Can everybody hear me all right? Okay. Welcome to the stockholder meeting for Salesforce. I'm Marc Benioff. I'm the Chairman and CEO. For those of you who haven't been through a meeting like this before with us, and for those of you who are joining us online for this discussion, I'm going to be reading from a script for probably about, what, 10 minutes or so, 15 minutes. Graham is going to be doing a presentation, and then we're going to open it up for questions. Okay. That's kind of the agenda for the meeting. I'll look forward to hearing from all of you, and I will be now starting the script. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am Marc Benioff, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of Salesforce.
It is my pleasure on behalf of the Board of Directors and the officers of Salesforce to extend you a warm welcome and to express our appreciation for you, to you, for attending this meeting. I'd also like to welcome our stockholders who are listening to the webcast of this event. After we conduct the necessary formal business of the meeting, we'll give a short presentation about your company. I did not mention that I have our Board of Directors here to my right, if you didn't notice them. They tend not to say anything during the meeting, so we'll see if we can get them to speak later. Unlikely, though. Snide remarks, probably. I will act as Chairman of this meeting. Sam Fleischman to my left, Senior Vice President and General Counsel in Corporate of the company, will act as Secretary of this meeting.
I'm pleased to introduce our directors who are here with me, and here they are: Craig Conway, Alan Hassenfeld, Sandy Robertson, Larry Tomlinson, Maynard Webb, Shirley Young, and who did I miss? Craig Ramsey. Very good. Did I get everybody? Okay. As you can see, they're a very quiet group. There are also several company officers and employees in the audience. Also present are Aaron Alter of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, over here to my left, our outside legal counsel, Craig Smith of Ernst & Young LLP, our independent registered public accounting firm. Craig? Okay. Very good. On the other side of the room. The Board of Directors has appointed Kerry Altig, a representative of our transfer agent Computershare, to act as Inspector of Elections, right over here. Ms. Altig has previously taken her oath as Inspector of Elections.
Her oath will be filed with the minutes of this meeting. Almost all of our stockholders have already voted their proxies, and if you have any proxies to be counted, please raise your hand now so Ms. Altig can pick them up. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. All proxies will be voted as directed by each stockholder, as more fully described in the proxy statement. If you have voted by proxy, you do not need to take any further action. If you did not turn in a proxy or wish to vote in person or revoke a prior dated proxy, please raise your hand now and a ballot will be brought to you. At the outset, let me say that this meeting will be conducted in accordance with the agenda and rules of procedure. Copies of this document have been distributed to you.
If you don't have a copy, please raise your hand now and a copy will be provided. Sam Fleischman, to my left, will now present the affidavit of mailing of the notice of meeting and report on the existence of a quorum for the meeting.
Thank you, Marc. The Board of Directors set April 19, 2011, as the date of record for the stockholders' meeting. As of the close of business on April 19, 2011, there were 133,881,690 shares of common stock of the company outstanding and no shares of preferred stock of the company outstanding. Each stockholder of record is entitled to one vote for each share of common stock held by such stockholder. We have at this meeting a list of record stockholders as of that record date, and this list has been previously available at the company's headquarters for inspection by the stockholders. Mr. Chairman, I hereby present the affidavit of mailing of our transfer agent, which states that the notice of meeting and accompanying proxy materials and annual report were mailed on or about May 4, 2011, to stockholders of record as of the record date.
I have been advised by the Inspector of Elections that a majority of the company's issued and outstanding shares entitled to vote is represented in person or by proxy at today's meeting, and therefore a quorum is present and the business of this meeting can be conducted.
Very good. Thank you, Sam. The report of the Secretary on the existence of a quorum is accepted. I direct that the affidavit of mailing be made part of the minutes of the meeting. On the basis of the Secretary's report, I find that proper notice has been given and that a quorum is present. Accordingly, this meeting has been properly convened. We may now proceed to transact the business for which this meeting has been called. Sam, is there a representative present from the Florida State Board of Administration to speak on behalf of the stockholder support of the stockholder proposal?
Yes, Marc.
Sam, were there any stockholder nominations or proposals for business for this meeting properly filed with the Corporate Secretary that were not included in the company's proxy statement?
No, Marc.
