Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff: Don’t call Chatter a social network
Salesforce.com announced a new product today called Chatter, which it describes as Facebook and Twitter for enterprises. But during a press and analyst session at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, chief executive Marc Benioff said he doesn’t want you to think of Chatter as a social network.
That’s some, uh, creative thinking there — Chatter has employee profiles, status updates and news feeds, so it sounds a lot like a social network to me. And… Continue Reading
Salesforce.com announces Chatter, another social network for companies
Salesforce.com announced today that it’s going to join the hordes of companies offering a social networking service for your business. With a new product called Salesforce Chatter, companies get their own secure, private social network where they can collaborate and communicate in real-time.
It’s a crowded market, with existing products from Jive Software, Socialtext, and many others, but Salesforce is one of the biggest companies to throw its hat in the ring. (Cisco recently announced social… Continue Reading
Salesforce.com profits up, but analysts disappointed
Salesforce.com saw its revenues and profits rise substantially in the third quarter of this year, but that reportedly wasn’t enough for some analysts, or for Wall Street.
The company, which delivers sales and business applications via online subscription, brought in $330.5 million in revenue in the quarter ending Oct. 31, up 20 percent from the same period last year. Its made $20.7 million in profit, or 16 cents per share, double its profits from last year.
Those… Continue Reading
Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff: ‘Many CEOs are afraid to get too personal’
Marc Benioff has been the reliably outspoken chief executive of Salesforce.com for 10 years. Salesforce was one of the pioneers of the software-as-a-service business model, where traditional software is replaced by a web-based application that customers pay for via subscription, and he trumpeted the model with ads declaring that software is dead. Now that SaaS and cloud computing are becoming an increasing part of tech business models, Benioff said this spells big trouble for companies like… Continue Reading
Salesforce.com tackles scheduled downtime with its ‘five-minute upgrade’
No one likes it when their favorite online service goes down, even if it’s for scheduled maintenance or upgrades. That’s especially true when there’s money at stake, as it is for users of Salesforce.com’s sales or customer service software. So the company says it’s rolling out a new service called the “five-minute upgrade,” which shrinks scheduled downtime to a tiny window.
Salesforce’s Senior Vice President of Product Management Alex Dayon says the company normally upgrades its… Continue Reading
Practice Fusion funnels electronic health records to BioReference Labs
Practice Fusion, a major provider of electronic health record services announced a partnership today with BioReference Laboratories — one of the largest full-service laboratories in the U.S. The Practice Fusion system will allow physicians at BioReference to easily view, add information to, and redistribute patients’ health records.
The PracticeFusion platform allows doctors from various facilities and regions to continually update individual patients’ charts. It also allows them to prescribe medication over the internet, keep track of… Continue Reading
Salesforce.com co-founder: No more scheduled downtime, maybe
Salesforce.com is one of the big evangelists for online software and cloud computing, and its co-founder Parker Harris said today the company is working to address a major concern with the cloud: Downtime.
Obviously, web users don’t like downtime — witness the uproar whenever Gmail or Twitter goes down. And things are even worse when it affects your business, not just your ability to tweet what your had for lunch. Salesforce says it already provides more… Continue Reading
Salesforce.com brings better customer service to Twitter and the web
Salesforce.com just announced the the latest version of its web-focused customer service tool, the Service Cloud.
The central insight of the Service Cloud, as suggested by Senior Vice President of Product Management Alex Dayon when it launched in January, was that customer service has moved away from the old model where customers called the company and asked for help. Instead, they use search engines like Google and social networking services like Facebook and Twitter to find… Continue Reading
Salesforce.com offers contact management for businesses of one
Salesforce.com already sells online customer relationship management (CRM) software to almost any size company, from giant corporations to small businesses. Now it’s announcing a product aimed at companies that are smaller still, with a simple contact management system for customers with just one or two users.
The San Francisco company’s new Contact Management Edition sounds like it really is just that — a way to store your contacts via Salesforce’s online service, stripped of more advanced… Continue Reading
Salesforce’s reseller program brings the middleman back into cloud computing
As the hype builds around cloud computing, questions are growing about how resellers of software — the so-called middlemen — will make money.
By delivering software in the Internet cloud (meaning over thousands and thousands of computer servers), companies like Google can more easily sell their software directly to customers. But Salesforce.com says it’s now bringing resellers back into the game.
The San Francisco company is launching a program for so-called value-added resellers (VARs) to sell services… Continue Reading
Salesforce.com wants to host your business applications at Force.com Sites
Salesforce.com wants to make the development of business applications faster and easier with a new service called Force.com Sites, which is available as of today. To sweeten the deal, the San Francisco company is letting businesses build and host their first application for free.
