Happy Holidays
December 24, 2007
Happy Holidays Everyone!
I’m taking a break from posting news until the new year and in the mean time will be working on some improving several aspects of Salesforcetimes.
Enjoy the break!
Best Regards,
Adam
Contract Management Co EchoSign Achieves Record Growth in 2007
December 20, 2007
Digital contract management should be a no brainer for companies with any type of paper to fill out, especially if said company deals with recurring contracts.
EchoSign, e-signature and contract management co, has seen record growth in 2007 due in part to their marketing on the AppExchange and no doubt due to the fact that this hot tech service is starting to catch on.
From the EchoSign Blog:
“EchoSign has seen a tenfold jump in growth of both our customer and user-base including giants like BT, GE, Honeywell; mid-market SAAS companies such as Salesforce.com, ExactTarget, VerticalResponse, Successfactors, LinkedIn, and Intacct; and SOHOs such as Brailgram.com, Biosphere Expeditions and RealHipHop Records.
Our almost 200,000 users cut their quote-to-close times from over a week to less than 42 minutes in 2007 using EchoSign. And they now sign well over $100,000,000 a month in deals on EchoSign.”
Continue reading here.
Or check out EchoSign’s Contract Management service on the AppExhange
Investment Bank ThinkEquity Chooses Salesforce and Force.com Platform
December 20, 2007
CRM Today reports on Think Equity’s latest move to begin using Salesforce.com as their CRM of choice. Not surprisingly TE has also chosen to develop custom applications on the force.com platform. Custom development is pretty common when it comes to large financial services firms due to the large number of disparate systems the industry tends to use.
If 2007 was the year SaaS broke into the main stream, then 2008 and subsequent years will be a time for companies big and small to merge legacy systems or replace them all together and to build their own custom applications on platforms such as force.com.
From CRM Today:
“Salesforce.com the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, today announced that ThinkEquity Partners LLC, a leading global growth investment bank, has joined 1,600 other financial services organizations standardizing on Salesforce for Financial Services. In addition to implementing salesforce.com’s industry leading on-demand CRM service to manage its diverse client base effectively across multiple business groups, the company used the Force.com platform to develop multiple custom solutions and to integrate with its publishing and sales commission system, resulting in a single interface for all its business needs.”
Continue reading the full article here.
Daily Best Practices Workshops and Discount on in Person Training
December 19, 2007
Did you know that Salesforce.com offers daily best practices training?
View a class schedule here.
Online training not cutting it for you? We’ve just learned that Salesforce.com User Group Leaders were given access to a discount code that will help you save on in person training in January. Contact your local User Group Leader for more information.
Force.com Event “Tour De Force” Scheduled for Jan 17
December 19, 2007
From the force.com blog:
“You do not want to miss this free event and the chance to learn about how to use software as a service and the Force.com platform. This event will help developers, admins, IT managers, and entrepreneurs who are new to Force.com or have already been using Force.com technologies and would like to create the next generation of business applications and companies.”
Siperian, Data Management Platform Gets AppExchange Cert.
December 19, 2007
From PR Newswire: Siperian, Inc. — developers of a leading master data management (MDM) platform — today announced that Siperian MDM Hub(TM) is now available on salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace. The integration of Siperian MDM Hub with salesforce.com’s Force.com platform and CRM applications helps organizations obtain the most comprehensive, accurate and up-to-date customer data resulting in improved sales productivity and more effective customer service. Siperian MDM Hub unifies critical data about customers, products, and organizations across different systems and delivers reliable and complete views of this data to reduce cost, improve compliance, and drive operational effectiveness.
Siperian MDM Hub allows Force.com and Salesforce users to obtain reliable, unified views of their customers, enabling better decision making and faster time to value
To learn more, see the full release.
Ribbit: Make Calls from Salesforce.com and Facebook
December 18, 2007
Editor’s note: A press release posted yesterday details the launch of the new phone service from Ribbit. Question: does anyone use the word telephony in every day conversation? I hate printing press releases like this due to their corporate speak mambo jambo but this appears to be the first piece of news on the subject.
