While August and early September tends to be slow in the Valley, Salesforce.com has had a quite a big month. The CRM vendor posted strong earnings for the second quarter of 2009; just announced a new version of their fastest growing product, Service Cloud 2; rolled out a lightweight contact manager for small businesses; and opened up its Force.com platform to outside vendors. Today, Salesforce.com CEO and Founder Marc Benioff is taking the stage at an event in San Francisco to announce more news and speak about the company’s strategy, the Service Cloud 2 and the power of Twitter. Here are my notes from his presentation:
Benioff says that the Service Cloud has had “spectacular performance” in a difficult economy, which is one of the reasons Salesforce is focusing on continuous improvement. Benioff says that Salesforce is the “cloud computing evangelist” as the company tries to push for platforms and applications in the cloud. Benioff draws special attention to the SMBs as clients, which can run on the same software and platforms as large companies.
Benioff highlights the real-time cloud, saying that applications and platforms need to deliver this value. Real-time is crucial to Salesforce’s offerings and Benioff emphasizes that real-time is the future of the company’s products.
Addressing the capabilities of the Service Cloud, Benioff says that call center technology is outdated and can’t leverage the power of Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. According to Benioff, the customer can save “millions of dollars” by using the service cloud and its “next-generation” innovations.
Benioff really focused on the power of Twitter in the CRM, saying the microblogging network has “incredible capabilities” around the world. Twitter in itself, he says, is a tremendous knowledge base. Jason Goldman, a board member of Twitter, says that the Service Cloud 2 is taking conversations that take place on Twitter to another level. He says that the platform is one of the best examples he’s seen of using Twitter to help businesses.
Goldman emphasizes that Twitter is imperative to businesses in many ways, especially given its real-time nature. Building Twitter into building processes is what makes the Service Cloud 2 a powerful platform, says Goldman.
As I wrote yesterday, Salesforce is making an interesting play in the cloud, almost making the transition between the enterprise and the social web seamless. The Service Cloud 2’s integration with Facebook, Twitter, Google and the consumer internet is made possible because it is a cloud-based platform and Salesforce isn’t letting anyone forget this.
Marc B – Please go build some products and stop promoting your company behind buzz words
Ditto!
If you want to sound cool and connected, add ‘twitter’ to the end of any sentance…
Salesforce strength has been risen suddenly with to great powers the Service Cloud 2 and the power of Twitter. Both sounds good. Twitter is imperative to businesses in many ways already, especially its real-time nature suits all. So by building Twitter into a realtime processes makes the Service Cloud 2 a powerful platform.
The Service Cloud 2’s integration with Facebook, Twitter, Google and the consumer internet is made possible because it is a cloud-based platform.
>>>> So it is going to be a combination of search engine, and social networking. Sure the features Salesforce Knowledge, Salesforce Answers, and Salesforce for Twitter would help grow business well and help in apt decision making.
Don’t they already have products?
+1 That summary sounds ridiculous.
This seems to be a great a idea, we might run with this!
Until Twitter can withstand the traffic from a small Apple press event (unlike today in which it crashed and burned) it will never be “enterprise ready”.
You want me to trust Twitter for use at my company on any mission critical functions? Keep it online for at least 30 days in a row.
Keep in mind that CRM is a collection of mostly elective use applications. When integrated with elective use apps, Twitter’s availability is good enough. Now, if you are deploying a life critical call center, OK, Twitter would not cut it, but that’s not the purpose of Twitter is it?
I read your column on cloud compputing and thought it was great. Egnyte is an on demand file server for small business and professionals that has been a top choice for a variety of industries. Egnyte has exceeded other cloud companies in my opinion taking it a step further by offering a local cloud for off line access, iphone and netbook access and a very easy interface. I encourage you to do a follow up on this column and take a look at egnyte.
Spamming the comments only makes you look like a fool.
Any enterprise software that integrates Twitter is a joke. You too can have awesome downtime, now at exorbitant cost!
And when Twitter is down, you can make a Google Voice call on your iPhone, no wait, sorry forget that. At least you could send an e-mail with your Gmail account, no shit, forget that too. Damn, it sure is tough to re-boot the cloud!
Are you really comparing the uptime of GMail to Twitter? Are you kidding?
Sounds like YOU are the person spreading FUD in this comment.
Think of Twitter as a knowledge base of sentiment. Mining that does not really require real-time systems to extract value. For outbound communication such as a campaign, think of it as a message queue; when it’s available, everyone gets the message. Think pragmatic.
You do have to hand it to Salesforce, they are expert marketers and they seem to be making in-roads everywhere especially the UK. I’m sure there is substance beyond the buzz.
What exactly makes Twitter substantively better than any other chat/messaging application? I know, I know, they’re just capitalizing on a fad that probably won’t go away for a long time, and on the power of buzzwords. But still…
I agree that egnyte is a great solution. I encourage others to take a look. The company is based in Mt. View Ca.
The simply have the greatest CRM Solutions on the web/Cloud
More Sales to come!