Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), a leader in on-demand business services, recently said that KONE, one of the world’s leading elevator and escalator companies, is expanding their deployment of Salesforce’s multi-tenant, on-demand CRM to 2,560 staff in 43 countries to maximize sales effectiveness and efficiency and help the company to deepen its customer focus.

Utilizing the Salesforce Platform, KONE is customizing the application and developing a seamless integration with the company’s SAP back-office environment, which will further accelerate the value of the implementation.

As previously announced, salesforce.com revenues in Europe for the quarter ended April 30, 2007 were up 71% from the same quarter a year ago. All of these customers, including KONE, are part of the 32,300 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of April 30, 2007. Revenue and subscribers will be recognized as the service is delivered.

With the elevator and escalator market moving towards a commodity model, KONE needed to distinguish itself by deepening relationships with its customers. After a five-year total cost of ownership study, usability reviews and time to value evaluation was completed, KONE was convinced that salesforce.com was the right choice.

Following pilot deployments in the U.S., the Netherlands, and Ireland, KONE will implement Salesforce in a further 40 countries and in 12 languages. Leveraging Salesforce Connect, all customer, escalator and elevator equipment — and contract information — is currently being integrated with Salesforce, and the prospect tendering system, orders and customer billing data will be integrated shortly.

By year-end, the Web-based automated lead management system will also be integrated, offering true end-to-end, web-to-leads functionality. In addition, the Salesforce Platform has enabled the business team to create its own customized tabs, fields, layouts and workflow themselves, with minimal support either from the salesforce.com Professional Services team involved on the overall program, or from KONE’s own internal IT department.

About KONE
KONE is one of the world’s leading elevator and escalator companies. It provides customers with industry-leading elevators and escalators and innovative solutions for their maintenance and modernization. KONE also provides maintenance of automatic building doors. In 2005, KONE had annual net sales of euro 3.2 billion and approximately 27,000 employees.

Salesforce Platform and the AppExchange
Salesforce Platform is the on-demand platform for the next generation of business applications. Salesforce Platform reinvents traditional customization and integration and enables a whole new generation of on-demand applications that go beyond client/server computing. The Salesforce Platform allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com’s AppExchange directory, enabling all the innovation that the Salesforce Platform unleashes to benefit the entire on-demand community.

More than 600 applications are now available on salesforce.com’s AppExchange, the world’s first on-demand application directory, found at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.

Apex Code is available today for developer preview, and is currently scheduled to be available in beta to salesforce.com customers later in 2007.

About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company’s Salesforce suite of on-demand CRM applications allows customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. The Salesforce Platform, the world’s first on- demand platform, enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful new on-demand applications that extend beyond CRM to deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy and The Business Web across the enterprise. The Salesforce Platform allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com’s AppExchange directory, available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com’s world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.