1. How is salesforce.com planning to focus on the Global 2000 companies and other packaged application software vendors who have a proactive strategy to reach customers, prospects, partners, and employees using the Internet especially in a global economy that has not yet shown signs of picking up from the slump it has been in for the past two years?

Salesforce.com is successful because its customers are successful. Our customers no longer have to put up with expensive, difficult-to-use software that costs millions of dollars, takes months (or years) to install, and may not provide a return on investment. 

A recent Gartner survey found that 42 percent of all enterprise CRM software licenses purchased are never deployed. This kind of failure, coupled with the economic downturn and shrinking IT budgets, has created momentum for salesforce.com's low-risk, high-return on-demand model within large enterprises. In 2002, we more than doubled revenues from $23 million to $52 million, and we have seen a steady acceleration in adoption by enterprise customers, including Honeywell, Cigna, Nokia, and AOL. With on-demand CRM, companies only pay for what they use, are often up and running in a month and seeing immediate value in terms of higher revenues, lower costs and greater productivity across the organization. This kind of performance sells in any economic environment. 

2. Global 2000 companies are increasingly trying to connect with their customers, prospects, partners and employees over the Internet. The adoption of the Internet and web technologies have created new opportunities for organizations to add value to their existing enterprise applications. How does Salesforce.com approach this highly dynamic era in the IT scenario?

In the same manner that water, sanitation and power are shared resources managed remotely and distributed as needed, salesforce.com is a subscription-based service that provides on-demand CRM functionality. Users receive all the advantages of a utility delivery system in terms of cost, risk and ease of use, along with functionality that takes advantage of the Internet to deepen and expand capabilities. 

Salesforce.com was built from the ground-up as an online service. While other traditional software companies may try to web-enable their product, we have a unique advantage in that our applications were designed for the Internet. Salesforce.com offers a 360-view of the customer anytime, anywhere through one application, and companies can offer customer self-service via the web. Salesforce.com's Web services API allows customers to extend their system to interface with other services over the Internet or access back-end systems. Through this API, and other .NET innovations, such as the Offline Edition, we are breaking down the technology distinctions between online and offline, front-end and back-end, to help our customers do better business. 

3. What are the components of the Online CRM solutions from salesforce.com and who are its target customers? What are its salient features and benefits to enterprise organizations in terms of increased ROI and web ennoblement with respect to traditional powerhouses in this arena of technology?

Salesforce.com offers CRM solutions in three editions for companies of differing sizes and levels of complexity -- Team Edition, Professional Edition, and Enterprise Edition. Each edition respectively builds on the other and has functionality for Marketing Automation, Sales Force Automation and Customer Service and Support. Salesforce.com is highly scalable, growing with the company (covering small, medium and enterprise companies), and offers customers seamless upward product migration. In addition, for traveling sales professionals, salesforce.com has a suite of mobile solutions, including an Offline Edition for disconnected use and a Wireless Edition for handheld wireless use.

We deliver all of the advantages of an outsourced solution: rapid deployment and substantial savings on staffing, hardware and software at a fraction of the cost and hassle of software. As it is so easy to learn and use, adoption rates regularly top 90 percent - ultimately increasing productivity and profitability. This translates into quick ROI - 10 times faster than any competitor. Most of our customers achieve significant ROI results within two months, not years. 

Salesforce.com's competitive difference is equally striking in terms of total cost of ownership (TCO). In the case of client/server software, software license costs are typically only 9% of total costs. Customization and implementation, hardware, training, IT personnel and maintenance accounts for the remainder. Looking at a direct comparison of a company with 150 users, Yankee Group calculated that salesforce.com is 19% of the TCO of comparable CRM software solutions. 

4. What is the Salesforce.com Billing Edition? What are its salient features and benefits to enterprise customers?

Salesforce.com Billing Edition will help customers track and manage contracts, orders and invoices. It will streamline the post-sale process and help companies easily track and report on the entire customer lifecycle. Users will be able to analyze billing and manage the most basic sale to complex, service-based sales models. Billing Edition will also provide interoperability with back-office functions, including accounts receivable and GL systems.

5. Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, had once boldly predicted that Salesforce.com would offer "every module that SAP has available to license" as part of its hosted service. How far have you reached with respect to this ambitious goal?

Today salesforce.com offers a total CRM package that includes Marketing Automation, Sales Force Automation, Customer Service Automation and soon Billing. We will continue to aggressively expand our products and offer solutions that meet our customers' needs. 

6. Salesforce.com has come a long way since its inception and has just been thru the industry's most bleak period. What are you planning for the future in terms of increasing your core area of technology and embracing newer technology that complements and supplements your existing range of products and solutions?

We are listening to our 6,200 customers, enhancing our products and services in line with their feedback and requests, and continuing to strengthen our product offerings to enhance appeal to large enterprises. To meet the acceleration in enterprise adoption of salesforce.com, we are also pursing strategic partnerships with major technology consulting firms, and in February, we announced a strategic alliance with PricewaterhouseCoopers. We also firmly believe technology is moving in the direction of on-demand services offered via the Internet. To that end, we will continue to develop products that keep people connected, anytime, anywhere. We just announced Outlook integration functionality, and later this year we will introduce additional technology enhancements, including document- and contracts-management features.

7. Which country do you think now has the most potential to absorb the CRM Market or where do you plan to expand services to? Which are the virgin territories that have the potential to explore the benefits of the CRM technology?

We have found tremendous global traction for the End of Software and our on-demand CRM solution, and have offices worldwide, spanning the US, Australia, Ireland, the UK, France, Spain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Japan. We just co-hosted a well-attended CRM conference in China, and we are formulating our launch plans now for China and the rest of Asia Pacific. 

8. Time and again, we've seen new technologies come and go, with no lasting effect. How do you think CRM is going to be any different?

CRM is about more than just the technology - it is a business philosophy and critical to a company's success. Customers are one of a company's core assets. In today's competitive environment, the more insight - not just data -- you have concerning your customers and what their needs are, the more ably you can create meaningful solutions and win their business time and time again. Any technology that helps a business manage and understand customer information, track their success and flag issues before they become problems is not going to disappear. 

About Jim Steele
Steele joined salesforce.com in October 2002 from Ariba Corporation, where he served as executive vice president of worldwide sales. He was responsible for global customer satisfaction and advocacy, expansion of direct and indirect sales channels worldwide and increased penetration in vertical markets.

Steele brings nearly 25 years of technology sales and executive management experience to his new role at salesforce.com. Previously, he served in a variety of globally focused executive roles at International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation. Most recently, Steele was vice president of the North America western region, where he was responsible for over $9 billion in hardware, software, and services sales of a 10,000 employee organization. His prior positions at IBM include more than 3 years in Tokyo as vice president of systems sales as well as general manager of telecommunications in Asia Pacific where he led IBM to record revenue and market share growth.

Mr. Steele holds a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from Bucknell University.

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