Experience the Future of CRM Today, Welcome to Salesforce Lightning

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 25, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM company, today introduced Salesforce Lightning, which sets a new standard for CRM and delivers a new level of customer success. Salesforce Lightning combines the new Lightning Experience and the new Lightning Design System with Lightning Components and Lightning App Builder, extending the Salesforce1 Platform and empowering anyone to easily create modern enterprise apps. Lightning Experience offers a brand new, modern and intelligent experience across any device that enables users to work faster and smarter. Based on feedback from more than 150,000 customers, Salesforce Sales Cloud has been rebuilt from the ground up with Lightning Experience and more than 25 new innovations.

CRM is the new center of gravity for businesses. Companies of every size and industry are looking to transform how they work and engage with customers to drive growth, and they are turning to Salesforce to connect every interaction across sales, service, marketing, community, analytics and apps.

Salesforce embarked on a multi-year journey to completely re-imagine CRM for the modern era. In 2013, the company looked at the mobile experience and delivered Salesforce1, empowering users to run their business from their phone. In 2014, Salesforce announced new platform technologies—Lightning App Builder and Lightning Components—that made it easy for anyone to build apps fast. And today, Salesforce is delivering the next generation of CRM with Lightning Experience and Lightning Design System.

The Future of CRM is Here Today—Salesforce Lightning
A key part of the Salesforce1 Platform, Salesforce Lightning is comprised of three pillars that enable people to work faster, smarter and easily create beautiful and simple enterprise apps that end users will love.

• Lightning Experience (new!): The Lightning Experience brings a consumer-grade experience that is modern, efficient and intelligent to every Salesforce user on every device—desktop, tablet and mobile. Relevant information is surfaced for each screen, streamlining processes and making workflows more intuitive.
• Lightning Design System (new!): Based on Salesforce's new design principles (clarity, efficiency, consistency and beauty), this system translates these principles into extensible Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The Design System is a how-to manual for Salesforce developers, enabling any developer or partner to build beautiful components that work with Salesforce on every device and operating system.
• Lightning App Builder and Lightning Components: Announced at Dreamforce 2014 and made generally available last month, Lightning App Builder is an intuitive way to build apps using a drag-and-drop visual interface of Lightning Components—reusable app building blocks that can be anything from single UI elements to robust microservices, all connected to the Salesforce1 Platform.

The New Sales Cloud: Re-Imagined for Selling Today
Sales Cloud has become the platform of choice for sales because it is highly customizable and customers can use the thriving Salesforce ecosystem to extend capabilities that meet their specific requirements. Building upon that, the new Sales Cloud elevates the user experience with Lightning and more than 25 new product innovations designed to enhance productivity and smarter decision making.

New benefits include:

• Sell faster: Buying cycles today are compressed and speed is everything. The new Sales Cloud Home aggregates everything a salesperson needs to know to start their day, including Account Insights, which highlights relevant news for top accounts and prospects, and Assistant, which recommends key actions to keep opportunities moving forward. Emails and files (i.e. Microsoft, Adobe, others) can be sent to contacts from within Salesforce, saving salespeople time and speeding up the sales process. Moreover, Lightning Experience has a responsive design that works on any screen.
• Sell smarter: Proactive sales intelligence surfaces the right information when and where it is needed. Pipeline Board is a visual representation of all active deals and salespeople can drag-and-drop opportunities like digital sticky notes as deals progress through the selling cycle. Additional details are surfaced in hover-overs giving salespeople the information needed in a clean way. With the new Activity Feed, sales reps can see everything happening in a deal and the key next steps in one simple view. In addition, collaboration tools powered by Salesforce Chatter make it easier than ever to share information, reflecting the trend of sales organizations moving to team-based selling.
• Sell the way you want: Customers can easily customize Sales Cloud to fit the needs of their organization. Dashboards can be easily configured and charts can be relocated on the fly. In addition, processes like Sales Path can also be customized to meet the needs of each organization, ensuring that every company can use their own best practices and selling processes to move deals through the pipeline efficiently. Existing customizations are brought forward seamlessly to the Lightning Experience. Additionally, because this is built on the Salesforce1 Platform, sales organizations can use App Builder, Components and the Salesforce AppExchange to easily build any app they can dream up to help grow sales.

