Customer relationship management, or “CRM,” software provider, Salesforce.com is no newbie to the telecom industry. With its dynamic product portfolio, the company’s sales, service and cloud computing systems lend to sales teams and companies looking to maximize time, manage operations efficiently and improve customer relationships.
And, as Salesforce.com’s (News - Alert) Senior Manager of Product Marketing, Viviana Padilla told me in a recent TMCnet interview, the current economic climate is forcing companies to scale back and re-evaluate where monetary needs should go.
“Whether it’s Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2 or Custom Cloud 2, customers are choosing the low-cost, low risk, and fast results of cloud computing over expensive hardware, software, and data centers that burn through precious capital and yet rarely produce the promised returns,” Padilla said.
And, going forward, Padilla predicts that 2010 will be a year of transition for companies to replace the expenses from enterprise software companies and migrating to built-in innovations of cloud computing, like the systems offered by Salesforce.com.
“In days like these when cash is king, liquidity is critical and credit is scarce, the predictable, flexible cost of cloud computing is overwhelmingly the right choice,” Padilla said.
Our full exchange is below.
TMCnet: How did your company perform this year? How close did you come to meeting your guidelines as you entered 2009?
Viviana Padilla: The current economic climate is causing customers to take a hard look at how they are spending money on technology. In these days of scarce capital and tight credit, big-ticket purchases for hardware, software, and data centers just don’t make sense. Cloud computing has a better answer: low, predictable costs, flexible, pay as you go deployments, and fast results.
Whether it’s Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud 2, Service Cloud 2 or Custom Cloud 2, customers are choosing the low-cost, low risk, and fast results of cloud computing over expensive hardware, software, and data centers that burn through precious capital and yet rarely produce the promised returns. What we’ve seen over the past few years is a big shift from client-server to cloud computing.
TMCnet: What major product, services and partnership announcements did your company report?
VP: In the last year, salesforce.com has continued to lead the industry in innovation with a number of new announcements, like Service Cloud 2 and Salesforce for Twitter, bringing the power of cloud computing to more than 67,000 companies including Dell, Cisco (News - Alert) and Avon.
The Service Cloud, introduced in January of 2009, represents the next generation in customer service applications. Everyone has felt the pain of trying to get a customer service question answered directly from a company – a maze of confusing phone, email and chat conversations that usually end without your question being answered. These days, more people are turning to the cloud to get their questions answered; in fact more than two-thirds of customer service conversations will be happening in the cloud by 2013 according to Gartner.
Service Cloud 2 brings together cloud computing applications like Facebook, Twitter and Google (News - Alert) with traditional contact center technologies like phone, email and chat, enabling companies to join the conversation with their customers wherever they are. With more than 8000 customers including Extra Space Storage and Misys, the Service Cloud is the only solution on the market today that helps companies join these conversations and source the expertise in the cloud.
Salesforce for Twitter, delivered in September of 2009, enables companies to search, monitor and join the conversations taking place on Twitter directly from Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2. Twitter’s incredible growth has attracted the attention of many enterprises that want to leverage and participate in this increasingly influential community. Salesforce for Twitter helps sales and marketing professionals increase their pipeline and sales by helping marketers convert Twitter conversations into customers and make it easy for sales reps to tweet back to interested prospects. In addition, Salesforce for Twitter enables customer service reps to join the customer service conversations on Twitter, providing service on one of the fastest growing social applications on the market today.
TMCnet: Talk to us about the major news item – whether it was a new product, an acquisition or something else – in your market segment this year?
VP: At Dreamforce ’09, Salesforce Chatter was announced, the biggest breakthrough from Salesforce.com ever.
Salesforce Chatter is a new social computing application and platform for enterprise collaboration. It will revolutionize the workplace by leveraging the social networking models made popular in the consumer Web. Salesforce Chatter is a real-time, secure, private social network within an enterprise. Employees within a company can join groups based on role or topics, they can participate in conversation streams within these groups, and even be alerted to new content or changes made within an application associated with their topic. By leveraging Force.com’s proven, multi-tenant sharing model, it enables companies to decide which employees have access to what information.
In addition, Chatter is also a social platform that will enable developers to make any custom or third party application social. Platform developers will be able to build custom social applications, and through the API, connect other enterprise applications (including on-premise apps) to Chatter – enabling the new innovations from Chatter to touch every corner of the enterprise.
TMCnet: With signs that the economy is pulling out of the recession, what are you expecting in 2010?
VP: I am not an economist, but I can tell you that there’s a common theme we’re seeing among our customers: They are taking a hard look at the maintenance payments that they are making to enterprise software companies and replacing those stagnant legacy technology costs with predictable, scalable subscriptions and constant built-in innovations of cloud computing.
In days like these when cash is king, liquidity is critical and credit is scarce, the predictable, flexible cost of cloud computing is overwhelmingly the right choice.