COOPER: AdWords has been received well. Our long standing relationship with Google is helping our customers manage lead generation, within Salesforce.com. A customer can search for Google AdWords, manage it and pay for purchases within minutes. Over the past 18 months, this is now becoming a challenge, as there are a lot of companies who rely on the local channel for marketing and being able to generate leads and translating them into revenue is proving difficult.

I think the online marketing space in APAC has matured now. In terms of marketing the percentage spent on search has gone up of late. Markets are maturing now and they are increasingly becoming B2B. 80 percent of B2B searches in the US are through web search and APAC is certainly progressing that way. Businesses are educating themselves about information available on the web. They have realised it’s a quick channel as information flows faster.

COOPER: We launched Salesforce Knowledge about three months ago. That was the result of the acquisition of Instranet, which was into knowledge products. Salesforce utilized its knowledge making platform and changed it into an on-demand environment. Now we are moving it into Knowledge- as- a- Service. For all Salesforce products, customers don’t have to download any software they just apply for the service. That is probably what the next generation of companies is looking for. In terms of a service cloud, we find that they are functionally rich. They allow concentration of a knowledge base and reduce the time required to resolve customer queries.

COOPER: The core competence of an SMB lies in managing its IT environment. It’s the ability to leverage the technology and the expertise to use it, which helps technology tick. So the proposition for an SMB is arguably more attractive, as for an SMB you don’t need a lot of capital, or additional headcount or overheads. More importantly it will never be latent with its adoption of technology, so these companies keep themselves up to date with the latest technology propositions.

COOPER: We do that in a number of ways. First of all we have a core value around trust and transparency and the reflection of that is our website trust.salesforce.com. The website provides anybody, whether it’s a customer or a partner, or an employee or even a competitor with real time feasibility and performance of their datacenter. We allow our customers to take our data in any frequency and format that they want. So if you put your data in Salesforce service, we can deliver your data and updates every week. But the cornerstone of what we do is set standards around the security of a customer’s data. The real test of this is when the customer uses his data and sees for himself the security. I think the most diligent industry around data security is the financial services industry, and globally over 1800 financial services companies rely on Salesforce to manage their data. In some markets which maybe amateur about cloud computing, we just want to concentrate on building on our heritage.

COOPER: I think that’s a myth to be honest. Cloud computing for Salesforce.com is essentially a one size fits all application. Even if you are a one person company or a 100,000 person company cloud computing will work for you, you can leverage it. What we provide is capabilities, through which our customers can customize their applications. For example you can log on to Yahoo, and you are able to customize it to your requirements and migrate fully every time Yahoo upgrades their application or do anything on their back end. This is huge for the future of CRM, which is the ability to customize applications to the user level.

COOPER: We do have relationships with smaller brands, going right down to local service providers in countries such as India. At the application level we are working with a lot of firms around applications like AppExchange, the online applications territory or those companies that have their applications on Salesforce platforms like Force.com. Salesforce.com would like to jointly focus with other companies on meeting targets and tapping more opportunities. We would like to have a heavy portfolio with as many partnerships as possible.

COOPER: We are working that out at the moment. At present we have a largely direct model, but we are currently working with a number of companies in India to work out the role of resellers. We want to do this to increase our reach and get down to the local level. We should have a statement out around these partnerships by the end of the year.

COOPER: That’s not entirely true. Our application is built on the Oracle database, there is no question about that and we would not want to hide that. But around that application we have built technology with applications and a lot of infrastructure. The foundation of our CEO, Marc Benioff’s presentation at the Oracle shareholders conference was also on emphasizing that we have built a successful application on the Oracle database. More importantly when you look at Oracle’s other customers, who are using applications like ERP and financials, they are increasingly using Salesforce CRM as their standard.