Salesforce.com launches on-demand support
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CEO says demand for automated support and service drives addition to customer resource management products.
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Salesforce.com today announced the immediate availability of the enhanced sforce Toolkit for IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD).
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(InfoWorld) - In a deal that makes both companies look good, Salesforce.com announced that Omniture, one of the leaders in online Web marketing analytics, will be the newest service to join AppExchange. AppExchange is theSalesforce.com platform that allows third-party ISVs to integrate their applications with Salesforce CRM.Â  For its part, Salesforce gets Omniture Closed Loop Marketing for Salesforce, a service that will bring to its site marketing executives, a group that up until now had no compelling reason to use Salesforce. "Salesforce is typically a tool used by sales executives," said John Lovett, senior analyst, Web Site Technologies & Operations at Jupiter Research. From an Omniture point of view, the company will now be able to expose its capabilities to a far larger audience, which will put the company in a good position to sell even more marketing analytic services than what will be currently offered on the AppExchange site. For example, neither Genesis, a service that allows companies to integrate their online marketing applications, nor SiteCatalyst, which focuses on visitor site behavior, will be offered on AppExchange. Omniture's appeal comes from its ability to allow marketers to track different aspects of multiple marketing campaigns and to attribute credit to numerous campaigns leading up to a sale or a conversion, says Lovett. "Previously, one campaign would get the credit for a sale even when it may have been the combined result of two or three campaigns," said Lovett. The pain point Omniture solves, according to both Gail Ennis, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Omniture and Ariel Kelman, senior director of platform product marketing at Salesforce, is in tearing down the wall that exists between sales and marketing. "It has been hard for these two organizations to come together to deliver effective marketing campaigns," said Kelman. Reporting capabilities will be available through both Salesforce or Omniture dashboards or through mashups between the services. Omniture Closed Loop Marketing for Salesforce is available now. Pricing starts at $2,500 per month for unlimited users.
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Blog: Salesforce.com throws a confections change up, with similar results to Pavlov's dog.
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A customer can connect to Google's AdWords and create an ad linked to particular search results. Anyone clicking on that ad is then encouraged to complete a form with their contact details, which then automatically becomes a new lead in Salesforce.com's CRM package.
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Plays nice with Oracle Salesforce.com is today expected to take its latest step towards improving integration with third-parties' software, including business rival Oracle.â¦
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Software maker Salesforce.com Inc.  said it reached an agreement with Google  to make Web-based software applications that help businesses improve sales and marketing.
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Hosted CRM company introduces a new framework for linking analysis tools to its applications.Image: Salesforce dashboard
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InfoWorld - Hosted CRM service provider Salesforce.com took another step forward last week in its strategy to build an online ecosystem of vendors that offer software as a service.
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Salesforce.com looks to make its developer platform a "peer with .Net and Java" with new user interface tools.
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Business Objects has started to roll out a full suite of business intelligence (BI) software in the form of an online service, initially for customers using Salesforce.com applications.
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InfoWorld - Salesforce.com Inc. and Google Inc. announced a strategic global partnership Tuesday, but it wasn&#39;t the&#160;widely expected tight integration&#160;between Google Apps and Salesforce.com&#39;s hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software. Instead, the two vendors brought out their first jointly developed and co-marketed product combining Google AdWords with Salesforce on-demand CRM.
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A major facelift and a lot of great new functionality!  The Sugar Team is excited to bring you the 2.0 release.  As you can see, hiring a UI engineer has taken the application to a whole new level of usability and appeal.  Who else has a pink UI?  We're also pleased to bring you the Leads module and significant improvements to the Contact module with vCard support and a simplified way of entering a contact, account and appointment in the single "Create from Business Card" screen.   You can send us an email any time with your feedback at contact@sugarcrm.com.  Our goal continues to be to build the sales automation system that you have always wanted, so your input is vital.  Check out http://www.sugarcrm.com for more details on the latest product roadmap, support forums, detailed product information and much more.  We hope you find this a useful tool for building your business.  Enjoy!  The Sugar Team    -=Included Features=- An overview of the features in this release.   Leads New to 2.0, put standardized processes into practice to make sure all sales reps use the same, consistent lead qualification methodology. With the click of a button, quickly turn leads into opportunities. With the Sugar Sales Leads module, you can also easily manage rented lists and prospect data separate from your customer data.  Import and Export Import contacts and accounts from CSV (comma separated values) files.  Users can also easily export data from the system to CSV files.  Opportunities Sugar Sales provides a complete, yet easy-to-use Opportunities module.  From deal size to each contactâs role, from listing the competitors to tracking the lead source, sales reps can easily manage each sales opportunity to completion.    Accounts & Contacts With the Accounts & Contacts module, you can easily enter and update key account and contact information. Tracking and staying in touch with your customers is simply a click away.   Activity & Task Management Managing your customer interactions is at the heart of a sales automation application. Sugar Sales provides a simple and clean set of tools for quickly tracking tasks, phone calls, emails and meetings.   Notes & Attachments Easily keep notes on every contact, opportunity or account. New to v1.5, add file attachments to notes.    Home Screen  Focus on the right activities with a quick view of your top opportunities, pipeline, today's appointments and task list.  Dashboard  A picture is always worth a thousand words.  With the dashboard module, you can graphically view how your opportunities breakdown by sales stage or industry.  New to v1.5, you can customize the charts to display the data you want.  Administration  Easily manage all the users in the system, their passwords, user interface themes and more.    -=Future Planned Features=- What we're working on next.   Internationalization  Support for local and localized date and time display.   Accounts & Contacts Easily sync customer contact information between Sugar Sales and MS Outlook and Palm devices.   Activity & Task Management Plug-ins for PDAs and email applications that deliver a best-in-class open source solution for tracking key customer information in your PDA quickly and easily.  Notes & Attachments Ability to enter HTML notes. Also provide for full-text searching across text or HTML notes as well as most file attachments.  Dashboard  More dashboard charts including the ability to customize the charts by time ranges, deal size and more.   The latest release can be found here: https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=107819&package_id=116411