Salesforce is best known for its customer relationship management (CRM) software delivered via online subscription, but it also offers a platform for building business apps called Force.com. Previously, those apps were for… Continue Reading
Salesforce’s Summer 09 release lets companies collaborate to answer complaints
Salesforce.com has been unveiling some big additions to its customer relationship management software and related products, including a scaled-down mobile application called Mobile Lite and the Service Cloud, a tool for addressing customer service queries across the web. The details of its just-announced Summer 09 upgrade (which will go live to the San Francisco company’s 55,400 customers in June) aren’t as groundbreaking, but there are still some cool new features.
At the top of the list… Continue Reading
Salesforce.com lets you answer customer complaints on Twitter
Most people on popular microblogging site Twitter (which just turned three) have probably seen customer service-type queries from other users — questions about how to make a product work, or complaints that it’s broken. I have even posted some complaints of my own. That’s one of the reasons companies like Google have created their own Twitter accounts, and its why Salesforce.com is adding Twitter integration to its customer service product, which it calls the Service… Continue Reading
Appirio raises $10M to bring business into the cloud
Appirio, a startup that integrates online business applications and platforms, has raised $10 million in a third round of funding.
The San Mateo, Calif. company developed three of the seven bestselling applications in Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, including the No. 1 app, which synchronizes users’ calendars in Salesforce and Google Apps. It also developed an application that integrates Facebook with Salesforce, allowing companies to recruit and market on the social network. And oh yeah, it provides various professional… Continue Reading
Tech scores in stimulus bill, Sirius XM prepares bankruptcy filing, Modu stages modular phone launch
Here’s the latest action:
Tech industry scores funding in stimulus package – Infrastructure spending includes $7 billion for expanding high-speed internet access, some $20 billion for building a so-called smart grid power network and $20 billion for digitizing health records. The New York Times has more.
Sirius XM prepares bankruptcy filing – Regulators approved the merger of the two satellite radio companies to avoid this from happening. But the combined company is planning a bankruptcy filing anyway. Echostar… Continue Reading
Awareness launches “best practice” templates for social marketing
“Social media marketing” is one of those catchphrases that sets off every right-thinking person’s jargon alarm, but the concept of engaging customers directly and interactively is becoming increasingly important to brand survival. Dave Carter, founder and chief technology officer of a marketing company called Awareness, says the strategy may even benefit from the economic downturn, since it’s faster, cheaper and more engaging than a traditional ad campaign. Now, Awareness wants to make social media campaigns… Continue Reading
Salesforce.com tackles customer service with the Service Cloud
It’s time to inaugurate a new era of customer service in the Internet cloud, says Salesforce.com. To that end, it’s launching a new product called the Service Cloud.
Traditional customer service channels, such as a phone number or an email address, are increasingly cut off from where the real conversation is, says Alex Dayon, Salesforce’s senior vice president of CRM customer service. Rather than contacting your company when they have problems, users are searching for answers… Continue Reading
Salesforce.com builds another bridge to Google’s cloud
Business software company Salesforce.com is moving forward with efforts to connect Force.com, its platform for business applications, with other Internet “clouds.” Just last month, the San Francisco company announced it would connect Force.com with Amazon Web Services; now it’s launching Force.com services for Google App Engine, the search giant’s platform for web applications.
Adam Gross, Salesforce’s vice president of platform marketing, says most applications built on the App Engine tend to be more social- and consumer-focused…. Continue Reading
Salesforce.com beats expectations in Q3
Salesforce.com, considered the standard bearer for the software-as-a-service business model, announced unexpectedly strong third-quarter earnings today.
Total revenue was $276.5 million — a 43 percent increase from the same period last year — and total income was 8 cents per share. Revenue and income beat out analysts’ estimates of $273.6 million and 7 cents per share, respectively. That’s good news for Salesforce, of course, particularly at a time when the economy is tanking and traditional business… Continue Reading
Salesforce.com on Microsoft: “They hate everybody”
Salesforce.com’s strategy can be boiled down to one word, according to chief executive Marc Benioff — love. Of course, Benioff was being a little tongue-in-cheek as he answered questions from analysts and reporters at today’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. But he was illustrating a real argument about how Salesforce.com might beat software giant Microsoft in the cloud computing market.
As with its other offerings, Microsoft’s new cloud-computing application platform, Windows Azure, is all about tying… Continue Reading