Since no stockholder nominations or additional proposals were properly filed with the Corporate Secretary in advance of this meeting, the business of this meeting is limited to the five matters set forth in the company's proxy statement. The first item of business today is the election of directors. Three Class 1 directors are to be elected at today's meeting. The three must receive a majority of shares present in person or by proxy at this meeting to be elected as directors. The directors elected today will hold office until the 2014 annual meeting of stockholders and until their successors are duly elected and qualified, subject to earlier resignation or removal. As set forth in the company's proxy statement, the Board of Directors has nominated myself, Marc Benioff, Craig Conway, and Alan Hassenfeld. Is there any discussion with respect to the nominees for directors?
The second matter being submitted to stockholders for action is the ratification of the appointment by the Board of Directors of Ernst & Young LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2012. The affirmative vote of at least a majority of the shares represented in person or by proxy at this meeting is required for such ratification. Are there any questions for the company or Mr. Smith of Ernst & Young regarding the second proposal? The third matter being submitted to stockholders for action is the advisory vote to approve the resolution on the compensation of the named executive officers for the 2011 fiscal year. Our stockholders are being asked to vote on the following resolution.
Resolved that the stockholders of Salesforce approve on an advisory basis the compensation of the named executive officers as disclosed in the company's proxy statement for the 2011 annual meeting of stockholders pursuant to the compensation disclosure rules of the SEC, including the compensation discussion and analysis, the fiscal year 2011 summary compensation table, and the other compensation tables and narrative disclosure within the executive compensation and other matters section of such proxy statement. The affirmative vote of at least a majority of the shares represented in person or by proxy at this meeting is required for the approval of such resolution. The Board has recommended a vote in favor of this proposal.
The Board of Directors and our Compensation Committee value the opinions of our stockholders and to the extent there is any significant vote against the named executive officer compensation as disclosed in the proxy statement, we'll consider our stockholders' concerns and the Compensation Committee will evaluate whether any actions are necessary to address those concerns. Is there any discussion with respect to the resolution of the compensation of the named executive officers? The fourth matter being submitted to stockholders for action is a non-binding vote on the frequency of future advisory votes to approve the compensation of the named executive officers. Our stockholders are being asked to vote for the option of one year, two years, or three years in response to the following resolution.
Resolved that the option of once every year, two years, or three years that receives the affirmative vote of the holders of a majority of the votes cast in person or by proxy at this meeting will be determined to be the preferred frequency of the stockholders with which Salesforce is to hold a stockholder vote to approve on an advisory basis the compensation of its named executive officers as disclosed pursuant to the SEC's compensation disclosure rules, which disclosure shall include the compensation discussion and analysis, the summary compensation table, and other compensation tables and narrative disclosure in this proxy statement. The Board has recommended a vote in favor of the option of one year for this proposal.
The option of one year, two years, or three years that receives the affirmative vote of the holders of a majority of the votes cast in person or by proxy at this meeting will be a frequency for the advisory vote on executive compensation that is recommended by stockholders. However, because this vote is advisory and not binding, the Board of Directors may decide that it is in the best interest of our stockholders and the company to hold an advisory vote on executive compensation more or less frequently than the option approved by our stockholders. Is there any discussion with respect to the resolution on the frequency of future advisory votes to approve a resolution on the compensation of the named executive officers? The fifth matter being submitted to stockholders for action is a stockholder proposal relating to advisory vote to repeal the company's classified board.
This item is detailed on page 46 of the proxy statement. I'll ask the representative of the proponent of this proposal, Mark Walsh, to address this meeting. Mr. Walsh, you'll have a total of three minutes to make a statement regarding your proposal, and I'll advise you when your time has expired.
Thank you, Chairman. My name is Mark Walsh. I represent the Florida State Board of Administration, the Florida State Board of Administration. Proposal to repeal classified board. Resolved that shareholders of Salesforce urge the Board of Directors to take all necessary steps other than any steps that must be taken by shareholders to eliminate the classification of the Board of Directors and to require that commencing no later than the annual meeting of 2013, all directors stand for elections annually. This resolution submitted by the Florida State Board of Administration with the assistance of the American Corporate Governance Institute urges the Board of Directors to facilitate a declassification of the board. Such a change would enable shareholders to register their views on the performance of all directors at each annual meeting.
