A fair portion of the Salesforce earnings call this week focused on their international growth and wins, both across Europe and Asia.  Who can blame them for celebrating?  Asia has been a tough market for traditionally North American companies to penetrate.  This quarter, revenue in Europe was up 71% year over year and 13% from Q4.    Revenue in Asian was up 85% year over year and 14% from Q4.  The revenue generated outside North America now accounts for 23% of their total.

With the recent announcement of 5,000 Salesforce licenses for Japan Post, the national (soon to be privatized) postal service and banking institution, don’t be surprised if that number grows significantly upon implementation.  With over 400,000 employees at Japan Post, Salesforce hopes to boost that number far beyond the initial 5,000 seats.

Existing customers in Japan alone include quite a number of businesses in banking, software, retail, manufacturing, non-profits, and business services.  Even the AppExchange has applications specifically geared towards the Japanese market. 

Last month Salesforce announced Salesforce China Edition, with appropriate pricing to entice businesses there to try CRM whereas other software has usually been cost prohibitive.  Not only that, but with the release of Apex later this year, don’t be surprised to find a wealth of new applications put out by the growing number of developers across China.  On a side note about the announcement from Salesforce, a friend of mine from Singapore pointed out to me though that they haven’t used Traditional Chinese for probably almost two decades in Singapore.

Part of the difficulty of breaking into Asia is somewhat the “nature of the beast” of enterprise software, particularly in the client-server model.  Applications and technology from dominant enterprise vendors has usually been ported to languages like Chinese and Japanese after the fact, and months, if not years after the new versions are released in English.

It’s much like enterprise customers running i/Series (AS/400) platform applications are used to the late release of applications and technology as compared to many of their other colleagues who run on other platforms like UNIX or Windows.

Out the chute, when Salesforce releases a new version like their recent Spring 07, native applications and help text are already prepped for all 14 languages they support which gives all non-English users a real sense of being treated equally. 

Even such commitments that Salesforce has made to tools such as the Translation Workbench, show that they’re serious about making it easy to put even your custom objects and applications into native languages.  If you haven’t used the Translation Workbench before, it’s extremely intuitive, easy to use, and helps ensure your users can easily use Salesforce in the language of their choice.

Growth in Asia is not only a good sign of financial benefit for Salesforce, but part of the validation of Software as a Service (SaaS).  Many of these companies are running their business on applications in their native language, yet the applications and data resides in North America.  In traditional client-server software, you’d rarely set yourself up that way.  I suppose with the time difference, they probably get great performance from the North American servers as most of us are asleep. 

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