Several exciting developments in the CRM world occurred over this past week, a few of them coming from Salesforce.com (News - Alert) and Soffront, two well-known leading customer relationship management software providers.

This week, Salesforce.com revealed a new advertising campaign with the first TV ads from the company slated to air before and after the 2011 Super Bowl’s halftime show next Sunday, February 6. Developed with the help of Black Eyed Peas frontman, will.i.am, the advertisements are animated and will promote Salesforce.com’s highly successful messaging service, Chatter.

Launching January 31, the new version of Chatter will allow employees who are not customers of Salesforce.com to use the service. The company will also launch the site chatter.com. The strategy employs the idea that users at non-Salesforce-using companies will use and love Chatter, and subsequently the businesses will upgrade to more complex versions of the software. To make that happen, Benioff stated, “We really need to launch Chatter.com in a big way. I can’t think of anything bigger to do than launch it at the Super Bowl.”

In other CRM news, I-Control Alliance has officially selected Soffront Software’s hosted CRM solutions to manage its customer relationship services. Soffront provides integrated hosted CRM solutions for small to medium-sized companies, and its technologies will facilitate I-Control Alliance’s policy management and compliance.

Soffront’s solutions will give I-Control Alliance the ability to customize its business processes and workflows as they are identified. Vickie Pullen, a business consultant for I-Control Alliance stated, “We recognize the potential of Soffront CRM to provide the tools we need to manage complex business processes and provide exceptional service to our customers. The ability to customize Soffront to service different industry specific needs is a definite plus.”

Juliana Kenny graduated from the University of Connecticut with a double degree in English and French. After managing a small company for two years, she joined TMC (News - Alert) as a Web Editor for TMCnet. Juliana currently focuses on the call center and CRM industries, but she also writes about cloud telephony and network gear including softswitches.

Edited by Juliana Kenny