Salesforce.com Introduces New Salesforce Ideas Application for Innovation Management

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com Dreamforce Conference -- Salesforce.com , the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today introduced Salesforce Ideas, delivering an entirely new type of on-demand application that enables customers to develop and drive innovative ideas from their communities. Salesforce Ideas brings the 'wisdom of crowds' to businesses for the first time by allowing online communities to submit, discuss and promote ideas. Salesforce Ideas is the application behind salesforce.com's own live community IdeaExchange and the Salesforce-powered Dell IdeaStorm. This breakthrough new on-demand application represents the dramatic expansion of salesforce.com's product portfolio made possible by Force.com Platform-as-a-Service.

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"Just like Digg enables people to discover, share and rank content from anywhere on the web, Salesforce Ideas will enable this same level of community driven success for businesses," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "We experienced breakthrough innovation based on the ideas that were living and breathing in our community and surfaced through the wild popularity of IdeaExchange. Now, we're giving customers the ability to tap into all of their own communities to accelerate their own innovation."

Salesforce Ideas is the power behind customer Dell's groundbreaking IdeaStorm (http://www.ideastorm.com/), which launched in February of this year, as well as its employee website, EmployeeStorm. IdeaStorm is Dell's customer- facing website for gathering suggestions regarding its products, services and operations. One of the most recent examples of customers' ideas being put into action was Dell's decision to pre-install the Ubuntu Linux operating system on select consumer desktops and notebooks in the U.S., UK, France and Germany. The idea for Linux on the desktop had quickly become a top idea on IdeaStorm and was followed up by a survey of the Linux community that had over 100,000 participants.

"Dell has always prided itself in building direct relationships with our customers," said Kevin Kettler, chief technology officer of Dell. "IdeaStorm has allowed Dell to more efficiently scale our direct customer interactions through an online tool that automatically captures customer product and service ideas. This approach provides quick and accurate feedback to Dell that ensures we focus on customer relevant issues quicker than previously possible during our product design process."

Salesforce Ideas -- Bringing the Power of Innovation Management to Businesses

Salesforce Ideas is the world's first on-demand application that enables the wisdom of crowds to drive business innovation. Based on the idea popularized by the consumer Web on the power of the collective ideas of a group, salesforce.com launched its own live community called IdeaExchange a year ago, sparking a new era of transparent community collaboration. Salesforce.com's IdeaExchange has changed the face of product development by empowering the salesforce.com customer and partner community to shape future product releases through an ongoing, live public debate. To date, more than 5,000 ideas have been posted, with 92,000 promotions, and numerous ideas have been incorporated into salesforce.com and partner applications.

"I posted my workflow idea on IdeaExchange in May 2007, and salesforce.com delivered its Summer '07 release -- that's rapid delivery!" said Rochelle Glover, Fronde Systems Group. "It's great to partner with a company who works as we do: Salesforce.com not only listens to its customers, but is also quick to follow that up with action."

Now salesforce.com is bringing this same power of community-based innovation to its customers with Salesforce Ideas, enabling them to build their own on-demand communities with their employees, customers, partners or prospects. Every company has internal and external communities that know the business, generate ideas, and can serve as a company's innovation engine. Salesforce Ideas allows companies to unleash the power of these communities to improve their business and to deepen valued relationships. For the first time, companies can tap into customers, employees and partners across divisions, organizations, and boundaries to drive the best ideas and innovations for their business.

"Salesforce.com is unique in the creative openness and transparency it has with its online community -- and the community has responded by spurring innovative ideas for all involved," said Sheryl Kingstone, director and principle analyst, CRM, at The Yankee Group. "This concept of innovation management that salesforce.com is now delivering to its customers is creating a powerful new application category for maximizing the value of a company's community."

Just like all Salesforce applications, Salesforce Ideas is delivered as a service, alleviating the pain and complexity of traditional software so that customers can focus on innovation, not infrastructure. Salesforce Ideas will allow companies to:

-- Build Communities -- Companies will be able to build online communities to share and vote on ideas spanning from product development, pricing, market research, branding, training courses, internal employee ideas, and beyond. -- Post Ideas -- Every community member small or large will be able to post ideas, including rich graphical content, and start an open and direct public dialogue with other members of the community and the business directly. -- Vote on Ideas -- As with the consumer Web, Salesforce Ideas enables an environment where the best ideas bubble to the top as community members vote and promote what's most valuable. Companies will have instant focus groups on whatever topic they choose and be able to test their ideas in real-time with targeted audiences. Built on the Force.com Platform

Salesforce Ideas is built on the Force.com Platform-as-a-Service, a new way to create and deploy business applications that makes companies and developers successful by letting them focus on what their applications do, rather than the software and infrastructure to run them. By replacing the complexity of software platforms with a complete, scalable service, the multi- tenant Force.com platform provides developers the fastest path to turn ideas into success.

Availability

Salesforce Ideas is currently scheduled to be available to customers during the fourth quarter of salesforce.com's current fiscal year. It will initially be available in limited release, and is scheduled to be fully delivered in 2008. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.

Force.com Platform and the AppExchange

Force.com reinvents the traditional development, deployment and distribution of any business application with Platform-as-a-Service. Developers, customers and partners can use Force.com to easily create a new generation of on-demand applications and deploy them worldwide as a service. Force.com allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace, enabling all the innovation that Force.com unleashes to be easily distributed to the entire on-demand community.

The AppExchange economy continues to expand, with thousands of customers installing thousands of applications via the AppExchange. Customers of all sizes can quickly and easily extend Salesforce with additional on-demand business applications available on the AppExchange, found at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company's Salesforce suite of on-demand CRM applications allows customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. The Salesforce Platform, the world's first on- demand platform, enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful new on-demand applications that extend beyond CRM to deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy and The Business Web across the enterprise. The Salesforce Platform allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange directory, available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com's world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.

As of July 31, 2007, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 35,300 customers including ABN AMRO, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, Sprint Nextel, and SunTrust Banks. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com/, or call 1-800-NO- SOFTWARE.

Copyright (c) 2007 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce.com and the "no software" logo are registered trademarks of salesforce.com, inc., and salesforce.com owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.