December 15, 2008 : Cathedral Partners Moves Its IT Infrastructure to the Cloud, Now Runs Public Website on New Force.com Sites Technology
SAN MATEO, Calif. and PHILADELPHIA, Pa. – December 15, 2008 – Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the enterprise cloud computing company, and Appirio (www.appirio.com), a leading partner of salesforce.com, today announced that Cathedral Partners has launched a unique new on-demand customer marketplace that connects buyers, sellers and advisers of privately-held companies, built entirely on the Force.com cloud computing platform. The portal matches buyers and sellers of businesses on criteria they define, and provides critical information that helps guide them through a more successful and shorter sales process. The new system was designed and developed in less than four months by Appirio, and it works seamlessly with Cathedral Partners' existing Salesforce CRM application. It also integrates with a new customer website built for Cathedral Partners by Appirio that runs on the recently introduced Force.com Sites technology.
Cathedral Partners is one of the 51,800 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of October 31, 2008. Revenue and subscribers will be recognized as the service is delivered.
"We have created a sophisticated, secure and scalable marketplace that enables us to serve the thousands of private equity firms, hedge funds, investment banks and private companies we work with today, along with a foundation that allows us to rapidly expand our business in the future," said Michael Wolverton, CEO of Cathedral Partners. "Working with cloud computing experts like Appirio and salesforce.com, we were able to create and implement a superior system in a very short amount of time and exceed our customers' expectations."
The new Cathedral Partners portal supports a subscription-based service in which the company advises and acts as a matchmaker between buyers and sellers of businesses – a service that until now has not existed for private companies. Prior to this, interested buyers such as private equity funds, venture capital firms, hedge funds and acquisitive companies had to individually identify businesses for sale, seek out company advisers, and manually research relevant background to confirm a potential match. Private companies interested in selling were in a similar predicament. Cathedral Partners' new global marketplace, which serves both buyers and sellers, makes this process much more targeted, efficient and cost effective.
The portal works together with Cathedral Partners' Salesforce CRM system and the company's Force.com Sites external website to provide a number of synergies. For example, removing data from duplicate systems has led to better visibility and reporting, and the automated workflow has eliminated time-consuming steps that previously could only be completed manually. Because these systems run on salesforce.com's global trusted infrastructure, the company has been able to keep IT expenses low and focus staff on increasing revenue and expanding offerings to better serve customers.
"The ability to drive revenue and offer customers a better experience without raising prices is critical for any company in today's economy," continued Wolverton. "By using cloud computing services from salesforce.com and relying on the expertise of Appirio to build on the Force.com platform, we're now able to focus on the core of our business and outsource the rest without sacrificing our competitive edge."
Force.com Sites, a new capability of the Force.com platform, allows customers to run their Web sites on salesforce.com's cloud computing infrastructure. Building their public Web site and other applications on salesforce.com's Force.com cloud computing infrastructure gives Cathedral Partners certain economies of scale without a huge up-front investment. Web sites and applications built on Force.com benefit from the security, scalability, performance, and multiple language, currency and device capabilities inherent in salesforce.com's platform. Because the underlying platform is open and easily integrated with other leading cloud computing services like those from Google, Facebook or Amazon, customers have an easier time expanding and evolving their own offerings in the future.
"The beauty of cloud computing platforms like Force.com is their ability to powerfully and cost effectively serve companies of all shapes and sizes – from smaller firms like Cathedral Partners to large multi-nationals around the world," said Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio. "The level of innovation at Cathedral Partners and other customers like them is paving the way for a whole new generation of cloud applications."
About Cathedral Partners
Cathedral Partners (www.cathedralpartners.com) was born from a need for private equity firms to more easily source deals from investment banks and business brokers. Founded in 2006 by a team of private equity and investment banking executives, Cathedral has worked with some of the world's largest corporations and institutions, and through technology innovation has rapidly evolved from an "offline" service provider into the only online global marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of privately held businesses.
About Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. 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 October 31, 2008, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 51,800 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.
About Appirio
Appirio (www.appirio.com) provides products and services that help enterprises accelerate their adoption of on-demand. Appirio has a proven track record of delivering business value to customers by implementing mission-critical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions based on platforms such as Salesforce and Google Apps, and developing innovative applications that connect and extend today's leading on-demand platforms. Appirio was founded in 2006, is the fastest growing partner of salesforce.com and Google, and is backed by Sequoia Capital.