Salesforce.com, a provider of cloud computing solutions and services for enterprises, announced that Nikon Instruments, a company that offers optical instrumentation solutions, has deployed its Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Chatter.

Nikon aimed at leveraging a system that would help it in establishing closer relationships with its customers, and also in providing it with real-time business intelligence regarding new opportunities and sales. John Bivona, CRM manger and project leader at Nikon, wanted to manage various small chunks of unique customer data scattered around the company that didn’t offer any substantial information about them. Also, the company was looking for a solution that could help it in bringing all customer data together to share while maintaining the highest level of control and security over the data. Nikon carried out a comprehensive review of various competitive solutions which also included Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SAP (News - Alert) CRM OnDemand, before finally selecting Salesforce CRM with Chatter.

The mobile, social, real-time cloud computing model of the solution, coupled with its comprehensive technology, clearly defined costs, and ability to run with few IT resources scored the odds in Salesforce solution’s favor.

With the help of Cloud 2 technologies, enterprises are able to unify sales, marketing, and service. Initially, Sales Cloud 2 is currently rolled out across Nikon's sales and marketing organizations and the company has also been deploying Service Cloud 2, salesforce.com's application for modern customer service, for customer support.

For efficient product marketing and product management, Nikon has been leveraging the benefits of Chatter, which helps its employees to provide real-time updates to the sales organization regarding new resources on daily basis. These resources include product brochures or links to articles that can accelerate their sales.

Further, the company automated quote requests from its website into Salesforce, which are then automatically routed according to product and geography without any human intervention or processing, and finally enable Nikon save internal resources and costs. Its agents can also have anytime access to Salesforce on iPhones and BlackBerries. Nikon’s marketing and sales organizations can access data on the success of trade shows and outbound e-mail campaigns right from within the new system, which helps them collaborate in a better way.

The company hopes by integrating the system with its SAP back-office system, a quote in Salesforce will be converted to an order in SAP and then back through Salesforce to communicate order status to the customer, which can save it substantial costs on time and efficiencies.

Recently this month, Bandwidth.com (News - Alert), a provider of Internet and VoIP services selected Salesforce CRM, using which it was able to coordinate and manage customer service and support across the numerous telecommunications parties involved in delivering service to customers.