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(InfoWorld) - Next Monday, Salesforce.com will, in the words of one industry analyst, "extend the value proposition of software as a service" when it introduces Visualforce at its Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco. The Visualforce layer introduces the user interface as a service. Visualforce is the latest component of Salesforce.com's Platform-as-a-Service, which the company announced earlier this summer as Force.com. Other components include the database and logic portions. Visualforce will allow Salesforce.com customers to design custom application interfaces while incorporating other technologies such as HTML, AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and Adobe Flex. The company made the move following requests from customers who wanted to present a more diverse UI, rather than creating applications that had a similar look and feel to the Salesforce.com CRM, according to Ariel Kelman, senior director of platform product marketing at Salesforce.com. Doug Menefee, CIO at The Schumacher Group, sounded quite enthusiastic about what he could do with Visualforce, although he hadn't used it yet. "By being able to build applications utilizing Visualforce, we will be able to build custom interfaces that improve workflow and productivity for data-entry-intensive job functions," said Menefee. Menefee was also pleased about the opportunity to build wizards in Visualforce. According to Jeff Kaplan, managing director of THINKstrategies, with each user conference, Salesforce adds another layer of value to SaaS (software as a service). Up until now, customization has been a thorn in the side of SaaS. It has been a topic of concern and criticism by SaaS skeptics, said Kaplan. "This new feature and capability is a clear indication of how quickly the SaaS industry is evolving to permit customization. And it is another example [of] how those misconceptions of the past are continually being eroded by these developments," Kaplan said. Menefee said that Visualforce will allow his organization to apply best practices to user interface design in various applications. This, in turn, will let them customize the employee experience based on their needs for data entry or viewing. Visualforce uses a "page-based model" built on current Web presentation technology and adds a component library for incorporating common interface elements. The UI platform tool leverages the data, logic, and workflow capabilities found in the greater Force.com platform. Among the features included in Visualforce are the following: * Pages, which allow developers to create pages using standard Web technologies. * Components, which allow companies to assemble current user interface elements in a new UI. * Logic Controllers for creating user interface behavior. Visualforce will be available for developer preview next week and generally available in the fourth quarter.
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On-demand CRM provider Salesforce.com Wednesday rolled out a parallel service its calling Support.com and aiming at corporations with far-flung call centers, help desks, and on-call technicians.
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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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(InfoWorld) - Salesforce.comÂ plans to widen the capabilities of its AppExchange Web site in 2007 to more closely resembles the online presence already established by companies such as Apple Computer and eBay. At an event due to take place Tuesday in San Francisco, the on-demand vendor will lift the curtain on work already underway at the company to turn AppExchange into a fully functioning online marketplace for hosted software. The idea is to make it asÂ easy for customers to buy on-demand softwareÂ from AppExchange as it is to purchase songs from Apple's iTunes music store, according to Kendall Collins, senior vice president of product marketing at Salesforce.com. Ever since Salesforce.comÂ officially launched AppExchangeÂ in January, there's been a question mark as to how the company will generate significant revenue from the service, he said. The site showcases both Salesforce.com and third-party hosted applications To date, AppExchange has functioned mostly as a central place where users of Salesforce.com's hosted software can go to find and try related applications and tools provided by the company, independent software vendors (ISVs) and developers. When a customer wants to buy a vendor's application, they have to individually contract with that company, meaning small development shops have had to provide the necessary infrastructure themselves to deal with selling, invoicing and deploying their products. Next year, Salesforce.com will make those capabilities available to any of its partners willing to pay for the services through an initiative the company's dubbed AppStore. There are several planned AppStore components. The AppStore Standard Referral Program will be available in February 2007, followed in August by AppStore Premium Referral Program and then AppStore Checkout in December next year. The Referral programs provide partners with access to Salesforce.com's marketing services, while the Checkout service will give them access to online ordering, billing, invoicing and collection services. Partners using Checkout will pay Salesforce.com 20 percent of the first year's revenue they obtain from any sale they close through AppExchange and the same percentage for subsequent years. The Referral services will work out at 10 percent of the first year's revenue of a sale for the standard version and 25 percent for the premium version, with nothing to pay in subsequent years. Checkout is a very significant development project for Salesforce.com, Collins said, essentially committing the company to take all the services and infrastructure it uses to run its own business and making those capabilities available to any of its partners worldwide. The vendor is already testing a prototype of the service able to handle multiple currencies and languages along with local sales tax requirements with some of its partners and developers. The prototype features single sign-on technology and includes an option for customers to purchase more Salesforce software licenses as they're buying AppExchange applications. Customers can also renew and upgrade their AppExchange subscriptions as well as purchase add-on technologies.