Harrah's Leverages Force.com Platform to Build Custom Applications for Managing Room Reservations, Air Travel Programs and Player Relations

November 24, 2008 8:00 AM EST

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced that Harrah's Entertainment, Inc. has used the Force.com Platform to build applications designed specifically for managing room reservations, air travel programs and player relations. These innovative new capabilities, built and deployed in just a matter of months, have delivered significant operational improvements as well as supported increased business to the company's 50 casinos domestically and abroad.

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Harrah's Entertainment is one of the 51,800 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of October 31, 2008. Revenue and subscribers will be recognized as the service is delivered.

"At Harrah's we know that innovation helps us continually surprise and satisfy our customers, as well as keep us a step ahead of our competitors," said Tim Stanley, CIO and senior vice president of innovation, gaming and technology at Harrah's Entertainment. "When we discovered how we could leverage cloud computing to develop new systems and enhance our existing capabilities that we use to run our business, we were thrilled to take advantage of the Force.com Platform."

In addition to reservations agents within the casinos, Harrah's has nearly 50 branch offices and 250 independent representatives who help customers participate in the company's air travel programs, book rooms, and enjoy casino amenities. Prior to innovating several new custom Force.com applications, many of these interactions were manual and time consuming. Booking a room, for example, might require the field representatives to fax reservation requests to the appropriate casino and took days of back and forth manual coordination to process. A new capability now allows Harrah's representatives to make room requests via a secure Web portal, and confirmations are received within hours.

Another innovative capability developed on the Force.com Platform integrates information from airline vendors and legacy travel management systems to provide Harrah's with a single, easy-to-use scheduling and yield management tool for its best customers. The application makes all travel options and occupancy rates immediately available, and has helped Harrah's accommodate increased VIP and International business.

"We have been advocates and innovators with a variety of SOA, SAAS and other enabling tools, technology and platforms for years and Force.com has shown strong promise as a viable, scalable and flexible platform for several new capabilities we can envision for our business," added Stanley. "We have now delivered several new applications that provide demonstrable benefits to our business -- and we are already pushing ahead into a wider array of new and enhanced capabilities including deeper integration with some of our existing

CRM and transactional systems. It's been a high value and low cost initiative for us."

About the Force.com Platform and AppExchange

The Force.com platform (http://www.force.com/) reinvents the traditional development, deployment and distribution of any business application. Developers, customers and partners can use Force.com to easily create and deliver a new generation of Software-as-a-Service applications. Force.com allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via the Force.com AppExchange marketplace, enabling all the innovation that Force.com unleashes to be easily distributed to the entire Software-as-a-Service community.

The Force.com AppExchange economy continues to expand, with thousands of customers installing applications via the AppExchange. Customers of all sizes can quickly and easily extend the benefits of Software-as-a-Service business applications throughout their enterprises using the Force.com AppExchange, found at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.

About Harrah's Entertainment

Harrah's Entertainment, Inc. is the world's largest provider of branded casino entertainment. Since its beginning in Reno, Nevada, more than 70 years ago, Harrah's has grown through development of new properties, expansions and acquisitions, and now owns or manages casinos on four continents. The Company's properties operate primarily under the Harrah's(R), Caesars(R) and Horseshoe(R) brand names; Harrah's also owns the London Clubs International family of casinos and the World Series of Poker(R). Harrah's Entertainment is focused on building loyalty and value with its customers through a unique combination of great service, innovative products, unsurpassed distribution, operational excellence and technology leadership. For more information, please visit http://www.harrahs.com.

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company's portfolio of SaaS applications, including its award-winning CRM, available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that customers manage and share business information over the Internet. The company's Force.com PaaS enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful on-demand applications that deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy across the enterprise. Applications built on the Force.com platform, available at http://www.force.com/, can be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's Force.com AppExchange marketplace available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.

As of October 31, 2008, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 51,800 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.

Copyright (c) 2008 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce and the "no software" logo are registered trademarks of salesforce.com, inc., and salesforce.com owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE salesforce.com

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