Our Solution
We are the leading provider of on-demand CRM delivered over the Internet as an application service, helping companies better track and manage their sales, customer service and support and marketing operations. We provide our service to businesses through our proprietary, scalable and secure multi-tenant application architecture, which allows us to serve large numbers of customers cost-effectively by leveraging a single instance of our application for multiple customers. By subscribing to our service, our customers do not have to make large and risky upfront investments in software, additional hardware, extensive implementation services, and additional IT staff. As a result, our service enables businesses to achieve higher productivity from, and a lower total cost of ownership for, their CRM solutions.
Key advantages of our solution include:
- Rapid deployment. Our service can be deployed rapidly and provisioned easily, since our customers do not have to spend time installing or maintaining the servers, networking equipment, security products or other infrastructure hardware and software necessary to ensure a scalable and reliable service. We believe the average time that a customer requires to deploy our service is significantly shorter than typical traditional CRM software deployments. We also offer complementary consulting and training services to assist customers in rapidly deploying and optimizing their use of our service.
- Enable high levels of user adoption. We have designed our service to be easy-to-use and intuitive. Since our service contains many tools and features recognizable to users of popular websites such as those of Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo!, it has a more familiar interface than typical CRM enterprise applications. As a result, our users do not require substantial training on how to use and benefit from our service. We conduct extensive surveys of our users to gauge their experiences with our service so that we may determine potential areas of improvement. In addition, because of the nature of our service, we receive automatic feedback as to which features customers use.
- Lower total cost of ownership. We enable customers to achieve significant savings relative to the traditional enterprise software model. Our service enables customers to automate sales, customer service and support and marketing processes without having to make large and risky upfront investments in software, hardware and implementation services, and additional IT staff. In addition, because all upgrades are implemented by us on our servers they automatically become part of our service and therefore benefit all of our customers immediately.
- Extensive features, functionality and configurability. We offer a comprehensive array of CRM features that meet the needs of businesses of any size. Our service supports the three key functional areas within CRM—sales, customer service and support and marketing automation. We also offer additional functionality such as file and document management capabilities, which enable businesses to centralize the storage and retrieval of customer-related documents. Furthermore, most features of our service can be accessed through a variety of devices, including laptop computers, PDAs and wireless devices. For example, we offer an offline version of our service that can be used on any PC or laptop and a wireless version for mobile access via wireless devices. Finally, our service is highly configurable, enabling our customers to tailor its appearance, policy settings, language, workflow and other characteristics without the use of significant IT resources or consultants.
- Secure, scalable and reliable delivery platform. The delivery platform for our service has been designed to provide our customers with high levels of reliability, performance and security. The IT systems within our data center have fail-over redundancy. We have built a comprehensive security infrastructure, including firewalls, intrusion detection systems and encryption for transmissions over the Internet, which we monitor and test on a regular basis. We built and maintain a multi-tenant application architecture that has been designed to enable our service to scale securely, reliably and cost-effectively to tens of thousands of customers and millions of users. Our multi-tenant application architecture maintains the integrity and separation of customer data while still permitting all customers to use the same application functionality simultaneously. Our architecture also enables us to segment access privileges across our user base.
- Ease of integration. Our platform is designed to enable IT professionals to integrate our service with existing applications quickly and seamlessly. Our sforce platform provides a set of APIs that enable customers and independent developers to integrate our service with existing third-party, custom and legacy applications and write their own application services that integrate with our service. For example, many of our customers use the sforce APIs to move customer-related data from custom-developed and legacy applications into our service on a periodic basis to provide greater visibility into their activities. In addition, through our relationship with TIBCO Software, our salesforce.com Integration Server enables our customers to quickly integrate their existing software applications with our service using custom-built connectors. |
