The CRM arena saw much action this week from leading organizations in the industry. From Salesforce’s Cloudforce 2011 event to special promotions from CT Americas, the customer relationship management field was nothing if not overflowing with news this week. Here are this week’s highlights below.

Hosting the Cloudforce 2011 event in New York City yesterday, Salesforce.com (News - Alert) revealed the results of a study it commissioned with WSP Environment & Energy concerning the use of carbon and cloud computing services.

Estimating that customers of Salesforce.com produce 95 percent less carbon than users on other on-premise application servers, the study compared organizations that run equivalent software with those that use Salesforce’s cloud computing services.

WSP noted, "Our analysis shows that cloud computing platforms, like salesforce.com's, are substantially more energy- and carbon-efficient than either on-premise systems or third-party data centers." The study also showed that largely scalable, multitenant cloud platforms are 64 percent more carbon-efficient than other “private clouds” that do not use multitenancy.

On the knowledge management side of CRM, Consona (News - Alert), a provider of knowledge management software, has recently released a white paper that discusses the importance of implementing knowledge management processes and software into any customer relationship management platform.

The white paper, titled “Knowledge Management is NOT an Add-On!” explores how to integrate knowledge into the customer experience in order to increase efficiency and revenue in customer service and support departments.

The paper expounds upon how the fiercely competitive DSP market, customer service and support can “make or break” a vendor. It’s vital for organizations to integrate knowledge into the business systems and service technologies that drive customer experience to keep a leg up on market trends.

And thirdly, for a limited time, China Telecom (News - Alert) Americas is offering its International Ethernet Private Line (IEPL) with savings of between 25 percent and 35 percent if interested users contact the company before May 15 of this year, and sign up for one year of service before July 15.

Offering a suite of fully-managed Ethernet-based network services, China Telecom Americas’ solutions are developed specifically to address the network performance requirements of enterprise and carrier customers.

The IEPL is an end-to-end, managed, bandwidth service that provides point-to-point, international connectivity with a standard Ethernet interface with an included high level of flexibility and security for easy LAN extension and WAN connection.

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