Lightning Strikes Twice: New Salesforce Financial Services Cloud Created with Lightning Experience
Today, Salesforce is also announcing the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, the company's first industry-specific product. Built on the Salesforce1 Platform and leveraging the Lightning Experience, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is empowering advisors to build deeper, 1-to-1 client relationships, be more productive, and engage more holistically with clients anywhere and on any device.

Salesforce Lightning Lights Up the Salesforce Ecosystem
The Salesforce ecosystem now has access to Salesforce Lightning and are building Lightning Components for the recently launched AppExchange for Components. Apttus, Bracket Labs, DocuSign, Financialforce.com, TAS Group and Xactly are among the Salesforce ISV partners building components or redesigning their apps to be "Lightning Ready." Unleashing a new era of innovation for partners, Salesforce Lightning brings new opportunity to the thriving Salesforce ecosystem.

Comments on the news

• "We designed and built a completely new Salesforce based on the collective feedback of more than 150,000 customers and 16 years of experience delivering the world's leading CRM," said Mike Rosenbaum, executive vice president of Sales Cloud, Salesforce. "Salesforce Lightning is the future of CRM and it is here today."
• "Salesforce Lightning allows for a much wider variety of UI components and it has the potential to power easier-to-use, more engaging and more productive customer-facing applications for daily users within and outside the enterprise," said Bo Lykkegaard, research director and associate vice president of Enterprise Applications, IDC.
• "Bracket Labs builds best-in-class Salesforce apps that make it easier for our customers to get work done," said Blakely Graham, co-founder, product design, Bracket Labs. "With Lightning, Salesforce has listened to our feedback and delivered something great. We have been piloting Salesforce Lightning with our TaskRay project management app and cannot wait to see how our customers build their own Lightning apps. Salesforce Lightning is smart, forward-thinking, and we are excited to be one of the first Lightning ready partners."
• "Accenture is an early pioneer in using Salesforce Lightning to extend our market-leading industry applications," said Saideep Raj, managing director and global Software-as-a-Service and Emerging Platforms lead, Accenture. "We share Salesforce's goal of supercharging the return on investment of sales solutions for our joint customers in this new era of customer relationship management."

Pricing and Availability

• Lightning Experience for Sales Cloud is available in preview starting today and expected to be generally available in October 2015.
• Customers can choose when they move to Lightning Experience. Additionally, they may try the new Sales Cloud with a subset of users in their organization before complete deployment.
• Lightning Experience will be available in all Salesforce languages, except Arabic and Hebrew. The new experience will be included in Sales Cloud Group Edition or greater.
• Lightning App Builder and Components for Lightning Experience on the desktop are expected to be in pilot in October 2015 and expected to be generally available in Q1 2016. Access to both is included in all CRM and Force.com admin licenses.
• The Salesforce Lightning Design System is available for free starting today for everyone and can be accessed at http://salesforce.com/designsystem.
• Salesforce Financial Services Cloud previews today, with general availability slated for February 2016.
• Pricing for the new Salesforce Financial Services Cloud will be announced at the time of general availability.

Additional Information

• Sign up for the Salesforce Lightning Preview webcast http://salesforce.com/lightning, August 25 at 4:00 PM PT
• Learn more about Sales Cloud http://www.salesforce.com/sales-cloud/overview/
• Learn more about the Salesforce Lightning Design System http://salesforce.com/designsystem
• Learn more about Salesforce Financial Services Cloud www.salesforce.com/news

Connect with Salesforce

• Like Salesforce on Facebook http://facebook.com/salesforce
• Follow @salesforce and @salescloud on Twitter

About Salesforce
Salesforce, the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit: www.salesforce.com.

Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is a product of salesforce.com, inc. and is not affiliated with any products or services of other companies.  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 applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce 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.

© 2015 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce, Salesforce1 Lightning, Salesforce Lightning, Salesforce Experience, Sales Cloud, Salesforce Lightning Design System and others are trademarks of salesforce.com, inc. Other brands featured herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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SOURCE Salesforce

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