Having directors stand for elections annually makes directors more accountable to shareholders and could thereby contribute to improving performance and increasing firm value. Please vote for this proposal to make directors more accountable to shareholders. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Walsh. I'll now ask Sam Fleischman on behalf of the company to present the company's position on the fifth proposal.
Thank you, Marc. The board's statement of opposition to this proposal is included in our proxy statement on pages 46 and 47. The board is committed to strong corporate governance policies and regularly considers and evaluates a broad range of corporate governance issues affecting the company, including whether to maintain a classified board structure. In fact, in January 2011, the board approved amendments to the company's bylaws and corporate governance guidelines to implement majority voting in uncontested director elections. The company's directors are divided into three classes that serve staggered three-year terms, such that one-third of the directors stand for election each year. This classified board structure has been in place continuously since the company became public in 2004.
After careful consideration of this proposal, the board concluded that its current classified board structure continues to be in the best interest of the company and its stockholders and therefore opposes the proposal.
Very good. Is there any further discussion with respect to the proposal to repeal the company's classified board? Because no further business is scheduled to come before the stockholders, I declare the polls for each matter to be voted on at this meeting open at 2:18 P.M. today, June 9, 2011, and direct that a vote of the stockholders be taken on the matters previously discussed. Each holder of common stock is entitled to one vote for each share of common stock held of record at the close of business on April 19, 2011. Proxies were previously distributed and collected from those of you who requested them earlier. Sam, have all proxies been returned?
Yes, all proxies have now been returned.
We now have all the proxies, so I hereby declare the polls for each matter voted upon at this meeting closed at 2:19 P.M. today, June 9, 2011, and direct the Inspector of Elections to collect and tabulate the ballots.
Thank you very much. All the ballots have now been tabulated.
Very good. Will the Secretary please report the results of the voting?
I have been advised by the Inspector of Elections that Marc Benioff, Craig Conway, and Alan Hassenfeld have each received more than a majority of shares present at the meeting in person or by proxy, which is a sufficient number of votes to be elected as directors. Accordingly, each of them has been elected as a director of the company to serve for the term expiring on the date of the company's 2014 annual meeting and until his successor has been duly elected and qualified, subject to earlier resignation or removal.
I have been further advised that a majority of the shares present at the meeting in person or by proxy voted in favor of the ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP to act as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2012, and that accordingly, the ratification of appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2012, has been approved. I have been further advised that a majority of the shares present at the meeting in person or by proxy voted in favor of the compensation of the named officers during fiscal 2011 in the advisory vote and that the board shall consider this result.
I have been further advised that the option of one year received a majority of votes present at the meeting in person or by proxy in the frequency for the advisory vote on the compensation of the named executive officers and the company shall consider this result. I have been further advised that a majority of the shares present at the meeting in person or by proxy voted in favor of the advisory vote on repeal of the company's classified board structure. The Inspector of Elections will furnish to me a written report of the final vote count with respect to the matters voted on today, which I will include in the minutes of the meeting. We will report the results of this meeting in our reports filed with the SEC, and the results will also be available for inspection at the company's headquarters starting tomorrow.
Okay. Very good. As there is no further business to come before this meeting, I note that this meeting is now adjourned. I want to thank all of you for attending today's meeting and for your continuing support of Salesforce, and we'll now have a brief presentation about the company by our Chief Financial Officer, Graham Smith, which will be followed by a question and answer session.
Thank you, Marc. Delighted to be here. Just to give you a brief overview of the company, this is a slimmed-down version of our investor relations deck, but just want to give everybody an update on what's been going on at the company and our current business strategy. First, before I get into that, this is our safe harbor statement. If any of you are not familiar with this safe harbor statement, it's on our website or on the SEC's website. Salesforce has been on a mission for the last 12 years to change enterprise computing. As you all know, there have been long-term trends in technology starting back in the 1960s with mainframe computers moving on to client server computing in the 1980s.
What the last 12 years have been about, certainly for Salesforce in the industry, has been proving the model of cloud computing, enterprise cloud computing, and its superiority. Salesforce is certainly still today an evangelist and a catalyst for this industry. The first decades, let's say, of cloud computing was very much about applications moving to the cloud. We think not only is that trend going to continue, but as importantly, development platforms are going to be moving to the cloud as well. We believe this is going to be sort of the defining trend, certainly for the next decade for enterprise computing. What's interesting is that these cycles that we've been through over the last, let's say, 50 years have really, the number of users that, as we pass through each phase of enterprise computing, the number of potential users accessing corporate systems is dramatically increasing as well.
