Salesforce.com IInd Quater results summary:

Subscriber / Growth - We achieved a new milestone in customer additions by adding 3,000 net new customers during the quarter, to bring our total customer count to roughly 35,300. That's an increase of 10,500 customers in the past 12 months. Our subscriber base increased by more than 60% from the year-ago quarter to more than 800,000 subscribers around the globe. After taking roughly seven years to achieve our first 400,000 subscribers, we have more than doubled that total in the past six quarters. Not only are we adding record customer numbers in all areas of our business, but our customers are getting larger, too. A year ago, our largest customer had roughly 7,500 subscribers. Today, our installed base includes two customers with more than 30,000 subscribers, four customers with 20,000 or more subscribers and five customers over 10,000 and a remarkable 68 customers with more than 1,000 subscribers. That last number represents an increase of more than 40% over the number of customers with 1,000 or more subscribers that we reported just six months ago. Nothing says more about enterprise adoption than this explosive growth.

These results clearly demonstrate growing momentum in our technology and business model for customers of all sizes. In fact, Gartner recently positioned Salesforce.com above SAP, Microsoft and Oracle in the Leaders' Quadrant of the SFA Magic Quadrant for 2007. Gartner's report went on to predict that within three years, the majority of Salesforce deployments will be delivered as a service.

Customers - Salesforce platform edition was a certifiable hit. In addition to the large customer I just mentioned, the platform edition customer list now includes Saber, Celerant Consulting, Panasonic, Allianz, Bank of Oklahoma, Robert Half and Procter & Gamble.

In the second quarter, we also saw large enterprise deals for our more traditional CRM service. In the United States, it's at large accounts like IMS Health and Wells Fargo. Internationally, we also saw continued growth with new wins at Fortis, Arriva, Asia Netcom and Air Liquide. Increasingly, our enterprise customers are realizing the benefits of extending their salesforce deployments to their networks of partners, and that drove another record quarter for our PRM Edition.

After growing their salesforce deployment to more than 15,000 salespeople around the globe, Cisco has selected Salesforce.com to manage approximately 15,000 PRM subscribers at roughly 3,000 resellers around the globe. This brings their total deployment to more than 30,000 subscribers. Equally exciting, we also booked a 15,000 partner opportunity with Sprint Nextel, bringing their total subscriber deployment to more than 20,000 subscribers. We also saw exciting new PRM wins at SAP - sorry, S&P, that's Standard & Poor's, Sun, EMC and Sony. However, we are also happy to take SAP if they need us.

Competition - The competition continues to struggle with how to build, sell and deploy multi-tenant shared solutions and their underlying business model. The appeal to customers is undeniable, but for entrenched legacy vendors like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, to truly adopt this model is unthinkable. SAP's largest European customer, Siemens, selected Salesforce for customer relationship management in the second quarter. Of course, we already have SAP's largest global customer, DuPont. That's amazing. We also won IMS Health, Mercedes-Benz and Corning against SAP. These new accounts join a long list of legacy SAP accounts that are now using Salesforce.com, including Motorola, Symbol Technologies, Air Products, Ashland, Shell Energy, Chevron and many others.

One thing that no competitor can match these days is the Salesforce Platform, which gained dramatic momentum in the second quarter. We logged our first 100-million transaction day in the quarter and for the period. Our transactions totaled approximately 6.8 billion, a new record. While we delivered 119% more transactions this quarter, we delivered them at an average time of less than 0.25 seconds each, a 22% year-over-year improvement in speed.. That integration capability took a big leap forward this quarter, with our introduction of Salesforce SOA. This is a powerful set of technologies for enterprises as they continue to move to on-demand. We had our first-ever developer conference back in May, and now our developer community numbers more than 48,000. On the AppExchange, 348 ISVs have contributed to the 642 applications now available. Customers have now completed more than 251,000 test drives and 32,000 installs of on-demand applications from the AppExchange. Our platform is where partners go to build their own businesses into the next Salesforce.com.

Source:1

Tags: salesforce.com - earnings+call

Prashanth Rai