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To: stockman_scott who wrote (27433)	2/10/2006 5:09:27 PM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 57684

Salesforce.com Tumbles By Bill Snyder TheStreet.com Senior Writer 2/10/2006 4:11 PM EST Click here for more stories by Bill Snyder Salesforce.com (CRM:Nasdaq - commentary - research - Cramer's Take) took a beating Friday, as investors reacted to rumors that the business software company lost a major customer to Oracle (ORCL:Nasdaq - commentary - research - Cramer's Take). Shares closed off $4.27, or nearly 11%, to $35.10 on unusually heavy volume. 1. Sirius' Game of Chicken 2. JBL: Ford, GM Will Lose This Game of Chicken 3. Monitoring the 'Mad Money' Madness 4. Cisco Call Shines Through 5. Gold Bugs Eye $600, $850 and Far Beyond Salesforce, which sells software as an "on-demand" service, has recently been plagued by a spate of service outages that kept customers from accessing their data for hours at a time. What the company described as a brief outage early Thursday may also have contributed to the sudden selloff. In an interview with Reuters news service, Karen Haus, an analyst at WR Hambrecht, attributed the stock drop mainly to market speculation that Salesforce lost a large contract to Oracle, but she also said the latest system outage was not helping, either. "I think it is a little bit of both," she said. "Losing the customer is a bigger deal in terms of the stock today." A spokeswoman for San Francisco-based Salesforce declined to comment on rumors of a major competitive loss. Salesforce sells software that helps manage customer data; but unlike traditional software suppliers who sell licenses, it hosts the applications on its own servers and charges for a service. Initially, the company's business centered on smaller companies, but more recently it has won major contracts, including AON, Merrill Lynch and Citizens Bank. It wasn't clear if the lost contract referred to a defection of one of those customers, or to the loss of new business to a rival.