Salesforce Facilitates Data Exchange Between Tenants
Mark Hendrickson
20 comments »
Tomorrow Salesforce will launch a new service called Salesforce to Salesforce (S2S) that facilitates the sharing of data between companies that use Salesforce’s software as a service (SaaS).
Companies have heretofore been able to manage their organizational data, whether CRM-related or not, with Salesforce applications provided by AppExchange or built on Force.com. However, their data was largely cut off from other companies, or “tenants”, who also use Salesforce’s hosted software. With S2S, businesses can now share data with partner companies, thereby taking advantage of Salesforce’s multi-tenancy architecture.
Salesforce claims to be modeling S2S off the sharing functionality of social networks like Facebook. To share data, such as leads or plans, you simply search for contacts from within your browser and create “connections” with them. Data objects land in their inboxes, from which they can choose to accept the objects or not. Once accepted, updates to the objects will show up for both companies that have access to them. Company representatives say that data sharing can also be set up to occur in a more automated fashion.
The idea is that employees for, say, Amazon can more easily send shipping requests to UPS and, similarly, Toyota can pass on information about sales leads to local dealerships.
As far as pricing goes, it will cost $100 per month for two companies to transfer data between their applications. However, only one of the companies (the one that sets the connection up) will shoulder that cost.
Salesforce says that it will boast one million subscribers, or users, by the end of this month. Over 38,000 companies currently use its services.
Brilliant. The cost, looks like reasonable, probably companies don’t mind, do they?… /ac.
Opening up access between implementations creates a hole for companies that do not want to share their SF data. Sf will say it’s controlled, but how many companies really will use it and is it worth the exposure? I think not.
This is great news. Should be very empowering by very easily allowing end customers to share and mash-up data. We’ll have our customers implement this so signed contracts can automatically show up not only in our customers’ SFDC accounts, but also their partners’ accounts as well, which our web app does but until now the AppExchange variant could not. This is nice.
Jason,
Of all the commentary I’ve read on this, what you just said makes the most sense in terms of why I should care about this capability.
Yawn….
The pricing seems fair for the service, but I really don’t see the value here other than some press action off of the announcement.
I am assuming this is just an import/export type functionality where one instance talks to the other one to create a copy of the information.
Somewhat handy…, but realistically.., what percentage of your customers and partners are using salesforce. I also wonder if they will incorporate any “discovery mechanism”. By discovery mechanism I mean a method/process to automatically know which contacts, customers, partners, etc are on salesforce as well.
Without notification of who is using salesforce as well…, are you just required to ask everyone as part of your business process if they are part of salesforce, and then do the hookup.
I wonder how this will play with their portal offering where the main goal is paying for a solution to share data with outsiders that are not users in your system.
Need to add customer experience management system that can record customer behavior, hope some one will develop such software or might be there I am not knowing.
This is a significant move, the ramifications of which will go way beyond CRM and Salesforce.com.
Uh…. thanks. Go ahead and readily share *my* personal data. I could use more SPAM.
Im not to sure if this will be an easy to use business software program. I think it is important for Salesforce to boost sales to large corporations in order to maintain sales growth and boost profits. And may be this is a just a step ahead.
Good luck
Parul
http://www.bhopu.com
Really that is interesting and useful. Cost wise it is reasonable. But sharing data itself doesn’t look like fair.
Hilary
http://modazzle.com/cms/modazz.....SalesForce
I think the main focus of this feature is companies that have several instances of salesforce.com for different divisions within their company.
You are almost forced to do this if you want to maintain some more involved customizations for one team separate from the other teams.
In the past, moving people from one instance to another was insanely challenging, requiring a db expert to export all the data, reupload, and relink it using the old relationships.
At first glance, it may solve this problem.
Well to me : Salesforce is becoming SOCIAL in a strict way. Its
a great move though, i think lot of other SAAS companies will follow
this for sure. And one thing which will add more push because of things like this will be bring more work on SOA as more companies will inegrate …
Now, when evaluating CRM platform, suddenly the size of its user-base is part of the equation. Companies will have to ask themselves; are my partners and vendors on the same platform? Clearly, Salesforce is taking advantage of the community of customers to acquire new customers, which is a smart strategy. This development is a benefit for current and future customers of Salesforce.
Disclaimer: I’m the product manager for the new Salesforce to Salesforce service. Obviously this is my ‘baby’ so I thought I would give my perspective here
#2 - customers need to explicitly decide what they want to share, with whom and when. The opt in/opt out model forms the core of this new service, any customer can stop sharing at any time. Additionally, customers have control right to the field level on what information they want to share and can customize that by relationship, all this without any IT investment. We’ve been talking to a number of customers and prospects and I can assure you a lot of them have been looking for such a solution, especially customers who depend on their partner community (e.g resellers, distributors, suppliers, agents etc) to run their business. Think of the alternative - disparate systems, costly EDI/custom implementations that only the very big companies can afford vs. this service that takes days (not months) to get up and running, is flexible to meet the evolving nature of business relationships and is cost effective for companies of all sizes
#6 - import/export by its very nature denotes asynchronous sharing. That’s how companies share info currently - importing/exporting excel spreadsheets which we all know has resulted in no visibility and limited cross-company collaboration. This solution involves setting up a connection that defines the rules of engagement (i.e. what obj/fields to share by partner) and once a record is shared, updates flow seamlessly in a bi-directional fashion without end users needing to do anything different.
#9 - again data is only shared via explicit action by an authorized user
#10 - we have designed this service using a point and click UI design. No additional custom implementation required and we’ve gone through a number of rounds of usability with all sorts of roles to make sure the service is easy to use and flexible for different kinds of processes
Generally speaking, we’ve included additional levels of security as far as the actual data sharing is concerned, over and above what’s available with the force.com platform so that unauthorized third-party’s cannot access the shared information. Additionally since it’s built on the force.com platform it integrates seamlessly into our workflow engine therefore ensuring both data and process integrity in cross-company sharing relationships. Bottom line: companies can follow their own processes which collaborating real-time on revenue sensitive information with their business partners in a secure manner
This is a very touchy thing for most of SF.com companies. The sharing or leads or potential sharing is a major hole that can be used to a lot of bad thing.
Sales reps are notoriously touchy about their leads and who can see them. Obviously their jobs depend on others not getting their hands on them!
Even in a car dealer situation I can see problems. Just because one dealer is allowed to get leads could lead to that dealer “lending” out that lead to another sales rep “under the table”.
This service could be useful to some of their customers. Mostly franchise customers. I would guess it might have a positive impact on 5% or less of their customer base.
Let’s put it this way. If you are a sales rep, would you like it if you knew your sales manager had opened this up and your leads may get picked up by another rep! I think that says it all
My general opinion of sf.com is that they have a product that is overpriced at this point, a bit too complicated to work with for general sales reps, and the interface is old-school and not very intuitive.
They had a great marketer/pr/CEO (who came from Oracle) which was one of the finest displays of fantastic marketing abilities turning a sub-par web app into the industry leader! He is the man!