SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com
(NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced the acquisition of
InStranet, the leading provider of knowledge management technology for
business to consumer (B2C) call centers. The acquisition brings powerful
knowledge base Dimensions technology to Salesforce CRM Customer Service &
Support, enabling customers and call center agents around the world to quickly
find the answer they need, the first time. The addition of this game-changing
technology and approximately 350,000 global call center agents aggressively
accelerates the momentum of Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support in the
growing customer service and support market, which is currently estimated at
$3.4 billion by Gartner (Gartner, Market Trends: CRM Software, Worldwide,
2007-2012, March 31, 2008).
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"I'd like to welcome the InStranet team to salesforce.com," said Marc
Benioff, chairman and CEO at salesforce.com. "We're excited to add this
unmatched technology to our SaaS applications and Force.com platform. Not only
will it make our service and support offering stronger for our customers and
further their success, but it will help catapult our growth in the customer
service and support space."
"Delivering our technology as a service had become a key focus for us due
to strong interest from our customers," said Alex Dayon, founder and CEO of
InStranet. "This is an exciting opportunity for all of us at InStranet, and
will be a huge leap forward for the SaaS market."
"This acquisition gives Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support unique
technology that provides a better approach to knowledge base management," said
Sheryl Kingstone, director, Enterprise Research at Yankee Group. "And the
timing is ripe -- companies have been asking for a better way to organize
their corporate knowledge to serve customers, and this acquisition will help
salesforce.com differentiate itself from the competition."
The Customer Service and Support Market Opportunity -- Turning Agents into
Brand Champions and Customers into Evangelists
Among the top five providers of customer service applications,
salesforce.com was the fastest growing by revenue in 2007 (Source: IDC,
"Worldwide Customer Service Applications 2008 Vendor Shares: Economic
Uncertainty Will Drive Service Applications," Doc # 213028, July 2008).
Thousands of customers around the world such as Qualcomm, Transunion,
Corporate Express, and Misys have already standardized on Salesforce CRM
Customer Service & Support. According to Gartner, at least 75% of customer
contact centers will use a form of SaaS by 2013 (Gartner, Magic Quadrant for
CRM Customer Service Contact Centers, Maoz, March 19, 2008).
Traditional customer service and support vendors' "search and hope"
approach using keyword search technology has been riddled with failure:
Customers struggle because they can't find the right answer to their questions
through Web-based self-service portals, and call center agents are more
challenged than ever to help customers due to the large amount and complexity
of information buried in their knowledge bases. According to IDC, searchers
fail to find what they are looking for 30-50% of the time (Source: IDC,
"Microsoft Buys Powerset Up the Web Search Ante," Doc # lcUS 21330608, July
2008).
InStranet has solved the customer service and support challenge by taking
a completely different approach to knowledge base management through its
patented knowledge base Dimensions technology, which adds the customer's
context, such as product or geography, to the knowledge base to quickly hone
in on the right solution and eliminate irrelevant search results. This
powerful technology provides call center agents with accurate answers to
customer questions at an unmatched speed and greatly improves customers'
Web-based self-service experience, drastically reducing the number of calls to
call center agents by frustrated customers. Given that Yankee Group estimates
that a customer service call costs $5.50 on average (Yankee Group, Great
Expectations: Self Service Success Can Happen, Kingstone, May 2006),
InStranet's customers are saving money and providing higher levels of customer
satisfaction.
In addition, because of the technology's open architecture, it provides
rapid time to value, with deployments taking place in weeks as opposed to
months. This approach has found tremendous customer success in the most
demanding enterprises, including some of the world's largest call centers
supporting more than 35,000 agents. Salesforce.com is adding this technology
innovation as a key component to Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support,
enhancing its Call Center and Customer Portal applications in use today by
thousands of companies around the world.
"Salesforce CRM Customer Service & Support has already revolutionized our
support centers by bringing the benefits of SaaS to our support personnel
around the globe," said Peter Rubenacker, vice president, Information
Technology, Qualcomm. "The addition of this knowledge base Dimensions
technology provides a valuable extension of their platform."
"This technology has had a significant impact on our ability to rapidly
launch new clients and maximize our agents' efficiency. Our 7,000 customer
service representatives use the solution on a daily basis, and I see further
growth potential," said Alan Giles, CTO, Transcom. "InStranet discovered how
to filter out the noise created by the explosion of information that customers
and agents must navigate. The combination of InStranet's technology and
Salesforce CRM makes a lot of sense."
Salesforce.com Acquires InStranet
Salesforce.com's acquisition of InStranet closed on August 4, 2008, for
approximately $31.5 million, which includes the assumption of $4.2 million in
cash on InStranet's balance sheet. This acquisition does not have an impact on
salesforce.com's results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2009, which
will be announced later today.
InStranet is headquartered in Chicago, IL, with most of its operations in
Paris, France. As part of its ongoing commitment to customer success,
salesforce.com will continue to support InStranet customers and plans to fully
integrate the seasoned InStranet management team and employees.
Additional information will be available during salesforce.com's quarterly
results call scheduled for 2:00pm PT/5:00 pm/ET today. Press, analysts, and
investors may access the event by visiting http://www.salesforce.com/investor.
About Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The company's
portfolio of SaaS applications, including its award-winning CRM application,
available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways
that customers manage and share business information over the Internet. The
company's Force.com PaaS enables customers, developers and partners to build
powerful on-demand applications that deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy
across the enterprise. Applications built on the Force.com platform, available
at http://www.force.com, can be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a
few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace available at
http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.
As of April 30, 2008, salesforce.com manages customer information for
approximately 43,600 customers including ABN AMRO, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan
Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, Sprint Nextel, 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.
"Safe harbor" statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act
of 1995: This press release contains forward-looking statements about our
acquisition of InStranet, Inc., including statements about the market for
InStranet and salesforce.com products and services and the growth of the
customer service and support and knowledge base and knowledge management
markets, the achievement of which involve risks, uncertainties and
assumptions. If any such risks or uncertainties materialize or if any of the
assumptions prove incorrect, our results could differ materially from the
results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements we make.
The risks and uncertainties referred to above include -- but are not
limited to -- risks associated with the integration of InStranet, and its
technology, rates of growth in the customer service and support and knowledge
base and knowledge management markets, acceptance by customers and partners of
the solutions of the combined companies and our ability to retain and motivate
InStranet employees.
Further information on these and other factors is included in the reports
on Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K and in other filings we make with the Securities
and Exchange Commission from time to time, including our Form 10-Q that will
be filed for the quarter ended July 31, 2008 and our Form 10-K for the fiscal
year ended January 31, 2008. These documents are available on the SEC Filings
section of the Investor Information section of our website at
http://www.salesforce.com/investor.
Salesforce.com, inc. assumes no obligation and does not intend to update
these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.
Copyright (c) 2008 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
