If you had any doubts, put them to rest.
According to industry journal EnterpriseAppsToday.com, Salesforce's vision of the social enterprise may be catching on.
The journal cites Tom Roderick and Gur Talpaz of Stifel Nicolaus writing that Salesforce.com (News - Alert) is "winning the hearts, minds (and wallets) of enterprise software buyers," and not just in its core customer relationship management market.
Messrs. Roderick and Talpaz wrote that "Heavy enthusiasm surrounding the company's product portfolio is the generally accepted norm amongst both the financial community and actual software buyers. Beyond the marketing hype, however, we believe something far more significant is happening behind the scenes.”
They conclude that Salesforce.com is seeing “real interest from enterprise-wide buyers for large-scale deployments that encompass multiple solutions,” relying on such research as “our post-Dreamforce checks,” which convince them that large enterprise customers “believe they can do so much more with Salesforce.com."
And the proof might be on the ground. After all, as they note, Salesforce.com is, in fact, displacing Oracle (News - Alert) Siebel CRM in "several large deals," among them Conoco Philips and "one of the world's largest technology vendors.”
This might strain that famous Marc Benioff (News - Alert) - Larry Ellison friendship?
In fact, Roderick and Talpaz say, Salesforce could benefit further from a weakening economy, since in tough times people look first to the more economical option, and these days that’s Salesforce.com.
This past week TMC’s (News - Alert) Anuradha Shukla wrote that Autoglass staff is responding to people's complaints or queries directly through social media by using Radian6 from Salesforce.com.
The company is using Radian6 from Salesforce.com to find out what people are saying about its brands on social media sites, according to Cliff Saran from computerweekly.com.
Belron, the parent company of Autoglass, aims to improve customer engagement in 2011 and is thus monitoring threads of conversations looking for negative and positive customer feedback.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.
Edited by Juliana Kenny