following SAP and Oracle, account for less than 60% of the CRM market. While Salesforce.com must keep close tabs on SAP and Oracle now that these companies have demonstrated keen intent to reassert their leadership roles, Salesforce.com must also be wary of smaller and more focused competitors who compete on specialization, geography, price and service. These smaller competitors often create highly specific vertical market CRM solutions that may erode entire industries from Salesforce.com. Salesforce continues impressive growth, but organic growth rates are not what they use to be, and the company's acquisitions are making up some of the difference. Salesforce.com's operating margins are much lower than its major competitors. As the market further commoditizes and pricing gets squeezed, Salesforce.com may be put into a precarious position of choosing between current R&D investment levels or profitability metrics. Salesforce.com Strengths and Weaknesses Competitive positioning in the cloud CRM market is highlighted with the following strengths and weaknesses. Salesforce.com Strengths The company is a proven innovator. This strength alone separates Salesforce.com from much of its competition and provides increased payback for customers. Salesforce.com promotes a vibrant user community. The company uses its own Ideas solution to solicit community input, actively monitors social networks and provides online venues for customers to make themselves heard. Too often CRM companies don't actually practice the Customer Relationship Management they speak of, however, Salesforce.com clearly walks the walk. The Salesforce.com user interface maximizes consumer technologies to deliver a simple and rewarding user experience. This has delivered a profound effect in achieving user adoption. Salesforce.com is championing social CRM and delivering the technology for its customers to achieve social CRM business objectives. The company's combination of Force.com, PaaS tools and AppExchange lead the SaaS CRM industry in terms of cloud integration, software customization, third party extensibility and ecosystem.

Salesforce.com Weaknesses As Salesforce.com continues its transition from a CRM company to a platform company, several CRM competitors have superseded Salesforce's CRM features, functions and capabilities. 8

Unlike primary competitors such as Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, SugarCRM and others whom offer both choice in deployment (on-premise, on-demand or a hybrid combination) as well as choice in cloud platform (vendor cloud, private cloud or public cloud), Salesforce.com does not support any public cloud (i.e. Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, etc.) which limits hosting options, prevents portability, threatens IT investment and significantly increases exit costs. For example, Salesforce.com customers who choose to extend their CRM software solution with custom development created with a single vendor tool set (Force.com) and which only operates on one cloud will likely not be able to transfer and protect that investment if they choose to leave Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com marketing software is competitively weak in the SaaS CRM industry. To achieve lead management or marketing automation capabilities such as digital prospect tracking, lead scoring, progressive profiling, nurture campaigns and rich marketing analytics requires a separate product acquisition. Salesforce has introduced the Marketing Cloud, but its limited to social marketing and satisfies few or none of the previously listed lead management or marketing automation requirements. Many Salesforce.com customers turn to third party marketing automation software products from vendors such as Act-On Software, Eloqua,Marketo or Pardot, which deliver strong solutions but increase costs and multi-vendor management issues. The Salesforce.com customer base is predominantly B2B. The CRM software is not nearly as well oriented to the B2C industry. Salesforce.com is also without sophisticated business intelligence (BI). Customers seeking data warehousing, data mining, online analytical processing (OLAP) or predictive analytics will need to procure third party solutions from AppExchange or elsewhere. Despite an initial thrust and acceptance in the small business market, small business customers repeatedly opine that professional services options are few and extremely costly. For small business customers that require software customization, system integration or other professional services, the lack of channel options, combined with the lack of desire for smaller projects by the few partners available, leave this customer segment without many options. When reviewing features to features its apparent that Salesforce.com is the highest priced product in the SaaS CRM industry. Salesforce.com becomes less competitive when looking beyond CRM as a point solution. For companies seeking broader business software suites, including back office accounting or ERP systems, the inconsistency and relatively shallow integrations delivered with third party AppExchange vendors do not stand up well to single vendor solutions from competitors such as NetSuite and SAP Business ByDesign. The company operates fewer international data centers than many of its competitors. This can impact user performance (latency, hops, jitter, etc.) as well as pose regulatory concerns with regard to data privacy and government compliance. This may make Salesforce.com less appealing for customers that get progressively further away from the U.S. Surprisingly, Salesforce.com generally doesn't provide a SaaS Service Level Agreement (SLA) unless the customer requests and negotiates it. Even then, SLAs are inconsistent from customer to customer and fall below uptime guarantees of primary SaaS CRM competitors. Salesforce.com Fit and Alternatives Sweet Spot Short list Salesforce.com when: Seeking best of breed or CRM-only solutions. Seeking CRM and tightly integrated social CRM capabilities. 9

Your focus is SFA, your requirements are not unusual and you desire fast time to market. You're a brand buyer with generic requirements and no special considerations. Your business is in one of Salesforce.com's designated vertical markets, including communications, financial services, healthcare, high tech, manufacturing, media, non-profit, public sector or retail. Alternative Solutions IT buyers may be best advised to consider alternative CRM products when: Sales people need to take sales orders or have access to inventory information. Desiring multiple deployment models, including on demand, on premise or a hybrid of both. Seeking an enterprise-wide, fully integrated ERP and CRM software as a service solution. You're a non-US company with cultural or regulatory requirements which advocate data residing in an incountry or regional (EU) data center. This is mostly likely to apply to European organizations in the financial services, health care and government sectors. Seeking vertically focused solutions with single-vendor accountability. Acquisition cost and total cost of ownership (TCO) are primary decision criterion. Concluding Remarks Salesforce.com is an innovatorand this is a key strength that sets them apart from much of their competition. They were one of the first business software companies to inject consumer technologies into business applicationsand continue to do this faster than most of their peers. They have accelerated the pace of platform as a service (PaaS), mobile CRM, social CRM and more, and show no signs of slowing their creativity and momentum. In fact, the company must continue to out-innovate its competition not just for product superiority or value-add purposes, but to stave off the inevitable downward pricing pressures that are otherwise unavoidable as online CRM software becomes commoditized. The on demand CRM market is now plentiful with credible competitors, so Salesforce.com's innovation is far more about holding off price erosion than technology advancement. Salesforce.com is now less of a CRM application provider and more of a platform and cloud infrastructure company. Creating a business web is the vision and Force.com is the primary product. However, this second act requires significant retooling and is nothing short of a fundamental business model shift that puts the cloud company into direct competition with yet another set of behemoth competitors such as Amazon, IBM and Google. While many discount the company's ability to compete with CRM giants such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft on one front, and platform-as-a-service giants such as Amazon, IBM and Google on another, they would be unwise to count out this formidable competitor simply due to its much smaller size. For over a decade, Salesforce.com has delivered what it said it would, out-maneuvered its slower moving old guard competition and assumed a leadership role in a market it helped to create. Salesforce.com's core competencies are innovation, evangelism and marketing prowess. A potent combination that can leap frog competitors, create new category leadership and earn significant market share. In many ways, the company's future is less predictable now than when run from the bedrooms of a small San Francisco apartment over a decade ago.

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