Salesforce Chatter and the Force.com Platform Bring the Power of Cloud 2 to Stratus Technologies

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, today announced the success Stratus Technologies, a provider of ultra high availability on its servers, has achieved with salesforce.com as the cornerstone of its IT strategy. The 30-year old company, who prides itself for being at the leading edge of IT, began adopting Salesforce CRM applications in 2004 and is currently leveraging Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2, the Force.com platform and most recently emerged as one of Salesforce Chatter's early success stories.

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Salesforce.com enables Stratus to achieve greater levels of transparency across its company and into its customer base, providing more customer-focused decision making. The company chose Force.com as its custom development platform due to its availability, performance, scalability, and security as a cloud platform. It has built five custom applications that have improved the way the company manages its business:

• Professional services application, built in less than three weeks, to manage projects that track items like resources, expenses, and time from the conception of a project through to booked revenue;
• License management application for its services team to track each software license that has been purchased and make it easy for customers to log into the portal and download new licenses;
• Marketing automation application to track existing marketing assets and marketing spending;
• System-loaner application to track computer systems that have been loaned out to partners for purposes like software development; and
• Application for the legal team to manage patents and trademarks.

Stratus deployed Chatter, the first enterprise social collaboration app and platform, in the spring of 2010 in response to dissatisfaction with existing collaboration tools like Microsoft SharePoint. The company found great value in the way Chatter animates any system built on Force.com, particularly its custom applications, along with the below benefits:

• Employees can now "follow" a project in Chatter related to Stratus' custom applications for managing projects or tracking software licenses and receive real-time alerts to any changes in status;
• Roughly 90 percent of Stratus' support requests come directly from hardware at customer sites as part of its remote service management service, Chatter provides a way for individuals with a more peripheral interest to also stay abreast of any changes in an installation or an account;
• Provides unprecedented visibility by automatically pulling together business events from multiple systems in real time without having to rely on IT; and
• Offers customized activity streams that can be discussed, organized, routed, tagged, tracked and delivered in a personalized report even to a mobile device like the iPhone.

Comments on the News:

• "The five custom applications we've built using Force.com along with Chatter are providing new levels of efficiency and transparency across our business," said Joe Graves, CIO, Stratus Technologies. "Salesforce.com's Cloud 2 solutions are enabling us to focus on our mission to help customers keep critical business operations online without interruption."

Additional Resources:

• For more information on Stratus Technologies' success with salesforce.com, visit: http://www.salesforce.com/customers/hi-tech-hardware/stratus.jsp
• Follow @salesforce on Twitter

About Stratus Technologies

Stratus Technologies focuses exclusively on helping its customers keep critical business operations online without interruption. Based on 30 years of expertise in product and services technology for total availability, Stratus is a trusted solutions provider to customers in manufacturing, health care, financial services, public safety, transportation & logistics, and other industries. For more information, visit www.stratus.com.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. Based on salesforce.com's real-time, multitenant architecture, the company's platform and CRM applications (http://www.salesforce.com/crm) have revolutionized the way companies collaborate and communicate with their customers, including:

• The Sales Cloud, for sales force automation and contact management
• The Service Cloud, for customer service and support solutions
• Chatter, for social collaboration
• The Force.com platform, for custom application development
• The AppExchange, the world's leading marketplace for enterprise cloud computing applications

Salesforce.com offers the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing. As of July 31, 2010, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 82,400 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.

SOURCE salesforce.com