SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), today announced the appointment of Steve McWhirter as president of its Asia-Pacific operations. McWhirter brings 20 years of sales, marketing and leadership experience to the company, 15 of which have been spent focused in the Asia-Pacific market. He will report to Jim Steele, chief customer officer and president of international operations, and will be based in salesforce.com's Singapore office. He succeeds Stephen J. Russell who served as president since November 2005 and successfully drove salesforce.com's expansion and leadership in the region.

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'As a seasoned technology industry veteran, Steve McWhirter will support salesforce.com's accelerated growth and market development in the Asia-Pacific region,' said Jim Steele, chief customer officer and president of international operations at salesforce.com. 'We're excited to add Steve McWhirter to our leadership team. He will be a driving force in extending the benefits of Salesforce CRM and the Force.com Platform to the growing number of companies in the region ready to eliminate the constraints of traditional software from their businesses.'

McWhirter joins salesforce.com from serving as vice president of HP Software Asia Pacific, a division of HP Technology Solutions Group, where he led an organization of nearly 500 sales, marketing, services and technical support staff. During his tenure, the HP Software division achieved rapid growth and successfully navigated the company's acquisitions of Mercury, Bristol, SPI and Opsware. Before HP, McWhirter held positions as vice president of Red Hat Asia-Pacific and director, APAC software sales of IBM Software Group, Asia-Pacific, among others.

'Salesforce.com has made its mark as one of the most innovative technology companies in the industry today,' said McWhirter.