Salesforce.com Positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation

SAN FRANCISCO, July 29, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, today announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders quadrant of the "Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation."(1)

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Leaders demonstrate a market-defining vision of how technology can help the top sales executives achieve business objectives. Leaders have the ability to execute against that vision through products, services and demonstrated, solid business results in the form of revenue and earnings. Leaders have significant successful customer deployments in North America, EMEA and the Asia/Pacific region in a wide variety of vertical industries with multiple proof points above 500 users.  Leaders are often what other providers in the market measure themselves against.

Comments on the News

• "We believe salesforce.com's leadership position is a direct result of our commitment to innovation," said Alex Dayon, EVP of applications, salesforce.com.  "The social and mobile capabilities of our flagship Sales Cloud product along with Chatter and Jigsaw deliver the tools today's sales people need to be effective and successful in their work."

Salesforce.com Innovations Pave the Way for Enterprises to Become Social

• The Sales Cloud is the world's leading app for connecting and selling to customers.  With Salesforce Chatter at the heart of the Sales Cloud, sales reps can collaborate across sales and other departments from any desktop or mobile device to close deals faster. In a recent survey, Sales Cloud customers reported an average 30 percent increase in sales, 27 percent increase in deal size, 25 percent increase in win rate, and 33 percent increase in productivity.(2)
• Salesforce.com is paving the way for enterprises to become social, with innovations like the Jigsaw Data Cloud, which instantly delivers accurate business contact data to the Sales Cloud.  Jigsaw has helped sales professionals increase productivity, response rates and overall sales effectiveness. By leveraging social collaboration for data creation, accuracy and distribution, Jigsaw has combined the cloud with the crowd to allow sales professionals to gain a data advantage over the competition.
• Recently Forbes Magazine named salesforce.com the world's most innovative company and chairman and CEO Marc Benioff the most innovative leader, based on an eight-year study by Harvard Business School Professor and master of disruptive innovation Clayton M. Christensen, along with colleagues Jeff Dyer, a professor at Brigham Young University, and Hal B Gregersen, a professor of leadership at INSEAD.

Additional Resources

• To access the full report, please visit: http://www.salesforce.com/form/pdf/sfa_magicquadrant_gartner.jsp
• For more information about the Sales Cloud, please visit: http://www.salesforce.com/crm/sales-force-automation/
• Follow @salesforce on Twitter

About the Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2011 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company that has transformed the way companies collaborate and communicate. Salesforce.com is leading the effort to bring Cloud 2, the next paradigm for computing, to the enterprise by offering its customers the social collaboration, mobility and openness that are the hallmark of this new world. The company's platform and application services include:  

• Salesforce Chatter, a private social network for your enterprise
• The Sales Cloud, for sales force automation and contact management
• The Service Cloud, for customer service and support solutions
• Radian6, for social media monitoring and engagement
• The Jigsaw Data Cloud, for data integrity and quality
• The Force.com platform, for custom application development
• Heroku, for building social and mobile apps in Ruby
• 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 April 30, 2011, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 97,700 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://salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

Copyright (c) 2011 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) Gartner "Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation" by Robert P. Desisto, July 14, 2011.
(2) Salesforce.com Customer Relationship Survey conducted April 2011, by an independent third-party, MarketTools Inc., on 4,500+ customers randomly selected.  

SOURCE Salesforce.com