Salesforce.com, Google release first joint product
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Salesforce.com Inc. and Google Inc. announced a strategic global partnership Tuesday, but it wasn't theÂ widely expected tight integrationÂ between Google Apps and Salesforce.com'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.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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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) - 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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(InfoWorld) - Salesforce.com is drawing particular attention to the analyticsÂ customization capabilitiesÂ it plans to offer in the next version of its hosted CRM (customer relationship management) software, known as Salesforce Winter '07. At an event due to take place Wednesday in London, Marc Benioff, the vendor's chairman and chief executive officer, is expected to preview analytics and dashboard mash-up capabilities as part of his "Future of Software" presentation. The announcement is part of a gradual run-up to the release of Winter '07, theÂ 21st generation of the on-demand CRM software, which is due to become generally available in the fourth quarter of this year. Analytics is loosely defined as the analysis of data contained in a company's enterprise applications to help highlight potential business trends. Being able to spot such trends early can help firms improve the speed and quality of their decision-making. Other CRM players including Microsoft, Oracle, and SAGÂ are increasingly placing more emphasis on their respective analytics offerings as key product differentiators. For instance, Oracle announced last month that it would add more real-time predictive analytics to its business intelligence, middleware, and applications afterÂ acquiring intellectual property assetsÂ from Sigma Dynamics. While the main theme of the current version, Salesforce Summer '06 which debuted in July, was integration between Salesforce.com's CRM offering and third-party products, the watchword for Winter '07 is "unlimited customization," according to Ariel Kelman, the vendor's director of AppExchange product marketing. Since Salesforce.com officially went live with AppExchange in January, a network to host third-party and custom applications and integrate them with Salesforce.com's CRM software, the vendor has seen plenty of demand for analytics offerings, he said. In Salesforce Winter '07 users will have the ability to fully componentize the on-demand CRM application's analytical dashboards so that they can mash up or bring together components of different vendors' business intelligence (BI) software which they can then share and manage. Users will be able to engage in a wide range of BI activities which can be displayed on their dashboards within Salesforce including supply chain analysis, complex what-if scenarios and profitability analysis. Business Objects is Salesforce.com's first BI partner to participate in an analytics mash-up between its Crystal Xcelsius data visualization offering and the hosted CRM software's dashboard framework, Kelman said. Other BI partners expected to support the mash-ups number around 13 initially and will include open-source player JasperSoft, he added. Analytics, e-mail marketing and sales tools have been the most popular offerings on AppExchange since January, but Kelman is already starting to see a second wave of component categories gaining more and more user interest. This next wave is around human resources, financials and IT tools, he said, along with project management, bug tracking and quality assurance. Although Salesforce.com remains focused on supplying hosted CRM, its AppExchange network continues to expand its capabilities to provide all kinds of business components, not just those with strong ties into CRM. Other features for Winter '07 include a new user interface based on Ajax or asynchronous JavaScript and extensible markup language, a hook-in to Cisco Systems' computer telephony integration option and full support for IBM's Lotus Notes collaboration software.
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Salesforce.com (CRM:NYSE - commentary - research), a provider of Internet-based customer relationship management software, posted its first quarterly profit as a public company after the bell Thursday.
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Class libraries in, execs out Salesforce.com will next month release its Apex programming language to developers hungry to mash-up web-based business applications with its "platform in the sky" and to reassure investors anxious about growth.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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The online software pioneer Salesforce.com will help the Internet search leader Google sell ads as part of a partnership.
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InfoWorld - Next Monday, Salesforce.com will, in the words of one industry analyst, &quot;extend the value proposition of software as a service&quot; when it introduces Visualforce at its Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco.
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New Salesforce.com hosted CRM lets users access Apex Code to make writing custom apps easier, adds workflow management.
