Salesforce.com expands call center support
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NEW YORK - Hosted CRM (customer relationship management) evangelist Salesforce.com Inc. began a new branding campaign this week to draw attention to its customer-service support functionality, launching a new Web site at Supportforce.com and announcing a batch of partnerships with top call center infrastructure vendors.
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InfoWorld - NEW YORK - Hosted CRM (customer relationship management) evangelist Salesforce.com Inc. began a new branding campaign this week to draw attention to its customer-service support functionality, launching a new Web site at Supportforce.com and announcing a batch of partnerships with top call center infrastructure vendors.
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Business software maker Salesforce.com Inc.  said on Tuesday it would help other companies market their software products on its Web site and charge commissions on sales generated by the new service.
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PC maker will offer 24-hour help desk services, on-site visits, and more.
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Dell will open a second call center in the Philippines early next year to provide additional tech support for its U.S. customers.
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InfoWorld - SAP continued to ramp up its on-demand CRM offering this week, announcing that it will now include service-level capabilities, the third key component of CRM solutions.
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(InfoWorld) - Everyone knows Salesforce.com as the company that pioneered SaaS (software as a service) and survived the dot-com bust when many other ASPs didn't. Now, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff says the company is ready to take on MicrosoftÂ as a leading development platform provider, a strategy he unveiled as "Salesforce.com 2.0" in New York on Tuesday. Promoting its hosted application infrastructure as a platform for application development is not a new strategy for Salesforce.com, but the company seems to be turning up the volume on the message. At Tuesday's event, Benioff unveiledÂ a new hosted application called Wealth Management EditionÂ for the financial services industry and an increase in users from 5,000 to 25,000 at customer Merrill Lynch. But he also used the event to vigorously promote the company's transition from an ASP to a hosted application platform for partners. As the company approaches its eighth anniversary next month, Benioff said it's important that Salesforce.com think about achieving its first-decade goals over the next two years. Becoming a hosted platform for other ISVs -- many of whom don't have the financial resources to build applications on their own -- is at the top of the list, he said. "That's very much what we're doing today when we talk about Salesforce 2.0," he said. "Our vision started with our killer applications -- a whole new way to deliver enterprise software. Next we had very successful customers ... [then] it moved to the developer community to add on to that, and then it really got into a platform to give our customers and developers the ability to extend these products and create new products on the same infrastructure." Benioff described how Salesforce.com set up a collocation facility in San Mateo, California, for companies that need application infrastructure. There are 32 ISVs in the facility now with a waiting list for when the company expands the project, he said. This kind of facility, combined with the ability for ISVs to build applications on Salesforce.com's Apex platform for free will drive the company's success as a platform provider, Benioff said. ISVs will be able to post those applications on Salesforce.com's AppExchange directory and sell them on its AppStore. The transition from being a straight SaaS provider to having all these new offerings can be confusing, said Laura Lederman, an analyst with William Blair & Co. in Chicago. Pulling it all together as a cohesive platform under the Salesforce.com 2.0 moniker should spur wider understanding and adoption by customers, she said. Moving into the platform space will put Salesforce.com directly in the path of its favorite nemesis, Microsoft. Benioff, outspoken as usual, said Microsoft's model of still requiring customers to install their own software instead of hosting it on the Web is "really screwed up." He said he tried to update his computer to Windows Vista but was unsuccessful because it was too complicated. Benioff also insisted Salesforce.com has no desire to compete with its partners -- something for which Microsoft has been criticized -- even as it ventures into the vertical hosted applications space. "We want to foster competition on the AppExchange," he said. "If we build a [customer] recruiting application, we want other people to do that, too. We want the best [applications] to rise to the top."
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AN FRANCISCO - WebEx Communications Inc. is expanding its Web conferencing service with an offering designed for sales professionals, the company plans to announce on Monday.
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Northern Africa is host to a new call center that's offshoring French-language technical support calls.
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Pair extend shared tech support services to dozens of markets.
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NOVEMBER 03, 2004  - On-demand CRM software provider Salesforce.com Inc. is branching out to offer hosted application development technology and online marketplace services to supplement its own software services.
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Company is upgrading current support and service program to draw more mainframe customers.
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Salesforce.com Inc., which has  been working with Google Inc. to make its Web-based software  applications meld with Google&#39;s own software push, said on  Tuesday it is enabling its customers to sell Google advertising  through Salesforce business software.
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Link to Salesforce.com data brings "software as a service" offering to back-office data integration tools.
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The success of Facebook's Web-app building tools hasn't gone unnoticed by Salesforce.com, which on Friday announced a new platform for building on-demand business software that it hopes will lead to an "explosion" of applications.
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Updated chat client allows users to send more personalized messages.
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(InfoWorld) - Salesforce.comÂ is starting to provide some details about the next version of its hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software, including the product's primary focus, which will be customization. Known as Salesforce Winter '07, the upcoming release will become generally available in the fourth quarter of this year, Salesforce.com said Wednesday. The vendor plans to launch aÂ Web siteÂ on Thursday to invite user feedback on the Winter '07 version. The idea is to foster a closer working relationship between Salesforce users and the vendor's developers, Marc Benioff, the company's chairman and chief executive officer, wrote in an e-mail. Winter '07 will feature a new user interface based on Ajax or asynchronous JavaScript and extensible markup language, a group of software development tools and standards that help create interactive Web applications. Users will be have the ability to customize the CRM application's desktop console and components. Other new features include a hook-in to Cisco Systems' computer telephony integration option and full support for IBM's Lotus Notes collaboration software. Salesforce.com's on-demand CRM is available in different versions targeting a variety of users including its Personal, Team, Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited Editions. The vendor's last major CRM version, Summer '06,Â debuted in JulyÂ along with a connector for its Enterprise and Unlimited Editions integrating its software with SAP's R/3 ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications. Salesforce.com competes with a variety of players in the hosted midmarket applications arena including SAP, Oracle, and NetSuite.