If you think about the number of mobile devices in the world today, there's a forecast that mobile devices next year will easily pass 500 million across the world. The number of people who actually want to have access to corporate data, corporate systems is just dramatically expanding. You take that trend of sort of mobile devices, mobile access, and then you overlay the social trends that we've all seen really explode over the last few years, really leads to some dramatic changes that are happening in enterprise computing. Fundamentally, it seems that the consumer is really now in a different world to an extent to the enterprise. If you think about a lot of people's day-to-day interactions with social networks, that whole paradigm has not really moved into the enterprise today for most companies.
Fundamentally, if you think about some of these trends, I mean, Facebook's about to pass 700 million users. There are 120 million tweets a day. LinkedIn, which just went public, has more than 120 million users. These are really dramatic trends and are sort of defining this new way of doing business, a new way of interacting with customers potentially for every company almost. Yet, today's systems, or rather I should say yesterday's systems, don't really address that need. What we've been messaging very much over the last few years, but most recently with Marc's presentation of Cloudforce in Washington last week, is this idea that really every enterprise ultimately is going to need to become a social enterprise. There are sort of three really fundamental defining characteristics of that social enterprise.
One is that clearly they need to embrace these social networks, the social model of interaction with their customers and partners and employees ultimately. I've already talked about the sort of mobile, the extent of mobile expansion in the world will really, again, define the way people interact with these corporate systems. As importantly, all these systems need to be open. They need to be interoperable. They need to be able to interact with different systems across companies, across networks to different companies. This is what we are defining as the social enterprise. What does the social enterprise look like in a little more detail? We think it's really a combination of networks within a company. If you think about what most customers are struggling with today, it's, I see the world is changing. I know that Facebook's incredibly important, but how do I monetize that?
How does that change the way that I engage with my customer from the beginning of my engagement, where it's really just in the old world, sort of the prospecting, which now is really an engagement process through these social networks, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or some blogs or whatever it is, customers need to be able to start to interact with their customers and prospects early on through the social networks. They need to be able to collaborate within the company, with partners, across all of the functions of the company to really satisfy and delight those customers, again, with this engagement across a private social network, really for the company to operate within a secure, highly available, and reliable system.
Ultimately, I think some of the announcements we've made recently, for example, with Toyota in Japan, you're going to see companies' products being part of ultimately the social network. There will be interactions with products through networks, and indeed, there will be monitoring and feedback and engagement with some types of products. Companies are really going to look to engage in all these different ways through safe, secure, reliable networks with their customers and partners and employees. How do we address that? We think we're in an amazing position as a company to take advantage of all these trends. You can think of perhaps the last, let's say, the late 1990s and the early part of the 2000s as being a lot of focus across enterprises on back office efficiency.
These were the years or perhaps the decades of companies taking on large back office ERP type projects, spending lots of money retooling their accounting or their HR or their manufacturing systems. Fundamentally, that's all about efficiency and saving costs. What really Salesforce is focused on is CRM, which means customer relationship management, which means driving growth for an enterprise. We focused on building applications such as Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, which are all about how to interact, build pipelines, support your customers, solve their problems. We're all about applications that focus on the customer. As importantly, we've got a platform underneath those applications that enables you to take those applications and customize them in a way that further differentiates your product or your service.
We think as part of this vision, people are going to want to use, of course, our core applications for things like managing your sales or your support functions. As you learn how to use those applications, you're going to want to build out more and more custom functionality to enable you to delight your customers in ways that your competitors can't. We have Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Radian6 was a recent acquisition, which is a cornerstone of our strategy to address the social aspects of the world. Radian6 has a social network sort of monitoring and engagement application that is fast growing and we think, again, a very exciting part of our offering. Jigsaw is a crowdsourced way of providing contacts to all of our customers. Every company needs sales contacts to build their pipelines and sell. We have a unique offering with Jigsaw.