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(InfoWorld) - The North American sales arm of Singapore Airlines Ltd. is halfway through a project to use on-demand software from Salesforce.com Inc. to improve collaboration between its home-based corporate travel staff. Following the lead of some of its peers in the industry, Singapore Airlines is requiring corporate business travel sales staff to work out of their homes to pare down infrastructure costs. The sales staff is spread out in cities including Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Philadelphia and San Diego. The issue the airline and other companies are grappling with is how best to foster collaboration between such geographically scattered staff while also increasing efficiency and driving more sales. Prior to initial deployment of Salesforce.com's hosted sales automation and marketing software in April, the sales staff relied on e-mail and offline meetings as its main method for communication and collaboration, according to Michael Stellwag, manager of direct sales and marketing for the Americas at Singapore Airlines. About 18 months ago, the airline decided a sales force automation tool could help bring its home-based sales staff into closer collaboration with each other. Singapore Airlines took an in-depth look at products from three vendors over the course of six months -- Sage Software Inc.'s Act contact management software, enterprise applications vendor Saratoga Systems' CRM (customer relationship management) product, and Salesforce.com's hosted sales force automation and marketing offerings. The airline particularly liked Salesforce.com's on-demand approach since the application could run without support from Singapore Airlines' IT staff. The airline closed a deal to use Salesforce software as the software vendor's fiscal year ended on Jan. 31, 2006. From late 2005 through early 2006, Salesforce.com experienced a series of much publicized service outages. "We didn't place too much emphasis [on the failures]," Stellwag said. "Companies like Salesforce.com live and die by availability and we were confident the problem would be fixed. It didn't seem like anything more than a blip on the radar screen." Once the application was up and running, Stellwag began to check out Salesforce.com's AppExchange Web site where the vendor showcases both its own on-demand add-ons and applications developed by third parties to be used with the Salesforce software. "I looked at the broad array of applications and got hooked," he said. Of particular interest have been applications that address the specific needs of the airline industry, according to Stellwag. So far, Singapore Airlines is using 14 AppExchange applications including user adoption dashboards that measure how frequently the sales staff use the software. He also highlighted an application that integrates the Hoover's company database, an important source of sales leads for the airline's staff, with the Salesforce software. Looking ahead, Singapore Airlines wants to find ways to help sales team members be more efficient in how they set up trips to meet customers by doing mash-ups between Salesforce and mapping software from Mapquest Inc. and Google Inc. So far, about a dozen home-based salespeople are using the Salesforce software, with several more individuals to go live shortly. "Longer term, the number of home-based sales team members could jump considerably," Stellwag said. The sales staff particularly like the hosted software's offline module which enables them to access the basic functionality of Salesforce without needing an Internet connection. "People are communicating more than ever before," Stellwag said. "Everyone can see everyone else's details to facilitate greater cooperation and communication and for everyone to see how everyone else is doing." That ability to view colleague's sales progress acts as a self motivator for staff to ensure their efforts are at the level they should be, he added. Sharing calendars and task lists is proving extremely helpful in enabling the airline to put together an account team focused on a particular company, despite the sales team being based in different locations. Soon, the airline will roll out IBM Corp.'s Lotus Notes groupware to its sales operation in the U.S. and Canada, which had previously been using Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook Express. Stellwag is looking forward to the integration of Notes with Salesforce to enable further collaboration. "Salesforce has been successful at increasing productivity and has had a significant impact on our sales success," Stellwag said. "This is an experiment being watched very closely by executives in our worldwide headquarters in Singapore." When the project ends in about a year's time, if it has continued to meet a number of preset key performance indicators, the door could be open for a wider deployment of the hosted software. 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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Salesforce.com has unveiled AppStore, which offers customers a single place to access, test out and buy more than 400 applications offered through the company's AppExchange marketplace.
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It's official: Salesforce CRM tools work with Safari on Mac OS X machines.
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(InfoWorld) - You know the argument: SaaS applications are great for green field deployments, but difficult or risky to integrate with those legacy applications where all the really important data lives. With its announcement this week of ApexConnect, an integration tool to connect on-demand applications to back-end systems, analysts say Salesforce.com has moved to stuff that bogeyman back in the closet and has given SaaS enterprise-level capabilities. The company said Monday that ApexConnect integration services will be built on Salesforceâs Apex programming language for multitenant applications announced last month. The new tool will allow the approximately 400 third-party applications on the companyâs AppExchange platform to work with legacy applications, Web services, and other on-demand applications. Apex uses a syntax that most Java programmers will find familiar and allows any component or application created in it to be shared with any other application on the AppExchange. The new tools include ConnectOut, an outbound messaging API that can orchestrate an event in an external system, such as SAP, based on a trigger event in Saleforce.com, said Kendall Collins, senior vice president of marketing at Salesforce. âIt has the ability to kick off a process with an SAP or Oracle system,â Collins said. Another ApexConnect tool, ConnectOracle, will give IT the capability to connect to any Oracle back office system to synchronize data between Salesforceâs CRM application and Oracleâs ERP systems, Collins said. For example, a new account in Salesforce could be automatically added to Oracleâs billing system or enable a business process such as sending out invoices or delivery notices or matching a new order against a previous discount schedule stored in a contract management system. The Apex API will also allow middleware partners including Tibco, Informatica, Web Methods, IBM and Oracle, to connect to any part of Salesforceâs on- demand system. Taken together, Salesforceâs SaaS platform, AppExchange partners, and ApexConnect show SaaS encroaching on enterprise capabilities and reaching a critical mass that will allow IT to build end-to-end system processes, said Denis Pombriant, principal at Beagle Research. âOne of the main themes that runs through the history of IT is vendors and companies trying to figure out how to support business processes the way they want to run them from the very beginning to the very end,â Pombriant said. âThis is the end game.â The Apex programming language will be available in the first half of 2007 according to Salesforce officials. â[Systems integrators] have been holding back, [on SaaS] waiting to see what the next big technology shift is going to be. Announcements like this that will help them decide,â Pombriant said.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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By MICHAEL LIEDTKE  SAN FRANCISCO - Online software pioneer Salesforce.com Inc. will help Internet search leader Google Inc. sell ads as part of a partnership that falls short of Wall Street's anticipation since word of the alliance leaked last month.
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Not the interface you're looking for Salesforce.com's incredible disappearing act will continue next week the announcement of its latest platform and tools initiative to target developers.â¦