Customer Relationship Management

On Jan 31st Salesforce unveiled its customer service application for small & medium business enterprises.
It is called Desk.com & is based on Salesforce's acquisition of Assistly.
Desk.com is a cloud based offering for SMBs to support their customers.

Continue reading "Desk.Com- Service Cloud for SMBs" »

Posted by Dinesh Singh at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How difficult will it be to roll out existing in-use Siebel application to few more European countries? Easier said than done and that's what we have realized in past few weeks. Even after numerous process workshops and conversion sessions, we are tackling loads of setup and data issues. What does it reflect? Global roll-out is a different ball game altogether - not to be taken easily. We had the inputs from incumbent partner doing roll-outs so far. We had the documentation in place. So what went wrong?

Continue reading "Diary of a Deployment Team" »

Posted by Nitin Lehri at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With Legacy applications, deciding about expected returns on IT investment has always been a tough task due to numerous cost components involved (Software installations, hardware investments e.g. servers, storage devices, maintenance, training etc.), longer deployment period spread across several financial quarters and nature of benefits achieved. By nature of benefits, I mean, that IT investment not only gives a measureable financial benefits but a majority of benefits are non-financial but crucial too.  Also, the legacy packages come with lot of tools/features which are rarely used by organizations. Does cloud computing add a new insight for decision making?

 

Continue reading "Forced or Not? You know the price" »

Posted by Amit Kumar at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Come 2012 and Salesforce.com (SFDC) will add another lethal ammunition to its stable, taking the cloud wars to the next level. On December 15, 2011, Rypple, an innocuous start-up into cloud based human capital management (HCM), signed agreement to be acquired by SFDC. It will be re-christened as SFDC Successforce (http://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases/2011/12/111215.jsp). This plugs a significant gap in SFDC offering portfolio, and will have significant (upside) impact for go-to market strategy for its enterprise social offerings. While Radian6's acquisition was aimed at improving the social strategy for SFDC client's customer, Rypple's focus will be on employees of SFDC clients.

Continue reading "Salesforce.com - Expanding footprint of Social Strategy" »

Posted by Saptarshi Basak at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello Everybody. Wishing you and your families a very happy New Year!

 
In my last blog - Game-changers in the Cloud Focus on CRM - Part I, I had written about a new offering from Salesforce.com named DRO (Data Residency Option) or On-premise storage of data at customer location. Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO had classified this offering for few large Salesforce customers who have data security or IP related issues with deployment of their key data on cloud. This development created a lot of buzz and the feature is expected to be officially available in 2012 i.e. this year. Hence, I found it wise to dig deeper and ponder on what is the technology backbone of DRO and what strategic benefits will Salesforce achieve after its acquisition of Navajo Systems, who were the owning company to this data storage and encryption technology.

Continue reading "Game-changers in the Cloud: Salesforce.com offers Data Residency Option" »

Posted by Gagan Paliwal at 3:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Since last couple of years internet has been taken over by the likes of Facebook, Twitter & Google.
Social media is impacting every aspect of our lives. People share their ideas, happiness, events, and issues over these social media websites.
"Arab Spring" is a classic example of what social media can do to a country; imagine what it can do to your business if used in the right way! Social media has evolved from just being a mode of interaction to a revolution that harnesses the power of multitude.

Continue reading "Social CRM & Salesforce - Part 1" »

Posted by Dinesh Singh at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Higher productivity, better resource utilization and innovative solutions are some of the critical factors for sustainability of any organization. In today's highly competitive environment, organizations need to be more agile, flexible and able to respond to changing customer preferences quickly. IT, as an enabler of doing business efficiently, has always provided a bucket of solutions to organizations to achieve their business goals. Customized applications, SAP, Oracle, Siebel packages etc. are some of the preferred solutions for the organizations. Although these IT solutions provide desired results to organizations but their implementation and maintenance are huge upfront costs for any organization. In global economic uncertainty and tightening market, organizations need to evaluate other options which are secure, reliable and cheaper. It makes a case for cloud computing based IT solutions. Cloud computing has become buzzword in today's business world globally and organizations are certainly cannot ignore it without evaluation.

Continue reading "Cloud Computing: Will it thunder or rain?" »

Posted by Amit Kumar at 10:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Lately there has been a lot of debate on the possible barriers to user adoption of cloud based technologies due to obvious concerns of data privacy, especially when it comes to sensitive data like company IP (design, manufacturing, etc.) residing on service provider's datacenters with little or no control.

Continue reading "Game-changers in the Cloud: Focus on CRM - Part 1" »

Posted by Gagan Paliwal at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

About the feature
Social Contact
Social Contacts feature is enabled by default for organizations created after October 7, 2011, and for existing organizations, they have to be enabled by default. It lets the user of the system view contacts' social network profiles directly in Salesforce.com instance. Currently, it is supported for the following social networks.
 LinkedIn® - Can be used for being up to date on contact's professional information and history
 Twitter™ - Can be leveraged to understand the contact's public personas and track their interactions. Recent tweets, followings, and contact's following can be used to gain insights
 Facebook® - Can be used to gain and track personal information regarding contacts and their interests. Integrate the information related to profiles, status updates, and mutual friends.

Continue reading "Social Contacts in Salesforce.Com" »

Posted by Saptarshi Basak at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In today's complex networked organizations, integration of different business functions has become more important than ever. Consider the case of a manufacturing unit - the procurement team requires inputs from inventory management before placing orders for raw materials; the manufacturing division has to negotiate with resource management for optimizing human and capital resources; and the sales team has to constantly keep the finance department in the loop about customer pricing. Up-to-date information has to be shared across the organization for centralized decision making. The need of the hour is a platform that helps business information to be shared in real time. Enter Chatter, the enterprise networking application from Salesforce.com.

Continue reading "Enterprise networking using Salesforce Chatter" »

Posted by Shyam Ramaswamy at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)