We offer a way for third parties to build applications on our platform and then market those to their customers as extensions, if you like, to Salesforce CRM. As part of our open strategy, which is long-term, I think we believe that all of these systems need to be open and interoperable, both with other ERP systems or other corporate systems generally. We have Force.com, which is our trusted, secure system based on our proprietary languages for building applications. We recognize that also people are going to want to program customizations and corporate applications in different languages. We have Java and Ruby and PHP and all of the newer languages that are growing rapidly as people try and deploy these new style applications. We have to embrace those and ultimately work across all of those open standards for our customers. Underlying all of this is our database in the cloud.
That has been the sort of secret sauce, this multi-tenant database in the cloud that's been the underpinning of the company's success over the last 12 years. All of that has led to incredible customer momentum. One of our core values as a company is customer success. I think this chart is obviously the best way to describe that vision, that core value of customer success has translated into amazing customer momentum. We're almost at the 100,000 customer mark. We got to just over 97,000 at the end of the first quarter. Even more excitingly, or as excitingly, our revenue growth has been re-accelerating. Clearly, every company went through a tough time in 2009, which for us was primarily in those quarters that sort of Q1 through to Q4 of 2010. Really since that time, our business has been accelerating.
We passed the $2 billion run rate in the first quarter. We're the first cloud computing company to get to that kind of scale. Hopefully, you can see that we believe our strategy, our vision is paying off both in terms of customer acquisition and revenue performance. We've improved our earnings on a non-GAAP basis. Clearly, we're in a heavy growth mode. We're investing as much as we possibly can to grow our sales and distribution organization, grow our development organization, our support organization. We're fundamentally focused on growth. At the same time, we've seen really exciting cash flow performance. Last year, particularly, we saw almost 70% year-on-year operating cash flow growth. That's been very gratifying to see as a result of our progress. This is a summary slide of all the things I just said.
Hopefully, you'll see that we're very, very excited about our position in the market and our vision of this social enterprise. We'd be delighted to take your questions.
We are happy now to open the floor. If there are any questions, just proceed to one of the microphones that are on the floor.
Hi, I'm Bill Blau. I'm from Calistoga. I own a number of shares in different entities in the company. I've been very pleased with your performance. I've got a couple of points. One, I am not a heavy-duty technology person. I come from a totally different generation than everyone put together here.
Not everyone, but we won't call those people out.
Yes, if you knew. I have one son who's an executive at IBM. They have a cloud system that is apparently inferior to yours. They also have something that does what Salesforce did, which his company was a user of yours until he sold it to IBM. He feels that yours is much better and wishes IBM used it. You obviously have a very intelligent son. Since I've owned the stock, I've read all kinds of articles on cloud computing and Salesforce and related items. It seems like all the big companies, IBM, Oracle, many others are now promoting cloud computing. From my rather ancient viewpoint, I don't understand how I think you're developing a program and a matrix of offerings that are superior and you're managing them very well. I don't see visually and verbally a differentiating marketing point. I come from a marketing background.
I once ran a marketing communications firm. I don't see that coming forward. I look at your name and your logo, and from a visual point of view, because my company actually was a design firm, I see three things there: a cloud, a logo, and then software. I don't see a single defining difference in the company. I think this relates to this question, a basic question I have is long-term, other than building a very in-depth offering to your customers, how are you differentiating yourself from a marketing point of view in the long run, considering that everybody seems to be rushing in this direction now? How will you avoid becoming a commodity?
Good.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for the question. One question could be, you know, why do we have nine quarters now of accelerating revenue run rate growth? What's happening that there's this phenomenal growth in our company and there's this phenomenal growth in the industry? The answer is that the market for cloud computing is just becoming enormous. That is the kind of the slide that Graham put up initially about the shift to cloud computing that we've been talking about for the last 12.5 years is really underway. It is by no means, you know, still mainstream. It's still somewhat niche. Our approach to cloud computing or in our specific role in cloud computing is and has mostly been focused on what we call customer relationship management.
That, at the end of the day, is really the market that we continue to target or the front office of the enterprise. That's why the company is called Salesforce, because the dominant part of the enterprise's position in its front office operations for the vast majority of our customers is Salesforce automation. The reason that there's the cloud around it is, well, that actually is our differentiation. What is cloud computing? Many companies have different definitions of cloud computing, and we have our own. Our approach to cloud computing is that it's what we call a multi-tenant system, kind of much like this building or this hotel that we're in. When they built it here in San Francisco, they didn't put in their own power, they didn't put in their own sanitation, they didn't put in their own water. They used shared utilities available here in the city.
