Salesforce Unveils Enhancements to the Salesforce Partner Program, Empowering App Innovators and Consultants to Drive Customer Success in New Ways

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 4, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- DREAMFORCE 2016 -- Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM company, today announced new enhancements to the world's largest "born in the cloud" partner program—including new technology benefits, enablement programs, marketing support and learning opportunities—to empower partners to drive customer success faster than ever before.

Salesforce partners achieved strong momentum this year, driven by thousands of customers deploying cloud solutions to digitally transform their businesses. In fact, IDC now predicts that Salesforce and its customers and partners will create nearly 1.9 million new jobs and more than $389 billion in new GDP impact worldwide by 2020.¹ And, in new data presented at Dreamforce, IDC revealed Salesforce partners report average year-over-year revenue growth of 48 percent, using the Salesforce Platform, Salesforce AppExchange and Salesforce Partner Program to lower barriers to development, increase their market reach and grow their businesses.²

As Salesforce's ecosystem rapidly grows and evolves, the company today unveiled several enhancements to the Salesforce Partner Program, including:

• New technology benefits: Salesforce partners today have unprecedented opportunities to build amazing apps, components and more on the Salesforce platform. With updates three times a year, the platform automatically gives partners new capabilities in each release, such as Salesforce Einstein. Partners can also create amazing experiences using Salesforce Lightning—an entirely new way to build apps and components via clicks, not code—and Lightning Bolt, which allows them to launch new communities, portals or customer-facing websites that instantly integrate with Salesforce. And with the launch today of Salesforce DX, a new developer experience, partners can continuously deliver innovative apps faster than ever with features such as scratch environments, an improved integrated development environment (IDE), seamless GitHub integration and more.
• New enablement programs: Salesforce is helping partners get to market faster with incredible new programs. With Security Review FastTrack, partners now can expedite the AppExchange security review process with special pre-screening assistance to quickly launch their apps on Salesforce AppExchange, the world's #1 business apps marketplace, while adhering to the strict standards customers expect. And to help partners future-proof their apps for the next wave of Salesforce innovation, the company is expanding the frequency and reach of its roadmap reviews with new pop-up labs with Salesforce Platform Architects at Salesforce events worldwide, and new quarterly roundtables with Gold Certified partners and above.
• New marketing support: With the new AppExchange in Lightning Experience launched today, the AppExchange is now surfaced inside Salesforce, promoting partner apps to customers and enabling them to seamlessly search and install apps without having to leave Salesforce. And to better market partner solutions internally to Salesforce's direct sales force, the company also launched improvements to nextlevel, an internal partner finder that allows Salesforce's own reps to find partner solutions faster by filtering by tier, industry and cloud specialization.
• New learning opportunities: Partners in record numbers are already tapping into Trailhead, a self-guided learning environment with modules on everything from culture to leadership to in-demand Salesforce skills, with more than 200,000 badges earned by partners to date. With the new Lightning Superbadge in Trailhead, partners can now highlight their expertise in building amazing Lightning apps for customers. And Salesforce today is also expanding its certification program with two new certs: System Architect and Application Architect, part of the revamped Certified Architect Framework.

Comments on the News

• "Salesforce's born-in-the-cloud partner ecosystem is rapidly growing and changing—partner types are morphing together, new app categories like Lightning components are emerging and partners are increasingly leading digital transformation initiatives with customers," said Tyler Prince, EVP Alliances and Go-to-Market Innovation, Salesforce. "With these new enhancements to the Salesforce Partner Program announced today, we hope to continue providing our partners with the right tools and resources to grow, thrive and drive customer success."
• "We've made a bet on the Salesforce platform to drive customer success in web content management," said Doug Girvin, Founder & CEO, Stantive. "The Salesforce Partner Program continues to play an invaluable role in our company's growth, whether it's easy-to-use development tools on the App Cloud, listing our app on the AppExchange, or tapping into the program's business and technology benefits."

Additional Resources

• Download a full copy of the IDC "Salesforce Economy" study at: http://www.salesforce.com/assets/pdf/misc/IDC-salesforce-economy-study-2016.pdf
• Like Salesforce on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/salesforce.
• Visit the Salesforce AppExchange at http://www.appexchange.com.
• Salesforce Trailhead: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/
• Learn more about Salesforce Certifications at http://certification.salesforce.com/
• Follow @salesforce 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, Salesforce1 and others are among the trademarks of salesforce.com, inc. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. © 2016 salesforce.com. All rights reserved.

¹Source: IDC white paper, sponsored by Salesforce, August 2016, "The Salesforce Economy: Enabling 1.9 Million New Jobs and $389 Billion in New Revenues over the Next Five Years." Ecosystem includes all companies that provide the products and services that surround a Salesforce implementation.
²Source: IDC white paper, sponsored by Salesforce, October 2016, "The Salesforce Economy: The ISV Advantage"; N=75 partners surveyed.

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