| By Vertical Market |
Similar to SAP's Business ByDesign and Microsoft's Dynamics CRM solutions, Salesforce.com empowers partners with an application development platform and AppExchange online marketplace to develop and distribute industry-specific solutions. Salesforce.com's designated vertical markets include communications, financial services, healthcare, high tech, manufacturing, media, non-profit, public sector and retail. Vertical solutions are generally more limited than those from enterprise wide application providers such as NetSuite and SAP as the bulk of Salesforce.com industry solution functionality and business processes are limited to front office, customer facing CRM operations.
Primary competitors with a similar vertical market software strategy include Microsoft's Dynamics Marketplace, NetSuite's SuiteApp.com, SAP's Business ByDesign ecosystem, Sage CRM's Partner Solution Source, SugarCRM's SugarExchange and Zoho's online Marketplace. |
| By Geography |
Salesforce.com is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with regional headquarters in Dublin (covering Europe, Middle East, and Africa), Singapore (covering Asia Pacific less Japan), and Tokyo (covering Japan). Other (largely sales) offices are in Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, and San Mateo, California.
With data centers in Singapore and Japan to address the Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Japanese markets, Salesforce.com may find an advantage for organizations that show preference for in-country data storage (although it does appear that data is replicated outside these countries for high availability purposes).
The Salesforce CRM application, along with online help and training documentation, are available in 16 languages: English, Dutch, Spanish, German, French, Finnish, Swedish, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Russian, Thai, Danish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. Also, end user languages available are Hungarian, Czech, Turkish, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian.
For reasons that are not clear, non-U.S. customers seem to pay about a 45% premium. For example, the Enterprise Edition in the European Union, Australia and Japan is priced at about €135/user/month, AU$180/user/month and ¥15,000/user/month respectively.
Salesforce.com has a few geographically specific partnerships. Regional partners include BT in the UK and Ireland (who also represents NetSuite and SugarCRM), CSK and CTS in Japan, and Stefanini in Brazil and Latin America.
Other global CRM solutions include Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite CRM+, Oracle CRM on Demand, RightNow, SAP Sales on Demand & Business ByDesign, and SugarCRM. |