It's multi-tenant. That is, there's actually many different residences in this hotel. There's the hotel and there's all the people who own property in the hotel, etc. That idea of multi-tenancy is actually at the heart of our cloud computing strategy. Right there, that's actually quite different from IBM. They don't have a multi-tenant approach. Their approach to cloud computing is what we call virtualization. The virtualization of software, which is essentially taking servers and making them more efficient, and they've also kind of labeled that cloud. They'll say it's a private cloud. To us, we look at a private cloud, which is a server that's been virtualized as very much a false cloud. We don't view that as cloud computing. When I do presentations around the world, the first thing that I'll do is actually define what is cloud computing. Cloud computing is shared. It's multi-tenant. It's efficient.
Recently, I was at the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland, and I was in a panel that looked much like this, except for everyone is much cheerier than the people to my right and left. I was with on the panel a Senior Vice President, not from IBM, but from Microsoft. I asked him afterwards, I said, "You know, if Salesforce did not exist, you know, we have 100,000 customers now. They've all got several applications on our service. How many servers do you think these customers would have had to buy? That is, what would have been the total consumption of servers, the hardware, the software, the networks, the hubs, the switches, the routers that you wouldn't normally have had to buy if Salesforce did not exist?" He said, "Well, it was 100,000 companies.
Even with private cloud or whatever, it's probably several hundred thousand servers." That's quite a lot. Each company, even with the IBM approach, has to buy a server or a couple of servers to run their systems because a private cloud is an on-premise cloud. It's quite different than what we're doing. He said several hundred thousand servers. The thing that's interesting about Salesforce is we only have about 2,500 servers for 100,000 customers. It's actually quite efficient. It's a shared architecture. It's much lower cost. The core of our company is our software that we've been working on for 12 and a half years that's very different than really what anyone else has built.
That intellectual property that we have and all of its representations is quite extraordinary in that if you go to a website that we have called trust.salesforce.com, you'll see that yesterday we delivered about 500 million or about a half a billion complex database transactions to our customers using 2,500 PCs at about 300 milliseconds per transaction and about four to five nines of reliability. To us, that's cloud computing. That's number one. Very high levels of efficiency, very high level of sharing, and delivered at a price point that the competitors have not been able to touch. The second thing is while we're building that out and building our platform and building our applications, we've really focused on the front office. We've really seen that as really the right place to be. You know, in software, it's kind of like life. If everything is important, nothing is important.
All companies cannot be all things to all people. It just doesn't work. In different software companies, they've kind of chosen different paths. The path that we've chosen is to really be this kind of front office provider to really demonstrate and continue to articulate what is a business doing to be modern, first in its Salesforce automation, in its customer service and support, in its marketing, in its approach to social networks, in its approach to building custom applications. That we call, as Graham articulated, the social enterprise. What the social enterprise is, is we take this cloud computing framework that I kind of talked about, the multi-tenant shared platform, and on top of that, we've built our own software. That software, which then inherits or takes on these multi-tenant characteristics, does a number of things. The end result is that it creates a social enterprise for a company.
The first and most important thing is we create social profiles for our customers. We create that social database. Those 500 million database transactions that are happening every day, that's a phenomenal thing. Companies don't have to buy Oracle or DB2 from IBM, which would cost them millions of dollars, or SQL Server from Microsoft. They can use database.com, which is a cloud computing database that we offer. It's just a much lower cost, much easier to use database built on the cloud. On top of that, cloud computing offering for the database, and you're building your social profile, we start to give you various functionality. How we've seen the market evolve is actually in three very interesting areas. Number one, the biggest shift that's going on, as Graham articulated, is the shift to what we call public social networks.
If you look at, I don't know if you have an account on Facebook or on Twitter, but you've probably heard of them. They're the fastest growing part of our industry. In fact, there's almost a billion people today on public social networks. Our customers, ranging from companies like Gatorade or Dell or KLM Airlines, they're very worried about how do they talk to their customers on these social networks. Those social networks are where the customers are living. Our customers increasingly find that they're disintermediated from their own customers because the customers are on the network and the company's over here. It used to be you would call the call center. I've got a problem. I'm going to call you. Then it was, I'm going to email you. Now I'm going to go work it out with somebody else because, you know, I don't even trust that vendor.
