Salesforce.com Keeps Busy
San Francisco-based CRM solution provider, salesforce.com, has been hard at work with new releases and strategic alliances while still having time to pull together a star-studded benefit concert at New York's Carnegie Hall.
New Releases
The three new CRM products — Enterprise Edition, Offline Edition, and E-Business Suite — are designed to fulfill the needs of growing customer-centric companies.
Featuring the Web Services interface, the Enterprise Edition is for larger and more complex businesses and allows for simplified and standardized customer operations through a single, rapidly deployed online solution — without purchasing or installing any code. The built-in Enterprise Infrastructure enables customization, integration and easy administration.
“Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition exemplifies the new way of building and delivering enterprise applications,” said Marc Benioff, president and CEO of salesforce.com. “We have bucked all the usual client/server trends and avoided their pitfalls to deliver powerful, easy-to-use, online applications that have all the features and functionalities desired by customers of all sizes. We believe today's announcement is another step toward the end of software as we know it.”
Salesforce.com's Offline Edition, dubbed “CRM in a Briefcase,” enables comprehensive management of multidimensional customer relationships without an Internet connection. The Offline Edition will automatically update records and data when reconnected, allowing for an immediate and continuous workflow.
The E-Business Suite is a fully integrated set of back-office and front-office applications that provide a complete 360-degree view of customers across the entire organization. Operations include order entry, tracking, and status; negotiated contract terms and pricing; lifetime customer value assessments; current and outstanding invoices; account balance and status; and electronic bill presentation.
Strategic Alliances
Enterprise analytic solutions provider Informatica® Corporation will deliver data integration capabilities to salesforce.com's Enterprise Edition, which will allow for secure, high-performance data exchanges and a comprehensive analysis of customer-facing interactions across disparate systems. The Web Services interface that is used to connect the online CRM solution coupled with the Informatica data integration platform will provide salesforce.com customers with the ability to share data with customers, suppliers and partners across the extended enterprise. The consolidated data can then be used for analytics and strategic planning to maximize business insight and market understanding.
“We are pleased to join with Informatica to enable our Enterprise Edition customers to integrate customer information with data housed in back-end systems,” said Benioff. “Joining with Informatica is an essential element to our integration strategy, and a valuable option for our customers who are looking for a powerful integration solution that effectively supports analytics and strategic planning.”
Salesforce.com's Enterprise Edition customers will also benefit from an alliance the CRM provider has forged with business integration company, TIBCO Software Inc. The partnership will enable Enterprise Edition customers to use TIBCO's powerful Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tools by allowing real-time integration of salesforce.com's online CRM solution with back-end enterprise systems and applications. Utilizing TIBCO products, customers will be able to interoperate with the open application-programming interface (API) to power the robust functions of the Enterprise Edition in real-time.
“Salesforce.com's leading CRM Web applications support TIBCO's vision of integrating Web Services,” said Keith Goldstein, TIBCO's vice president, strategic alliances. “Our joint customers rely on our combined products to provide an end-to-end CRM solution, giving them visibility throughout their enterprise.”
Tibet House Benefit Concert
Salesforce.com/foundation will celebrate the Year of the Water Horse at the 12th Annual Tibet House Benefit Concert at Carnegie Hall on February 22. The evening will begin with dinner and cocktails, hosted by Marc Benioff, at New York's Russian Tea Room and will be followed by the concert that features David Bowie, Philip Glass, Bebel Gilberto, Nawang Khechog, The Kronos Quartet, Patti Smith, Tibetan monks from the Drepung Gomang Monastery, and Adam Yauch.
Benioff sits on the Tibet House Board and salesforce.com/foundation has donated over $100,000 in the past two years to develop projects that empower the Tibetan people with technology for education and communication. Charitable initiatives include the Tibetan School Technology Project, designed to educate hundreds of Tibetan youth by installing computer centers in schools; the opening of 18 Community Technology Centers in the San Francisco Bay Area to serve local youth; and partnership with Just Think Foundation to launch the first mobile computer center on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Benioff's philanthropy is a result of his belief that successful business practices can and should give back to the community from which it drew its success. Robert Thurman, Tibet House president and professor of Indo-Tibetan Studies at Columbia University, supports Benioff's business practices, saying, “Salesforce.com/foundation is helping to create a model for a new kind of company by building community service and philanthropic cause into its culture from the beginning and helping to improve the lives of those less fortunate.”
Robyn Greenspan, an independent researcher and speaker, is interested in innovation, market trends and information technology. She was a participant in the AI Summit and also took part in the IEEE International Conference on Edge Computing, International SOA Symposium series and the International Cloud Symposium series. She graduated from Temple University. She was previously the communications and research manager for the AMS, an internationally recognized professional association that advances knowledge in the IT and business management areas.