If you have any thoughts on the service let me know as I will gladly post them.
(Reuters) - Silicon Valley start-up Ribbit Corp on Monday unveiled a technology platform that will let developers put Web telephony in everything from business software to popular social network sites such as Facebook.
As well as planning to sell its own services directly to consumers in the first quarter, Ribbit said it is working with more than 600 outside developers who are using its technology to create their own voice applications.
Ribbit software serves as an interface between anything from Web sites, e-mail and instant messaging to mobile or regular phones. Developers do not need to be telephony experts to build services with Adobe’s Flash software, which works on most computers.
“A developer can take telephony out of our sandbox and bring it to where you live,” said Crick Waters, Ribbit’s vice president for strategy and business development.
For example, he said that about four developers are using Ribbit to build services that consumers could incorporate into their personal pages on Facebook, a popular online hangout. These services could let members make and log calls and check their voicemail in transcript form without leaving Facebook.
Ribbit has already built an application that businesses will be able use within Salesforce.com Inc’s customer relationship management software. This lets workers dial clients via the Internet from within the application and automatically stores a log of client calls and voicemail transcripts alongside the rest of that client’s information.
See the full release, which details pricing for Ribbit, here.
2007: A SaaSy Year in Review
December 18, 2007
It’s that time of year again when many of us take some time to review the past year and look forward to the next. A favorite topic for many journalists in print and especially on the web is to either predict what the coming year will bring or give us a summary review of the past 12 months.
Larry Barret over at Earth Web has written one such review of 2007. The four page article discusses major changes that took place in 2007 for the Software-as-a-service industry, including highlights from Salesforce.com, Cisco, SAP and Microsoft.
From the article:
“Salesforce.com during the year extended its lead in the sector. The company reported strong earnings, customer wins (including many wins against on-premise competitors) and the launch of its platform-as-a-service offering, Force.com, for developers to build and deliver any application they want, on demand.”
To continue reading, visit Earth Web.
And then there were two.
Just after I hit the publish button on the last post I spotted another well-written piece on 2007 by Erika Murphy of Ecommerce Times (nice name!).
Erika comments on how SaaS has come of age in the past year noting a few successes and failures in the space.
“Several years ago when Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) burst onto the CRM scene it was difficult to imagine how the upstart firm could make a dent in the space. At the time, the gorilla in the room was Siebel and the thought of an Internet-based application — an experimental delivery mode then — besting the deeply entrenched, feature-rich iconic CRM provider was laughable.
Indeed, Salesforce.com’s ad campaign from those days, which centered around taking on Siebel, drew more than a few smirks in the industry. Today, it is Marc Benioff, CEO and chairman of Salesforce.com who is laughing, all the way to the bank. Salesforce.com is now the company to beat in this space, while its erstwhile bette noire is merely one part of the Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) family.”
See the full piece, here.
Salesforce.com Sets Targets on India Expansion
December 17, 2007
According to a new press release posted on tradingmarkets.com, Salesforce has announced plans to expand in Asia with a focus on medium to large sized companies in India.
From the release:
“India is the fastest growing SaaS market in Asia Pacific. There are over 70 lakh Small and Medium Businesses which are underserved which is our opportunity,” company Vice President Operations Asia Pacific Doug Farber said.
As per a study by leading global research firm Springboard, the early adopters of SaaS in India are not small companies but medium and large ones as opposed to mature markets.
To read the full story visit Tradingmarkets.com
Update: TMC Net posted a good write up about Salesforce.com’s India expansion.
Enterprise Wars: Google Vs Microsoft Vs Salesforce.com
December 17, 2007
Guy Creese made an interesting post on the Pattern Finder blog discussing the recent NY Times article: Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft.
The post talks about Google’s strengths and weaknesses in the Enterprise space and briefly mentions Salesforce.
It is an interesting read and while it doesn’t focus on SFDC it relates to the industry and provides some good insight into current developments in the SaaS scene.
To read the full post, visit Pattern Finder.
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