SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 16 /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 that it has received a Wall Street Journal 2008 Technology Innovation Award for the Force.com Platform. The Force.com Platform is specifically designed for building business applications that run in the cloud. The Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards honor companies which have developed innovative solutions that break new ground in their field and demonstrate measurable impact.

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"Companies worldwide are using our Force.com Platform to run their business in the cloud," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "Instead of buying and maintaining cumbersome hardware and software, businesses can use the Force.com Platform to build and run their enterprise applications as a service. We're deeply honored to be recognized by Wall Street Journal and its esteemed panel of judges for the industry impact and customer success Force.com delivers."

The Wall Street Journal received more than 700 entries for the Innovation Awards. An independent panel of judges selected the top technologies in 16 industry categories including computing systems, energy, medical devices and network security. In its review, the Wall Street Journal noted salesforce.com's tenure in Software as a Service and remarked that a company can use Force.com "to build its own customized business applications that are developed and delivered over the Internet." Currently, more than 47,000 salesforce.com customers are using the Force.com Platform to customize and integrate business solutions as well as to build new applications.

Judges of the Wall Street Journal 2008 Technology Innovation Awards include: Mark Bernstein, Palo Alto Research Center; Larry Bock, Lux Capital; Asheem Chandna, Greylock Partners; Robert Drost, Sun Microsystems; Peter Graf, SAP; Barry H. Jaruzelski, Booz & Co.; Anthony Komaroff, Harvard Medical School; Richard S. Lang, Cleveland Clinic; Pedro Nueno, IESE Business School, Spain; Ray Rothrock, Venrock; Jane Royston, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology; Darlene J.S. Solomon, Agilent Technologies; Kenny Tang, Oxbridge Climate Capital; Peter Terwiesch, ABB; and William Webb, Office of Communications, U.K.

An awards ceremony will be held October 21 at the Sofitel Hotel in Redwood City, California. For a complete list of winners, visit http://www.wsj.com.

Force.com Platform and the AppExchange

Force.com reinvents the traditional development, deployment and distribution of any business application with platform-as-a-service. Developers, customers and partners can use Force.com to easily create a new generation of on-demand applications and deploy them worldwide as a service. Force.com allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace, enabling all the innovation that Force.com unleashes to be easily distributed to the entire on-demand community.

The AppExchange economy continues to expand, with thousands of customers installing thousands of applications via the AppExchange. Customers of all sizes can quickly and easily extend Salesforce with additional on-demand business applications available on the AppExchange, found at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.

About The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal, the flagship publication of Dow Jones & Company is the world's leading business publication. Founded in 1889, The Wall Street Journal has a print and online circulation of more than 2 million, reaching the nation's top business and political leaders, as well as investors across the country. Holding 33 Pulitzer Prizes for outstanding journalism, The Wall Street Journal provides readers with trusted information and knowledge to make better decisions. The Wall Street Journal print franchise has more than 750 journalists world-wide, part of the Dow Jones network of nearly 1,900 business and financial news staff. Other publications that are part of The Wall Street Journal franchise, with a global audience of 3.8 million, include The Wall Street Journal Asia and The Wall Street Journal Europe. The Wall Street Journal Online at WSJ.com is the largest paid subscription news site on the Web with 10.9 million users each month. In 2008, the Journal was ranked No. 1 in BtoB's Media Power 50 for the ninth consecutive year. The Wall Street Journal Radio Network services news and information to more than 280 radio stations in the U.S.

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, 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 Force.com AppExchange marketplace available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.

As of July 31, 2008, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 47,700 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.

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