Salesforce.com Unveils Salesforce China Edition
Salesforce.com Unveils Salesforce China Edition - Making the World's Leading On-Demand Customer Relationship Management Application Accessible to the Chinese Market
Now every company in China can use the CRM solution trusted by global leaders Sprint Nextel, AMD, and Singapore Airlines starting at the equivalent of 888 RMB per user, per year
Salesforce China Edition delivers core Salesforce CRM capabilities for companies that work exclusively in Simplified Chinese
Strong Hong Kong momentum demonstrates the incredible market potential for salesforce.com in greater China
HONG KONG, April 23 -- Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced the release of Salesforce China Edition, a regional edition of salesforce.com's award-winning customer relationship management applications tailored specifically for the Chinese market starting at the equivalent of 888 RMB per user, per year for either five or ten users. Since salesforce.com launched its Asia business in 2005, many Chinese companies, including Metlife China, Digital China, Forex Capital Markets Asia and Protime Consulting, have already experienced success with Salesforce CRM.
"Salesforce has dramatically improved visibility into our Hong Kong and Chinese operations and is helping us close more deals every day," said Ornit Niv, Managing Director of Forex Capital Markets Asia. "In addition, we have seen marked improvement in the productivity of our employees - the easy to use interface allows our employees to access the single, latest view of customer information anytime, anywhere, and from any device."
"Salesforce China Edition is uniquely positioned to be a catalyst for growth for the emerging generation of Chinese entrepreneurs," said Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com at the Salesforce China Edition launch in Hong Kong. "A high-growth, fast-moving economy like China's requires business applications that can adapt quickly and scale efficiently. We are responding to the demands of Chinese customers with a product that delivers value, success and the guarantee of world-class enterprise quality and trust at a price that is affordable for businesses of any size."
Beyond the introduction of Salesforce China Edition, salesforce.com has proven its commitment to investing in Greater China by opening its first Chinese office in Hong Kong in October of 2006. Salesforce.com has had a presence in the APAC region since 2003 and already has a number of customers.
Salesforce China Edition - Bringing Enterprise-Quality Business Applications to China
Salesforce China Edition makes the leading multi-tenant, on-demand CRM solution available for over 10 million small and medium businesses in China. Salesforce China Edition extends salesforce.com's vision for on-demand computing to China by releasing a lower-priced product in a single language, Simplified Chinese. The rapid pace at which the Chinese market is expanding demands that business applications keep up with this pace of innovation in order to be successful. For this reason, Salesforce China Edition and its on- demand, multi-tenant model is well-suited for the Chinese market because it can be deployed and scaled quickly, and customized to keep up with continually evolving business goals and objectives. Best of all, the applications and customizations benefit from the universal, automatic upgrades that are possible because of salesforce.com's multi-tenant architecture. Finally, time to value and deployment costs are kept at a minimum because IT departments are not saddled with the hardware and software deployment and maintenance burdens associated with traditional, on premise solutions - with Salesforce, IT departments can focus on innovation, not infrastructure.
Under the Hood - Salesforce China Edition
All of the key applications businesses need to run marketing, sales and customer service departments effectively are included in Salesforce China Edition. First, Salesforce Marketing helps companies plan targeted emails with professional-looking HTML email templates. In addition, Salesforce Marketing allows companies to capture leads coming in through the company website and distribute those leads to the sales teams.
Salesforce Automation, also included in Salesforce China Edition, is an easy to use application that helps businesses manage their sales team, data and processes. Salesforce keeps sales teams organized and working together so customers receive the attention they need, deals are closed faster and opportunity milestones and opportunity-related interactions are tracked efficiently. To further assist sales teams, Salesforce China Edition acts as the on-demand resource for critical business materials by providing a common document repository to provide instant access to the most recent versions of sales and marketing documents like product sheets, presentations and contracts.
The final component needed to achieve a 360-degree customer view is Salesforce Service & Support, which enables companies to enhance their customer's experience by drawing on a shared customer history through sales, marketing and service. Included in Salesforce China Edition, Salesforce Service & Support enables users to create and document cases to ensure that customers get top-notch service quickly and that service level agreements are met.
Finally, Salesforce China Edition enables companies to gain real value from sales and marketing data with powerful, real-time analytics. Since the reports are quick and easy to access with up to date information, management can make decisions quickly and effectively. With Salesforce China Edition, companies can also calculate win rates, sales pipeline, service resolution times, coverage ratios, actual vs. goal comparisons, and much more.
Developer Success
Not only does Salesforce China Edition bring Salesforce applications to Chinese companies, it opens Hong Kong and mainland China to the 35,000 innovators of the Apex Developers Network (ADN). In turn, the large numbers of developers in Hong Kong and mainland China can now tap into an international ecosystem of 29,800 salesforce.com customers in need of tailored applications and solutions. The flexibility of the Apex platform and power of Apex Code allows developers to build and deploy any application on-demand, while the AppExchange marketplace enables developers to go to market with these applications.
Also, the Apex platform enables Salesforce to be easily customized and integrated into an organization's IT architecture to meet their unique business needs. Salesforce China Edition builds on the platform of Apex to enable easy integration with Microsoft Outlook and Office, Lotus Notes and multiple applications from the AppExchange marketplace. In addition, the application can be customized on both the application and individual user level including custom tabs, fields, objects, drag and drop custom layouts and embedded mash-ups - many customizations can be made by a simple point and click.
Pricing and Availability
Salesforce China Edition is available today in a 5 user version for $576 USD per year or a 10 user version for $1152 USD per year. On a per user basis, this is the equivalent of 888 RMB per user, per year. The product is available for purchase exclusively with a USD credit card after a free 30 day trial where companies can test drive Salesforce China Edition without any downloads or installs. The free trial is available at https://salesforce.com/cn/form/trial/freetrial_te.jsp.
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. Apex, 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. All Apex components and applications can be easily shared, exchanged and installed via salesforce.com's AppExchange directory, available at salesforce.com/appexchange. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com's world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.
As of January 31, 2007, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 29,800 customers and approximately 646,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), America Online (AOL), Avis Budget Group, Inc, Dow Jones Newswires, Polycom 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 www.salesforce.com/, or call 1-800-NO- SOFTWARE.
Salesforce.com is a registered trademark of salesforce.com, and Apex, AppExchange, The Business Web, IdeaExchange and Successforce are trademarks of salesforce.com, Inc., San Francisco, California. Other names used may be trademarks of their respective owners.
CONTACT: Katy Dormer of salesforce.com, +1-415-901-8595, kdormer@salesforce.com
