Prospectus Summary
PROSPECTUS SUMMARY You should read the following summary together with the entire prospectus, including the more detailed information in our consolidated financial statements and related notes appearing elsewhere in this prospectus. You should carefully consider, among other things, the matters discussed in “Risk Factors.”SALESFORCE.COM, INC.
Salesforce.com is the leading provider of application services that allow organizations to easily share customer information on demand. We provide a comprehensive customer relationship management, or CRM, service to businesses of all sizes and industries worldwide. By designing and developing our service to be a low-cost, easy-to-use application that is delivered through a standard Web browser, we substantially reduce many of the traditional expenses and complexities of enterprise software implementations. As a result, our customers incur less risk and lower upfront costs. Our service helps customers more effectively manage critical operations including: sales force automation; customer service and support; marketing automation; document management; analytics; and custom application development. We market our services on a subscription basis, primarily through our direct sales efforts and also indirectly through partners. From the introduction of our service in February 2000 through October 31, 2003, our customer base had grown to approximately 8,000 subscribing customers, with an aggregate of over 110,000 paying subscribers in approximately 70 countries.
The pervasiveness of the Internet, along with the dramatic declines in the pricing of computing technology and network bandwidth, have enabled a new generation of enterprise computing in which substantial components of information technology, or IT, infrastructure can be provisioned and delivered dynamically on an outsourced basis. This new computing paradigm is sometimes referred to as utility computing, while the outsourced software applications are referred to as on-demand application services. On-demand application services enable businesses to subscribe to a wide variety of application services that are developed specifically for, and delivered over, the Internet on an as-needed basis with little or no implementation services required and without the need to install and manage third-party software in-house. The market for on-demand application services is projected to grow from $425 million in 2002 to $2.6 billion in 2007, which represents a compounded annual growth rate of 44 percent, according to a May 2003 report by International Data Corporation, or IDC, an independent market research firm.
We believe that the CRM applications market, which was approximately $7.1 billion in 2002 according to a July 2003 report by IDC, is one of the first to benefit from on-demand application services. CRM applications are intended to enable businesses to automate sales, customer service and support and marketing. Despite the significant potential benefits that can be attained from CRM, many enterprises have failed to successfully deploy the CRM applications that they have purchased for a variety of reasons including the difficulty and relatively high cost of implementing and maintaining enterprise applications, as well as the historically low rates of user adoption and lack of ubiquitous access that have contributed to lower returns on investment in CRM deployments.
From inception, our service has been specifically designed to provide customers with robust CRM solutions on an outsourced basis through our proprietary, scalable and secure multi-tenant application architecture. Key benefits of our solution include:
those of Amazon.com, eBay and Yahoo!, it has a more familiar interface than typical CRM applications. As a result, our users do not require substantial training on how to use and benefit from our service.
Our objective is to be the leading provider of on-demand application services for businesses worldwide. To achieve this objective we intend to:
We were incorporated in Delaware in February 1999. Unless otherwise indicated, as used in this prospectus, the terms “salesforce.com,” “we,” “us” and “our” refer to salesforce.com, inc., a Delaware corporation, and its subsidiaries. The address of our principal executive office is The Landmark @ One Market, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105 and our telephone number is (415) 901-7000. Our website address is www.salesforce.com. The information on, or that can be accessed through, our website is not part of this prospectus.
Our No Software logo, salesforce.com and sforce are our trademarks in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks, trade names or service marks appearing in this prospectus are the property of their respective owners.