The future of CRM with SalesForce.com
May 23rd, 2007 by Patria LanfranchiSalesForce.com and Google, together, made the front page of the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Good timing with their SalesForce.com Developer Conference which was also held on Monday and I was a fortunate attendee. SalesForce.com is not saying anything publicly about their future plans with Google, but stay tuned as it appears the two may soon come up with a partnership that will threaten Microsoft.
ReadyTalk is in the process of customizing SalesForce.com for our customer relationship management (CRM) needs as we migrate from our old system.
I was initially unimpressed by the high price of SalesForce.com, but as I see more of their product, as well as their new APEX code (in Beta), it’s becoming more clear as to why companies are embracing it. SalesForce.com has created what appears to be a solid infrastructure and it presents a clean, easily customizable front-end that has been carefully architected. It allows for developers to code and get fancy, but it’s not required to have an expert in-house in order for a company to customize SalesForce.com appropriately.
The number of participants at the SalesForce.com Developer Conference (between 700 and 1,000) speaks to the momentum building for SalesForce.com. There are a lot of eager developers excited to create (and sell) new applications for SalesForce.com, increasing SalesForce.com’s value to an even wider array of customers.
One of the highlights of the conference was hearing Guy Kawasaki speak. He spoke about the “Art of the Start.� Watch his presentation, it’s useful and entertaining and will benefit anyone who is interested in starting anything.
SalesForce SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) was announced yesterday, see the power of it, coupled with Apex code, in this demo.
Technorati Tags: SalesForce.com, Google, CRM, SOA, Apex Code
June 17th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Salesforce definitely has a huge and growing presence but there are also several legitimate issues many companies have with it. One issue is price… especially for small companies it can be too much price and functionality-wise. I like http://www.octopuscity.com for a free web-based contact manager/CRM system that also includes other free business services like free teleconferencing.
June 16th, 2009 at 7:15 am
Now that ReadyTalk uses Salesforce.com as its CRM, are there any plans to integrate the two? Many companies use ReadyTalk to run lead generating webcasts and it would be nice if the data gathered in RT was available in SFDC.