Salesforce sees cloud’s silver lining

Cloud computing is good business for Salesforce.com, which is faring b et t e r than many of its more traditional counterparts in a shaky economy.
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While the credit crunch saw many traditional software companies miss their latest quarterly targets, Salesforce.com reported 34 per cent year on year growth in its last quarter and reachedUS$1billion in revenues in the last fiscal year.

It was the first enterprise cloud computing company to achieve this level of turnover, and one of only about 25 software companies ever to do so. The reason is simply that CRM, as soon as it is installed on a computer’s hard drive, can now be accessed online. As Dr Steve Garnett , EMEA chairperson for Salesforce.com, sees it, Google has changed the world. Garnett said companies realised that there was no need to own the infrastructure their software runs on.

The result, he said, was the unprecedented migration away from traditional CRM software in favour of CRM on demand - or ‘‘as-a-service’’.

‘‘People are happy to use the likes of Yahoo!, eBay, Google and Amazon for personal transactions, where the technology is hosted online. There’s no reason business applications like CRM can’t be as simple to use as customer applications,” said Garnett.

It is estimated that, for 80 per cent of companies, IT budgets mainly go towards maintenance. Describing this figure as ‘‘frightful’’, Garnett said that accessing software packages online, as a managed service, allowed companies to bypass their own IT departments.

Using the cloud computing model, small companies can leverage the power of CRM in the same manner as a large multinational. Cost-saving and reduced complexity are the biggest advantages of accessing CRM applications online.

Since the onset of the global recession, Garnett said companies had refocused their efforts to retain existing customers, improve sales effectiveness and use technology to create new products and services.

‘‘When times are hard, you want to hang on to your traditional customers. You want to be cross-selling to them and getting as much value out of them as possible,” he said.

‘‘Companies are also turning to improving their sales efficiency and effectiveness. If, out of ten sales prospects, they used to close five, how do they increase that to six or seven?”

Information about customers, captured by a CRM package, can be of immense value - possibly more so in a recession where people need every incentive to spend.

‘‘It is important for sales to have visibility of customer service records. If you’re a salesperson and you’re about to call on a customer, it is worth checking that they don’t have 27 outstanding problems that haven’t been fixed,” said Garnett.

‘‘If a customer calls up with a problem and your company has a million-euro opportunity on the table with them, access to up-to-the-minute CRM data can alert you to this and you might prioritise resolving the existing problem in your workflow as a result.”

A big focus for Salesforce.com in the future will be the integration of sales and customer service. The company has already launched what it calls the Service Cloud, an application that enables customer service organisations to join and manage customer service conversations online.

The Service Cloud is built on the firm’s Force.com development platform and, through deals with internet giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

com, it enables customer service businesses to capture every conversation that takes place online.

Salesforce.com predicts that, in the future, more than two thirds of all service conversations will take place in the cloud.

This focus on cross-collaboration between customer service agents and salespeople is also central to Salesforce CRM Spring ’09, the company’s recently released CRM package, which has been updated with more than 50 new features.

Clients can also build their own custom applications on the company’s Force.com platform, a recent trend in the field, according to Garnett.

‘‘Our customers are now starting to use our platform to build their own apps. We thought: ‘If we can build a billion dollar business in the CRM space, what about all the other areas where we don’t have industry expertise or intellectual property, for example supply chain management, asset management, human resources, talent management and so on?’,” he said.

‘‘What we decided to do was externalise the tools we used to build Salesforce.com, and allow our partners and customers to build their own applications. Thousands of applications are popping up, created by our customers, and extended to cover any areas within their businesses.”

Cloud computing will dominate in the months ahead, as more companies see the value in leveraging the internet to build applications and websites and interact with their own customers.

‘‘We’re seeing that really explode,” said Garnett. ‘‘There’s huge momentum around custom development on Force.com. It’s a massive market that spans all industries.”

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BY Niall Byrne
Source：THE POST.IE

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