Salesforce.com Extends On-Demand CRM Leadership and Customer Success With Summer '06
Summer '06, 20th Generation of the Industry's Leading On-Demand CRM Service, Combines CRM Innovation and AppExchange Momentum to Deliver Customer Success on The Business Web
Company Introduces Salesforce Connector for SAP R/3 to Further Extend On-Demand CRM Success in the Enterprise
More Than 10,000 Customer Installations of Over 280 AppExchange Applications Have Taken Place in First Six Months
SAN FRANCISCO, July 17 / -- Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM), the technology and market leader in on-demand business services, today announced the availability of Summer '06, the 20th generation of its industry-leading family of on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. Summer '06 extends salesforce.com's leadership in on-demand CRM and delivers a dramatic leap forward in creating customer success on demand across sales, marketing, service and support and mobile applications. In conjunction with Summer '06, salesforce.com is also launching the Salesforce Connector for SAP R/3, to extend on-demand CRM success to enterprise customer environments. Through Summer '06, SAP integration and the AppExchange, salesforce.com is fostering a new era of innovation, collaboration and freedom, enabling customers to manage and share all of their business information on demand.
"The on-demand model championed emphatically by salesforce.com is obviously a model that is here to stay," said Mary Wardley, IDC's Vice President, Enterprise Applications and CRM Software. "With this latest release, Summer '06, salesforce.com is giving a preview of its next important stage of evolution. Beyond the anticipated application functionality it is releasing the critical component to enterprise class customers: native integration to their back office system. With the release of the Salesforce Connector for SAP R/3, salesforce.com is making the very important bridge for customers between their traditional enterprise systems and their on-demand installation."
"Over 20 product generations, salesforce.com has evolved from the on-demand CRM pioneer to the overall CRM industry leader," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "While our competitors have struggled to innovate, consolidate, and actually deliver anything new -- we have been the sole company that leads customers to success. Summer '06 takes on-demand CRM to a new level and combined with the AppExchange and the new SAP Connector, customers of all sizes are realizing the promise of The Business Web and running their business on demand today."
In its first six months, the AppExchange has been an overwhelming success. More than 10,000 customer installations of the more than 280 applications now available on the AppExchange have taken place. Customers have taken more than 134,000 application test drives on the AppExchange since it was announced. Additionally, more than 43,000 custom applications and objects have been deployed via the AppExchange, indicating a high degree of customization and extension of Salesforce CRM deployments is taking place in the salesforce.com customer base.
Summer '06 On-demand Leadership and Customer Success
Summer '06 is now available to all of salesforce.com's 22,700 customers and 444,000 subscribers worldwide. Salesforce.com's on-demand model delivers seamless migration of the entire salesforce.com customer base, including all existing customizations and integrations, to the Summer '06 release. Summer '06 is available in Personal, Team, Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited Editions, allowing customers to select the best product for their size of implementation and enterprise.
"Salesforce has enabled us to consolidate critical data from multiple home-grown applications so we now have a complete view of our customer data, including sales orders and service needs, in a single, central location," said Jim Malloy, vice president of sales, Miyachi Unitek. "The new features in Summer '06 will help us to continue to improve productivity across our sales, service and marketing initiatives."
Summer '06 represents a dramatic leap forward in customer success -- providing greater insight to sales, marketing, and support professionals about their customers. With Summer '06, companies can achieve a more complete view and understanding of each customer, by integrating more customer information from sales, marketing, service, support, and mobile devices. New features that build on the industry's leading on-demand sales force automation product include:
o On-demand Innovation with Partnerforce, Salesforce Partner Edition
Fully integrated with Salesforce SFA, Salesforce Partner Edition is the
industry's first integrated on-demand PRM-SFA solution, making it
possible to track a consolidated sales forecast and manage pipeline
dashboards across internal sales groups and external indirect partner
sales channels. With Salesforce Partner Edition, customers can extend
the benefits of their CRM system to their indirect sales channels
through completely customizable portals that allow on-demand management
of the entire partner lifecycle. In addition to a base subscription of
Salesforce Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition, pricing for
Salesforce Partner Edition will be $1,500 per partner, per year, and
includes subscriptions for five partner employees.
o Extending On-demand Mobility Leadership with AppExchange Mobile
With new AppExchange Mobile updates in Summer '06, customers will be
able to efficiently add products, access pricing, and improve lead
response time while mobile through automated lead assignments. Summer
'06 will offer full mobile support for product and price books, giving
sales reps the ability to view, add, edit, and delete individual items
they are selling in their opportunities. With Summer '06, AppExchange
Mobile customers will be able to effectively manage all aspects of an
opportunity from open to close. Additionally, remote sales customers
will be able to receive new leads on their mobile device that were
automatically assigned to them via an assignment rule, and/or create
new leads and send them to the appropriate person based on assignment
rules predetermined in Salesforce.
o Integrated CRM Leadership with Advanced Call Scripting
Advanced call scripting guides sales and service professionals with the
right script to market, sell, and service customers. Customers can
empower their agents with branching scripts, question-and-answer
coaching, and answer scoring to help qualify leads, up-sell and
cross-sell products and services, resolve cases, or escalate issues
when necessary. Scripts can be easily tailored for the needs of
different customers based on their profile.
o On-demand CRM Sales and Marketing Momentum with Lead History Tracking
Lead history tracking is an important feature for compliance and
auditing, allowing sales managers to track lead status changes from
week to week, conduct historical and trend analysis, choose which
information on leads needs a detailed audit trail, and help ensure
legal compliance with an audit history of customer interactions. Sales
and telesales reps can view detailed lead history for more-informed and
targeted communication with prospects.
