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We are looking to tie-up with partners with cloud capabilities

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DQC Bureau
New Update

The Indian market is not yet fully aware about the benefits of cloud

solutions. Thompson revealed that Salesforce.com is keen on changing that

mindset with the company's newest offering, Chatter

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A lot of small and medium enterprises are apprehensive about cloud

offerings in India. As a top cloud service provider, how will Salesforce.com

plan to do in creating awareness about cloud in the SMB segment?



I see growing trust in the marketplace as more and more leading

organizations are placing their bets on Salesforce.com. When major organizations

like Citibank and Japan Post are comfortable with cloud computing, you start to

see the change from interest to adoption. This is what we saw during our last

fiscal year, in which our India customer base grew by 42 percent, winning over

customers like Bajaj Auto Finance. We have 36,000 developers in India, and I

think you'll continue to see more and more developers choosing to build their

applications on Force.com rather than in traditional development platforms.

How many partners do you have in India? What kind of channel plans or

channel expansion plans you have in India for 2010?



We are always looking for strategic relationships with good partners who are

committed to customer success and have the capability to deliver and implement

cloud computing solutions. We have a diverse community of implementation

partners-from cloud computing pure play specialists like Astadia, Lister, CRM

Orbit and Compro to global systems integrators such as, Wipro, Deloitte, and

Accenture-that have established Salesforce.com centers of excellence to ensure

all of our customers, large and small, in every region are achieving customer

success.

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A lot of enterprises are hesitant in shifting to cloud because of security

conserns. What is Salesforce's take on such concers?



One of the major benefits of security in a multi-tenant cloud like

Salesforce.com is that all customers benefit from the same rigorous security

standards set by some of the most security-conscious organizations in the world

like Citibank, Japan Post, Symantec, and many public sector organizations. Every

customer benefits from our efforts to exceed those standards. Salesforce.com has

also received formal certifications like the SAS70 Type II and ISO 27001.

How do you plan to market Salesforce Chatter in India? Would the promotion

of the product only be confined to online advertising? Do you feel Chatter would

be able to minimize the usage of e-mails in organizations?



When Chatter is made available later this year, it will be free and

available to more than two million Salesforce.com users. There is no question

that Chatter will decrease e-mail volume-we see this trend within our own

internal deployment of Chatter. Additionally, it will bring with it a host of

smart and friendly collaboration tools that will revolutionize the enterprise

collaboration space.

What would be your focus segment in India, in the context of both CRM and

Chatter services?



The beauty of the Salesforce.com public cloud is that it makes world class

enterprise applications available to both small and large organizations, from

one user to more than 100,000 users. There's a significant amount of interest in

India from customers of all sizes who are looking to implement the public Cloud

as a way to rationalize the cost of their existing IT infrastructure, but also

as a means to respond faster to market requirements with innovative applications

and services.

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Brief us about Salesforce.com's future plans in India.



We will continue to build a business that focuses around customer success

that includes strategic partners. We are bullish about India's appetite for

running and developing enterprise applications in the cloud. We intend to

increase our presence in India to capitalize on pent up demand from small and

large enterprises looking for enterprise class CRM that can be implemented in

days or weeks, versus months or years.

We also see an opportunity to work more with developers in India. People are

often surprised to hear that we have 36,000 independent developers in India

developing applications on Force.com, our development platform. Force.com has

created an explosion of creativity and diversity in the developer community and

we believe we're going to see more innovations coming from India in the next few

years.

Bharat Sharma



bharats@cybermedia.co.in

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