Salesforce.com Increases Asia Pacific Customer Base by 36% in Fiscal Year 2010

SINGAPORE, March 31 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, added more than 1,800 net new customers in the Asia Pacific region(1) during its full fiscal year ended January 31, 2010, bringing its total customer base to almost 7,000 organisations in the region, a 36% increase, year-over-year.

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"Asia Pacific was the fastest growing region for salesforce.com globally in FY10," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "Total revenues for the full fiscal year 2010 in the Asia Pacific region were up 36% year-over-year, demonstrating significant interest from large and small organizations in Asia Pacific for cloud computing based enterprise applications."

Leading organizations in Asia Pacific choose salesforce.com for CRM and custom application development:

• Salesforce CRM, which includes Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, is the world's most popular CRM application. FY10 wins in Asia Pacific include: AdGlobal360 (India), Aspire Business Counsel (China), Bajaj Auto Finance (India), Barracuda Networks (China), Bausch & Lomb (Korea), Beijing Nancal Drives (China), Cheviot Bridge (Australia), Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development Victoria (Australia), eBay Greater China (China), Hanjin Corporation (Korea), Light in the Box (China), Matrix On Board (Australia), Ministry of Education (Singapore).
• The Force.com development platform allows organizations to build and run applications 5 times faster, at about 1/2 the cost of traditional software platforms.(2) Hundreds of customers in Asia Pacific like Fulton Hogan (New Zealand), Lotte Liquor BG (Korea), Samil Pharm (Korea), and World Wide Entertainment (Australia), built custom applications on the Force.com platform in FY10.
• Salesforce.com now has more than 70,000 members in its Asia Pacific developer community, developing applications on Force.com.  

Comments on the news:

• "By adopting cloud-based solutions, organisations in Asia Pacific can gain improved competitive advantage, drive greater standardisation at the IT infrastructure level and reduce the amount of resources required to leverage technology for business benefits," said Michael Barnes, vice president of Software & Asia Pacific Research, Springboard Research. "For cloud computing vendors, establishing and maintaining trusted relationships is critical to overall market growth, one of the many reasons why salesforce.com continues to dominate the cloud computing market in Asia Pacific."
• "We're seeing an inflection point in the region among leading enterprises who are increasingly saying good bye to expensive hardware and software that burn through precious capital and yet rarely produce the promised returns," salesforce.com Senior Vice President for Enterprise Sales, Asia Pacific, Steve McWhirter said.
• "The need for speed, agility, and greater productivity at a lower IT cost has made cloud computing a clear favorite among small to medium-sized businesses," said Lee Thompson, senior vice president for Corporate Sales, Asia Pacific, salesforce.com. "They are voting with their wallets at a dramatic pace in favor of CRM and other critical business applications on a cloud computing platform."
• "The story gets even better this year," said Jeremy Cooper, regional vice president, Marketing, Asia Pacific, salesforce.com. "When Salesforce Chatter is made available later this year to every one of our two million+ users worldwide, we will introduce – on that single day -- a completely new era of enterprise collaboration."

Customer quotes:

• "Salesforce CRM is nothing short of a revolution for our sales and finance business," Bajaj Auto Finance Limited CEO Rajeev Jain said.
• "Once we saw what can be done with salesforce.com, we immediately recognised the potential to rapidly shift to a more flexible, cloud-based system. We replaced our legacy CRM and job scheduling system with a customised Salesforce CRM application and have literally thrown out our old application server," ENS International CEO Michael Foulds said.
• "We view salesforce.com as a complete business platform that happens to have a leading CRM application built in. CRM was just the start and we didn't stop there. We've also rolled out our own custom-built applications on the Force.com platform and the list of requests from the business continues to roll in. There is a real sense of excitement around what we can achieve with Force.com," Infomedia Business Systems Manager Nicolas Fogg said.
• "Barracuda Networks China went live with Salesforce CRM in November 2009, and we've enjoyed massive productivity gains in the first few months of our deployment," Barracuda Networks China General Manager Arron He said.
• "Fuji Xerox Printer Channel went live with Salesforce CRM in July 2009 and we have enjoyed massive productivity gains in only the first month of our Salesforce CRM deployment. Salesforce has improved our partner engagement and increased our staff productivity," Fuji Xerox Printer Channel General Manager for Australia & New Zealand David Borg said.
• "Salesforce.com gives us complete visibility into our sales processes. We didn't have to invest in hardware or software or employ additional headcount to maintain any systems and were able to get our CRM off the ground with minimum hassle," PurpleClick General Manager for Media, Stanley Tay, said.
• "My advice to any start up or small business -- if you want to compete with the big boys, be on salesforce.com," Ffreedom Founder and CEO Sumeet Vaid said.
• "Customer retention is a key focus for Superwoman and we want to make sure it's as easy as possible for customers to enroll for our products and services. With Salesforce CRM, Superwoman increased its sales conversion rates by 50%," Superwoman Marketing Manager Anna Windress said.
• "In previous CRM implementations, there was little buy-in from the top and consequently low user adoption rates. With Salesforce CRM, the whole company has got behind the implementation," Enware Australia COO Adam Degnan said.

Additional resources

• Salesforce.com Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2010 Results
• Cloud Platform for CRM: Sales Cloud and Service Cloud
• Video: What is Cloud Computing?
• Video: Cloud Computing for small businesses
• Follow salesforce.com on Twitter @salesforce or @salesforceAPAC

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company's portfolio of Salesforce CRM applications, available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that companies collaborate and communicate with their customers across sales, marketing and service.  The company's Force.com platform (http://www.salesforce.com/platform/) helps customers, partners and developers to quickly build powerful business applications to run every part of the enterprise in the cloud.  Based on salesforce.com's real-time, multitenant architecture, Salesforce CRM and Force.com offer the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing.

As of January 31st, 2010, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 72, 500 customers including Allianz Commercial, Dell, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, 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) 2010 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce 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.

(1) The Asia Pacific region includes Australia, Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

(2) Source: IDC, "Force.com Cloud Platform Drives Huge Time to Market and Cost Savings," September 2009, sponsored by salesforce.com.

SOURCE salesforce.com