That's been a very interesting phenomenon. Our first and most important initiative has been how do we really adapt our companies so that we can listen to these social networks and help our customers listen to these social networks more empathetically and then also engage with their customers on the social networks. In fact, that's why we recently bought a company called Radian6 because we believe in creating this whole concept of a listening cloud, really this idea of a marketing cloud where our customers can go to listen and engage and then market with our customers. If you go to Twitter, for example, and you go to a user ID KLM, which is the KLM Airlines, you'll see them conversationally with customers on the social networks. After every tweet, which is kind of a message that you do on Twitter, it'll say via CRM.
Those tweets are not them typing these answers. They're actually working through our technology, through our cloud. You could look at that at KLM, or if you go to B of A Help for Bank of America, you'll see the same thing. Bank of America, B of A Help, which is kind of the modern branch today, you know, like we used to have bank branches that we would go to and, you know, cash our checks and exchange money. Today, of course, Bank of America has websites and service organizations behind those websites, but they also have a presence on Twitter. If you go to B of A Help on Twitter, you'll see, again, the same thing, them talking to their customers, responding, resolving issues, all saying via CRM, via CRM.
That idea of listening and then engaging on those social networks, for our customers trying to understand what's going on in the social networks, this becomes a major initiative. The second thing that we're doing is helping our customers market on these social networks. For example, Disney has a number of new rides and theme parks opening. They need to build presence on the social networks to build demand for their products. It used to be that demand was advertising or demand was kind of some traditional print vehicle. Today, demand has to be done through the network itself. You want to be where your customers are to build demand. They're building it on the social network. A company like Disney has chosen our platform, which is called Heroku, to build out all their web presence and also their place on Facebook.
If you go to facebook.com/disney and you see the robustness of the applications that are being built, you see this kind of dynamism and this agility. The reason that Disney has chosen our technology, or the reason that KLM or Gatorade or B of A is because this cloud that I kind of articulated, it's not only just much lower cost, it's just much easier and much faster for them to deploy these applications. We move rapidly inside these companies because these companies now are all rebuilding themselves. If you've watched our industry, you don't want to keep technology inside your company too long because it rapidly obsoletes itself. One of the major areas that our customers are evolving is collaboration. They're trying to collaborate more internally. They're trying to share more information and work either across the world or maybe across departments.
That's why we've built a technology called Chatter, which is a private social network. Our customers are looking at their employees who are so productive and so capable on public social networks that they want to be in these private social networks. We move into Salesforce Automation. A good example of that is a company down the road here, Symantec, who has like 18,500 employees on our Chatter system, or Dell has 120,000 users on our Chatter system. They're collaborating with their employees inside these private social networks. They're also building what we call Sales Cloud, kind of like our logo, like you mentioned. Those Sales Clouds, a good example is a company like Groupon or their competitor, LivingSocial. They both have thousands of users on our Sales Cloud. They're collaborating and working on deals and closing deals and making things happen.
This is our traditional heart and soul of our company. In fact, we have tens of thousands of these Salesforces all over the world. In fact, we're the dominant Salesforce automation solution in the world today. It's our number one product. It's the majority of our revenue. We're number one on Gartner's Magic Quadrant, and pretty much every analyst in the world rates us number one in Salesforce automation. These Sales Clouds that customers build in are tremendous because they make their Salesforces much more efficient and much more, well, capable. At the end of the day, they also connect them to these other areas easily that I've been articulating. Also, Service Clouds they're creating, like that Bank of America Service Cloud or another company down the road here, Zynga, which is a new game company.
If you go to their website and you touch their support tabs, you'll see a whole support center and frequently asked questions and all these things. Like Bank of America that I talked about or KLM where we're doing their service, Zynga, we're also running all their service operations. Even though it looks like their own website, it's actually ours. It's all provided by that multi-tenant shared cloud or that database that I talked about. A lot of our customers are then moving beyond public social networks and private social networks and really creating their own social platforms. I was in Japan two weeks ago announcing something called Toyota Friend with Akio Toyoda, the CEO of Toyota, because they're building a social platform for Toyota. That is the simple question that we ask them, why is your car not on the social network?
