June 12, 2006

Salesforce.com Opens In New Zealand

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor

Last Wednesday industry observer Campbell Gardiner reported that Wellington, New Zealand-based IT services firm Synergy had “entered into a partnership arrangement with global CRM provider salesforce.com,” and now Kiwi industry observer Tom Pullar-Strecker has noted that salesforce.com will open an office in Auckland later this year.

According to Singapore-based regional vice-president Graeme Beardsell, Pullar-Strecker writes, “salesforce.com has signed up 65 New Zealand customers over the past three years. These include the local subsidiaries of Vodafone and Fairfax. Worldwide, its software is used by 444,000 people in 22,700 organizations.”

In what the sardonic would take as an evil omen auguring ill, the news was greeted by a freak power outage in Auckland, bringing “chaos to New Zealand’s Auckland city on Monday, leaving thousands of houses and businesses without electricity, roads gridlocked, phone lines down and hospitals closed,” according to Reuters.

It doesn’t get much more ironic than this. As Pullar-Strecker notes, salesforce.com “has been rattled by outages that meant customers couldn’t access its application for short periods.” Welcome to Auckland, you’ll feel right at home here.

Kiwis are getting a lot more demanding and sophisticated about CRM. Last week a panel sponsored by Genesys (News - Alert) picked ANZ Bank as one of their 22 points of light, citing them for their outstanding CRM.

According to the official recognition, Melbourne, Australia-based ANZ, the number one bank in New Zealand, “has become one of the most highly rated businesses in the eyes of the customer, based largely on its commitment to investing in people and technology for its contact center operation.” Namely that ANZ has improved customer satisfaction “nearly 40% while at the same time reducing costs by nearly 30%,” thanks to a contact center called “a model of efficiency with validation and awards from the Australian Government and numerous consumer and contact center groups.”

Pullar-Strecker writes that “salesforce.com is one of only a few successful application service providers,” hosting “its software in its own datacenters in the US, charging customers a monthly fee of US$17-$165 per user to access the application.”

Founded in 1999, salesforce.com is now valued at more than $3.3 billion on the NASDAQ.

David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.

(source: http://news.tmcnet.com/news/-new-zealand-salesforcecom-/2006/06/12/1677305.htm)