Salesforce Service & Support Momentum with Service Entitlements
Implemented by thousands of customers worldwide, including Charter Communications, Cray Inc., EFI, Miyachi Unitek, Mobile Messenger, Phoenix Technologies, R. L. Polk & Co., and SunGard, Salesforce Service & Support is continuing its rapid adoption in the marketplace. Combined with Salesforce SFA, Salesforce Service & Support provides businesses an integrated, 360 degree view of their customers across all marketing, sales and service initiatives.
New service entitlements in Summer '06 will ensure that customers are given the appropriate level of service based on their status. Service and support teams can easily determine and validate what level of service to which their customers are entitled, understand how well they meet their service-level commitments to those customers, and better manage the quality of the service they offer. With service entitlements in Summer '06, customers will be able to:
o Differentiate service levels by first response time and resolution time
o Improve service quality by proactively escalating cases before service-
level commitments are violated
o Improve visibility into service-level compliance by using reports and
dashboards to compare service-level exceptions across products, agents,
and regions
o Provide an additional revenue source for differentiated service through
up-selling for better service levels and ensuring service contracts are
renewed.
"With Summer '06, salesforce.com is delivering powerful on-demand CRM features that address the requirements of large enterprises such as Charter Communications," said Chad Rycenga, Director, IT, Charter Communications, at www.charter-business.com/ . "Charter Business's use of salesforce.com has helped us improve customer visibility within our sales, service and marketing initiatives. Summer '06 raises the bar for enterprise on-demand CRM."
Salesforce Connector for SAP R/3 -- Innovation and Leadership for the Enterprise
With Summer '06, salesforce.com is launching the Salesforce Connector for SAP R/3, which will enable enterprise customers to seamlessly integrate Salesforce with their back-office SAP R/3 application to gain a full, integrated view of all relevant customer data in one place. The new connector will provide easy-to-implement and simple-to-use support for synchronizing account information between Salesforce and SAP R/3 and significantly reduce the time, expense, and effort required to integrate the two systems. The Salesforce Connector for SAP R/3 will bring several benefits to enterprise customers, including:
o Fast and simple customer data integration, using a simple and easy-to-
implement tool that addresses the end-to-end integration between
Salesforce and SAP R/3 to accelerate the customer-data-integration
process
o Support for bidirectional synchronization of account information
between Salesforce and SAP R/3 to keep customer data in both systems in
sync
o Access to front- and back-office enterprise customer data in
Salesforce, enabling better, faster decisions with information
transparency
o Support for customer data-centric business processes that span both
applications by seamlessly integrating key areas of Salesforce and
SAP R/3.
The Salesforce Connector for SAP R/3 will be available upon request as a free option for Unlimited Edition customers and for a $12,000 annual fee for Enterprise Edition customers. The Salesforce Connector for SAP R/3 is scheduled to be generally available on July 30, 2006.
The AppExchange On-Demand Platform and Directory
The AppExchange is both an on-demand platform for creating and running on-demand applications, and a directory for publishing, sharing, distributing and marketing on-demand applications. As the world's leading on-demand platform, AppExchange provides a complete environment that enables developers and partners anywhere in the world to create new on-demand applications as well as customize and integrate their existing Salesforce implementation. Applications built for the AppExchange are run entirely on demand, eliminating the need for developers or partners to create and manage their own data center or infrastructure. Partners benefit from salesforce.com's world-class security, scalability and reliability for their solution through a salesforce.com-delivered service.
Found at appexchange.com/ , the salesforce.com AppExchange directory now offers more than 280 on-demand business application listings created by salesforce.com, its customers, developers and partners. Together with on-demand partner solutions on the AppExchange, salesforce.com's newest generation of products gives customers the ability to easily manage and share all their business information on demand. AppExchange enables all of these on- demand applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with one click into a customer's salesforce.com account.
About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company's Salesforce suite of on-demand applications enables customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. AppExchange, salesforce.com's on-demand platform, allows customers and partners to build powerful new applications quickly and easily, customize and integrate the Salesforce suite to meet their unique business needs, and distribute and sell on-demand apps at appexchange.com/ . Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com's world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.
As of April 30, 2006, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 22,700 customers and approximately 444,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), America Online (AOL), Avis/Budget Rent A Car (Cendant Rental Car Group), Dow Jones Newswires, Nokia, Polycom and SunTrust. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit www.salesforce.com/ , or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
Source: salesforce.com, Inc.
