Japan Post Expands Salesforce Platform Deployment to 45,000 Users
Salesforce.com , the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced Japan Post will deploy the Salesforce Platform to an additional 40,000 users. Japan Post tapped Hitachi Software Engineering Co., Ltd. (HitachiSoft), a salesforce.com partner in Japan, to develop a custom, on-demand application for reporting customer inquiries and compliance-related issues as the world’s largest financial institution advances toward privatization in October of this year.
This latest implementation is in addition to the 5,000 users that Japan Post announced for its Salesforce Platform-based customer information management solution in April of this year, bringing the total number of Salesforce Platform subscribers at Japan Post to more than 45,000 and making it the largest on-demand platform deployment in the world. Thirty-six thousand of these subscriptions were activated on July 31, 2007.
Japan Post is one of the 35,300 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of July 31, 2007. Revenue and subscriptions will be recognized as the service is delivered.
In addition to delivering mail and selling stamps, Japan Post serves as a savings bank and provider of financial products to individuals, and is the largest financial services firm in the world in terms of asset holdings.
Japan Post’s latest custom-developed, Salesforce on-demand application enables employees stationed at 24,000 post offices across Japan to report customer and compliance-related issues to regional branches and Japan Post headquarters in Tokyo. By swiftly and securely reporting customer issues and improving business processes, Japan Post is laying the foundation for raising service levels and strengthening internal compliance as the public corporation moves toward privatization in October 2007.
The Salesforce application will be developed by Hitachi Software Engineering Corporation, a leading systems integrator and software development firm in Japan with approximately USD 1.3 billion in annual revenue and more than 5,000 employees.
“With our implementations at MUFJ and Japan Post, we feel the momentum of the SaaS market has picked up tremendously since we announced our SaaS business one year ago,” said Isao Ono, president, chief executive officer and director of HitachiSoft. “As we continue to demonstrate customer success with our new service, we see a huge market emerging in Japan’s IT market.”
“Thanks to the innovative zeal of our customers and support from our partners like HitachiSoft, salesforce.com is moving beyond CRM and becoming the trusted on-demand standard for a wide range of applications in Japan,” said Eiji Uda, president and CEO of salesforce.com in Japan. “Japan Post’s decision to use the Salesforce Platform to develop custom applications is a testament to the power and flexibility of our on-demand technology. Moreover, our success with Japan Post and other large firms gives us the awareness and credibility we need to extend our reach to small and mid-sized firms, which comprise 99 percent of the second largest economy in the world.”
