Salesforce.com Unveils Apex Alliance; Dozens of Partners, Customers and Venture Capital Firms Support Salesforce.com's Apex, the

Accenture, Adobe, Borland, Business Objects, Cingular Wireless, Citrix, Dell, Deloitte, Informatica, Palm, RIM, Satyam, Siemens, Skype, SOFTBANK BB, Sprint Nextel, Sybase, Symantec, TATA Consultancy Services and Other Industry Leaders Embrace Apex On-Demand Language and Platform


SAN FRANCISCO - SALESFORCE.COM DREAMFORCE CONFERENCE - Oct. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced the Apex Alliance, a select group of industry leaders, including salesforce.com customers, industry partners, and venture capital firms, supporting Apex, the world's first on-demand programming language and platform. For the first time, all members of salesforce.com's community have access to the same power to create as the company's own developers. The announcement was made today at Dreamforce '06, salesforce.com's user and developer conference.

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The Apex Alliance features dozens of salesforce.com partners, including industry leaders Accenture [NYSE: ACN], Adobe [Nasdaq: ADBE], Astadia, Bluewolf, Business Objects [Nasdaq: BOBJ], Cingular Wireless [NYSE: T], Citrix [Nasdaq: CTXS], Dell [Nasdaq: DELL], Deloitte, ExactTarget, Harte-Hanks [NYSE: HHS], Hoover's [NYSE: DNB], Informatica [Nasdaq: INFA], OKERE, Omniture [Nasdaq: OMTR], Palm [Nasdaq: PALM], Research In Motion (RIM) [Nasdaq: RIMM; TSX: RIM], Satyam [NYSE: SAY], ShareMethods, Siemens [NYSE: SI], Skype [Nasdaq: EBAY], SOFTBANK BB, Sprint Nextel [NYSE: S], Sybase [NYSE: SY], Symantec [Nasdaq: SYMC], TATA Consultancy Services, Tibco [Nasdaq: TIBX] and many more.

Apex will run on Dell and Intel architecture in salesforce.com data centers using Dell's new 1x50 architecture.

"With Apex, salesforce.com is changing the idea of what an on-demand application can be," said Michael Dell, chairman of Dell. "And at Dell, we're proud of the fact that the Apex platform is running on hundreds of Dell PowerEdge servers. I believe that salesforce.com has established a new standard that the industry will look to for innovation on demand."

Salesforce.com customers at the forefront of on-demand application development and deployment are in support of the Apex Alliance, including AlliedBarton Security Services, Analog Devices Inc. [NYSE: ADI], Bandwidth.com, Bella Pictures, Bennett's Business Systems, Borland [Nasdaq: BORL], DoubleClick [Nasdaq: DCLK], Dow Jones [NYSE: DJ], Esker S.A., Fios, First Advantage CREDCO [Nasdaq: FADV], Jobscience, K/P Corporation, Kaiser Permanente, Magma Design Automation, Payment Processing, Inc., Phoenix Technologies, Symbol Technologies [NYSE: SBL], The Phoenix Companies [NYSE: PNX] and Vicon.

Additionally, venture capital firms supporting the initiative include Angel Investors, Emergence Capital Partners, Hummer Winblad and Minor Ventures.

"Apex is a fundamental breakthrough in the scope and scale of on-demand applications," said Marc Benioff, salesforce.com chairman and CEO. "With Apex, the entire community will have the same creative power as our own developers. When you empower the community with creativity and simultaneously remove barriers and complexity, amazing things can happen."

Apex Alliance

The Apex Alliance is a select group of industry leaders, including salesforce.com customers, industry partners, and venture capital firms who share a common vision of the power, innovation and benefits of the on-demand computing model and multi-tenant application development that will be delivered through the new salesforce.com Apex programming language and platform. The Apex Alliance will fuel and encourage multi-tenant application development and adoption and help drive critical new advances for the on- demand community.

Apex -- Salesforce.com's Breakthrough On-Demand Programming Language and Platform

Apex, salesforce.com's breakthrough new on-demand programming language and platform, will empower the on-demand community to create the future of multi- tenant application development. Apex was announced in a separate release today. For more information, please visit http://www.salesforce.com/apex.

Apex will enable customers, developers and partners to build powerful new on-demand applications that go far beyond CRM, and for the first time, write their own code and have it run with the security, reliability, upgradeability and ease-of-use of salesforce.com's industry-leading multi-tenant service. Customers will be able to use Apex to modify the core features and functionality of their Salesforce deployments for their unique business needs and quickly and easily integrate new applications and components from partners and developers. Without any infrastructure investment, anyone will be able to build on-demand applications with unprecedented power to innovate with the same creative freedom as salesforce.com's own developers.

Customers will be able to expand the success that they have found with Salesforce on-demand business applications far deeper into the enterprise with more complex applications like financials, ecommerce and inventory management. They will also be able to create any custom application on demand, faster, with less complexity and more power than previously possible.

Over 150,000 test drives and 14,000 customer installations have taken place of the more than 400 applications that are now available on the salesforce.com AppExchange, the world's first on-demand directory, found at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.

Availability

The Apex platform is currently scheduled for availability in conjunction with Salesforce Winter '07, and the Apex language is currently scheduled for availability in the first half of 2007. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services.  The company's Salesforce suite of on-demand applications enables customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. Apex, salesforce.com's on-demand programming language and platform, will enable customers and partners to quickly and easily customize and integrate the Salesforce suite to meet their unique business needs, and to build powerful new on-demand applications, without any infrastructure investment. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com's world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.

As of July 31, 2006, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 24,800 customers and approximately 501,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), America Online (AOL), Avis/Budget Rent A Car (Cendant Rental Car Group), Dow Jones Newswires, Nokia, 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 http://www.salesforce.com/, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

Salesforce.com is a registered trademark of, and Apex, AppExchange and Successforce are trademarks of, salesforce.com, Inc., San Francisco, California. Other names used may be trademarks of their respective owners. 

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