Verticals onDemand And Salesforce.Com Join Forces To Bring The Power Of Platform-as-a-Service To The Life Sciences Industry

Verticals onDemand and Salesforce.com, Inc., the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, recently announced that Verticals onDemand will package its VBioPharma CRM application with Force.com, the world's first Platform-as-a-Service, to provide customers with the first on-demand solution for the life sciences industry.

Verticals onDemand's VBioPharma CRM application demonstrates the strength, flexibility, and robustness of Force.com. The innovative Platform-as-a-Service technology from salesforce.com has made it possible for Verticals onDemand to cost-effectively develop four highly specific editions of the application to meet the unique needs of different types of pharma sales teams. Since its launch in July, VBioPharma has been selected by five life sciences organizations, including Indevus Pharmaceuticals, Solstice Neurosciences, and Publicis Managed Markets.

"We went through a rigorous and competitive review process and realized that with Verticals onDemand and Salesforce, we truly get the best of both worlds," explained Rick Norton, executive director of sales operations at Indevus Pharmaceuticals. "We get the world's leading on-demand technology platform and a highly tailored, pharmaceutical-specific application that immediately meets our end user requirements."

The Force.com platform replaces traditional software platforms with Platform-as-a-Service, a complete and scalable service that allows developers to focus on creating applications that solve specific business issues instead of creating the complex software and infrastructure required to run them. The Force.com platform provides the necessary building blocks for creating any business application – simple or sophisticated – and automatically deploying it as a service to both small teams and huge enterprises.

"By leveraging the Force.com platform, Verticals onDemand is empowering life sciences organizations of any size or type to reap the benefits of a PaaS CRM application that truly meets their specific needs," said George Hu, chief marketing officer at salesforce.com. "This joint work with Verticals onDemand delivers an industry-leading on-demand solution for the global pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industries."

Peter Gassner, president & chief executive officer of Verticals onDemand concluded, "The Force.com platform gives us a significant advantage over the traditional client/server competitors in the market today. Our customers will increase their CRM success through faster innovation, improved usability, and tremendous flexibility.

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 www.salesforce.com/appexchange.

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 www.salesforce.com/appexchange. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com's world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.

As of July 31, 2007, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 35,300 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 VBioPharma
VBioPharma is the first suite of SaaS CRM applications designed specifically for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. It is the easiest to use and most flexible Pharma CRM solution, and is the only one that integrates functionality for primary care, specialty care, managed markets, and KOL management. VBioPharma is priced on a per user per month basis. Customers will license VBioPharma and the Force.com Unlimited Platform Edition directly from Verticals onDemand.

About Verticals onDemand
Verticals onDemand is the emerging Software as a Service (SaaS) market leader in customer relationship management (CRM) solutions for specific industry segments. Founded by software industry veterans, the company combines deep industry domain expertise, CRM deployment experience, and SaaS operations savvy with Force.com, the world's first Platform-as-a-Service. With an initial focus on the life sciences industry, Verticals onDemand customers will achieve the fastest time to value through the deployment of fully functional CRM applications that are simple to deploy, inexpensive to operate, and provide a superior user experience.

Verticals onDemand is a privately-held company headquartered in Pleasanton, CA. For more information, visit www.verticalsondemand.com.

SOURCE: Verticals onDemand and Salesforce.com, Inc