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Salesforce.com/Foundation Appoints International Philanthropic Leaders To Its Board Of Directors

Alan Hassenfeld, CEO and chairman, Hasbro, Inc. (NYSE:HAS); Robert Thurman, president, Tibet House; and Rebecca Enonchong, CEO and founder, AppsTech, Inc join innovative company in delivering "Business as a Service"

May 28, 2002

San Francisco, CA - May 28, 2002 -- Salesforce.com/foundation today announced the addition of Alan Hassenfeld, CEO and chairman, Hasbro, Inc. (NYSE:HAS); Robert Thurman, president, Tibet House; and Rebecca Enonchong, CEO and founder, AppsTech, Inc. to its Board of Directors. With the addition of these socially-minded individuals, salesforce.com/foundation continues to execute on its vision of corporate community service by providing access to technology for youth in underserved communities both domestically and abroad.

"We launched salesforce.com/foundation in July 2000 with the goal of integrating business and philanthropy into our corporate culture at the earliest stage of our growth," said Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "Over the past two years, salesforce.com has surged to its position as a successful, global company with over 4,500 customers, and the foundation has grown alongside the company. The addition of strong humanitarians and impressive corporate leaders like Robert, Alan and Rebecca to the foundation Board will ensure that we continue to bring creativity and innovation to our mission."

Alan Hassenfeld, CEO and chairman of Hasbro, has been a leader in rallying corporate executives to work with elected officials to end childhood hunger. Hassenfeld is involved in issues impacting underserved communities in the state of Rhode Island by serving on advisory boards for Refugees International and Big Brothers of Rhode Island. He is also a board member of the company's two philanthropic divisions, the Hasbro Charitable Trust and the Hasbro Children's Foundation. Hassenfeld is active in many charitable and social causes, serving as Chairman of the World Scholar Athlete Games, Chairman of Families First and Chairman of the Right Now! Coalition, an effort created to foster ethics and campaign reform and enlighten the state government to its constituent's concerns. Hasbro is a worldwide leader in children's and family leisure time entertainment with $2.9 billion in revenues and an impressive blue-chip portfolio of familiar and popular brand names under one roof such as PLAYSKOOL, TONKA, MILTON BRADLEY and PARKER BROTHERS.

As one of its many initiatives, salesforce.com/foundation has supported the Tibet House and Tibet Fund for the past several years in an effort to bring computers and wireless technology to Tibetans and connect them with the world as they live in exile from their homeland. Robert Thurman, president of Tibet House, will be able to further enhance this mission and promote the unity of displaced Tibetan communities with the work he has done to preserve Tibetan culture around the world. He is a scholar, author, former Tibetan Buddhist monk, and close personal friend of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Additionally, he is the director of Tibet House in New York City. In 1987, he and actor Richard Gere founded Tibet House, a nonprofit institution devoted to preserving the living culture of Tibet. Thurman writes, "What I have learned from these people [Tibetans] has forever changed my life, and I believe their culture contains an inner science particularly relevant to the difficult time in which we live. My desire is to share some of the profound hope for our future that they have shared with me."

Rebecca Enonchong, CEO and founder of AppsTech, has focused on bringing technology to underserved international communities while creating a philanthropic culture in her young company. Like salesforce.com and salesforce.com/foundation, Enonchong has instilled into AppsTech a focus of giving back to the community through initiatives such as Children First, Entrepreneurial Commitment, and Leveraging Economies Worldwide. As a native of Cameroon in Western Africa, she has also devoted much of her life to promoting African interests, both in Africa and in the U.S. She is founder and Chairman of the Africa Technology Forum (www.africatechforum.org) http://www.africatechforum.org, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting technology in Africa, and serves on the UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women) Global Advisory Committee on the Digital Divide. The World Economic Forum recently named Enonchong as one of the Global Leaders for Tomorrow (GLT). AppsTech is a leading global provider of enterprise application solutions. Powered by industry leaders like Oracle, SAP and PeopleSoft, AppsTech helps clients streamline their operations.

Thurman, Hassenfeld, and Enonchong join salesforce.com's current board members, Marc Benioff, chairman of the board, as well as chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, and Dave Moellenhoff, salesforce.com CTO. Benioff founded salesforce.com in the spring of 1999 with a vision of catalyzing "The End Of Software," and in July 2000, with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell publicly endorsing the initiative, Benioff founded the salesforce.com/foundation. He was recently honored as a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow, class of 2002. Moellenhoff was recently recognized as a Premier 100 IT Leader by Computerworld magazine and a Top 10 Technology Innovator by InfoWorld magazine.

About salesforce.com/foundation

The salesforce.com/foundation has committed itself to bringing technology to under-served communities both domestically and internationally to unleash the potential of youth. Since July 2000, the Foundation has opened 17 Community Technology Centers in the San Francisco Bay Area, which serve local youth. At each Center, the Foundation, through its grants and its ongoing hands-on support, builds on the Center's continued successes and strives to provide staff funding, program development, technical support, teacher training, curriculum development, best practices models through collaboration among the Centers, and strategy and sustainability planning.

Additionally, salesforce.com/foundation has partnered with Just Think Foundation to launch the first mobile computer center, a re-modeled bus, on the Big Island of Hawaii. This bus reaches underserved communities of the Big Island and brings youth computers, scanners and Internet access. Internationally, the Foundation partners with Cisco Systems, Tibet House and Tibet Fund to bring technology to schools and settlements in the Middle East, India and Nepal. The Foundation hopes to foster the peace process while creating an environment for under-served youth to effectively learn through the use of technology.

Salesforce.com is the first Internet start-up company of its kind to institutionalize philanthropy at its inception in the form of an active Foundation. The Foundation's mission is two-fold: one, to unleash the potential of youth through technology; and two, to build community service into the corporate company as a core cultural value. More information is available at http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/.