According to a recent case study presented by Salesforce.com (News - Alert), “it took one person less than a week to customize, brand, and fully deploy the Salesforce CRM customer portal in production. "

Salesforce CRM "gives us the ability to react quickly to changes driven by the business and to revise the app in minutes -- not days or weeks -- using point-and-click capabilities," said officials of Qualcomm (News - Alert) about the deployment. "With our previous CRM systems, changes were difficult to make and typically deployed in an eight to 12 week release cycle.”

Qualcomm wanted a CRM it could roll out for greater user adoption and data unity, finding that the time and energy expended managing its existing on-premise CRM systems "failed to produce equivalent value." 

So in 23 days, Salesforce.com officials say, a Qualcomm analyst with only basic online training "rolled out Salesforce CRM Unlimited Edition to 55 initial users in Qualcomm’s Enterprise Services group; word of the successful implementation quickly spread, resulting in a replacement of two of the existing large on-premise CRM systems with Salesforce CRM to over 600 users."

Used in operational B2B instances, the Salesforce CRM call center case assignment, escalation, and auto response e-mail capabilities are used by customer service representatives to fuel call center operations across multiple groups.

Dashboards track sales and support key performance indicators with real-time reporting, and numerous AppExchange installations such as Sales KPI Dashboard, iLinc, Angel.com and Adoption Dashboards provide specific solutions that enhance the company’s cloud-computing investment.

So what results has Qualcomm seen? Salesforce CRM’s cloud-computing model has saved Qualcomm "an estimated $100,000 in hardware costs to upgrade existing, out-of-date on-premise solutions," company officials say, saying that in addition, the lack of hardware to buy and maintain allowed Qualcomm to reduce required support staff by 60 percent.