If you have a Toyota Tacoma, you have a Toyota Corolla, why do you not have a Toyota Friend? If I can have a friend on Facebook, why is my car not my friend? I have an electric car myself, and I need to actually have information from my car on a regular basis. Is it charged? How far can it go? If there's issues with it, it needs to talk to me on these networks. That's a huge new area, social platforms. It's kind of amazing. Toyota is building out this social platform, or even that company I mentioned, Groupon, they chose us recently. It was our largest transaction in our first quarter to build a social platform to service their customers or their merchants more effectively.
You can look at Avon or thousands of other companies who use our social platform to build custom applications or even medical applications. For example, we have a customer, Zimmer, who has built applications that run on mobile devices where they're selling knee replacements and hip replacements and products for trauma surgery. They want additional time with doctors. They want additional time with their customers. They've built mobile apps to have better conversations with them. In addition to that, we've seen that idea that there's all, as Graham said, all these mobile devices in the world, our customers realize their customers are on mobile devices. How do they build apps to those mobile devices? We've also extended all of that with something called the AppExchange. If you go to that, it's kind of like Apple's App Store.
There's about 1,200 apps where you can extend these public social networks that we're connecting and private social networks and social platform and mobile with your own apps. All of it connects back to that database that I mentioned originally because you're filling that database. That's why our transactions are constantly going up because we're filling it with more and more data. The differentiation against a company like IBM is they've still very much stayed in their status quo. They continue to sell DB2, which is their database software they've had for 25 years, their WebSphere, their application server. They don't have a database.com. IBM doesn't offer databases as a service. It's a term we actually came up with. IBM doesn't have a platform as a service. In fact, IBM really doesn't have much of software as a service or applications as a service.
We have competitors in each of those areas, and there's also infrastructure as a service. All of those things make up cloud computing, which is this huge new fast-growing part of our industry. At the end of the day, what's happening is companies are shifting. They're shifting because they have to shift, because our industry itself is shifting, because their customers are shifting. They have to shift to where their customers are going. As a company, we have to make that shift. That's what we've done. We've built out Radian6 to provide our customers with this social analytics, with Heroku to build these apps that can run on platforms like Facebook, Chatter for collaboration, our Sales Cloud, our Service Cloud. We have our Force.com system for building these custom applications.
All of this is running, and we have database.com and Jigsaw, which is giving us this very clean social profile so our customers can have this database. That is our approach, and it is highly differentiated against our competitors. It is a very different strategy than IBM's strategy or Oracle's strategy or SAP's strategy or Microsoft's strategy. It is one of the reasons that our company is growing so quickly because we've positioned ourselves in a way that is unique in the industry, but also offers our customers tremendous value.
That is our approach, and that is also how we position ourselves publicly. It is not a consumer sale. It is not something that we can easily advertise. That is why we do not really advertise. It is not something that we can easily bring forth in a simple conversation. That is why we have a very large direct sales force so that we can bring that kind of somewhat technical sale directly and customize that for the customer and deliver it for them very specifically. Does that answer your question, or would you like me to go through a little bit more? Okay. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Social enterprise platform. Right. Yeah. Yeah. We have that, but it shifts for us.
We have other slides and so forth, but that could easily say Salesforce, the social enterprise platform, but that is kind of an evolving message for us still. At the end of the day, what that message, what that logo means for our customers, in my opinion, a brand like that is just a collection of memories anyway. It can say whatever you want, but it is really, we could put different brands up from different companies that would all mean different things to different people in this room. I think the number one thing that this brand means to our customers is trust. That is what we are trying to bring forth, and the trusted experience of using our cloud and the level of customer success we have is the most important thing. That, at the end of the day, is the key.
Is the logo as good as it can be? Is the brand? I do not know. It becomes very subjective. I am sure if I asked 10 people, I would get 10 answers. I run something called ideas.salesforce.com. It's a website for our customers so they can come in, or even investors or analysts, you can come in and actually comment and tell us what you think about those things. We do that. We'll post our brand on there, put our company name up there, and we'll ask the very questions you asked. Do you like this name? Do you like this brand? What does this mean to you? What do you think? It's kind of like a modern focus group, but much, much larger and more dynamic. That's been a tremendous way. It's one of the ways that we listen to our customers.
Thank you very much for your comments.