Webber 2: Salesforce.com – an on-demand Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution vendor headquartered in San Francisco, California with regional headquarters in Dublin, Singapore and Tokyo.
About two months ago, these two companies made one sensation pact. Google, although mostly known as the search engine supreme, is also the largest online advertising agency and has been helping not just big corporations but small businesses as well to market theselves. Saleforce.com has also been giving support to the same small businesses in keeping track of sales leads.
With the new partnership, Google will help small enterprises in generating sales leads while Saleforce will take its turn turning these leads into actual customers.
According to the Boss of Saleforce, Marc Benioff, this deal will help his company sell more subscriptions. A Salesforce subscription is a package which costs about $600 a year for five employees in the same business. But for charitable institutions, subscription is free.
And maybe the deal has done a lot more than what Mr. Benioff expected. On August 15, Salesforce in its website at salesforce.com reported that its number of additional customers has been at record high beating consensus estimates in terms of total revenue and earnings per share during the second quarter of 2008 fiscal year.
As shown in their website, Mr. Benioff detailed the addition of customers for the quarter. Two customers have more than 30,000 subscribers; four have 20,000; five have 10,000 and 68 customers have more than 1,000. this translates to 40 percent increase in the number of customers having 1,000 subscribers compared to six months ago.
According to Mr. Benioff, it was actually the company's CRM which made the largest deals but its platform. This year the platform with include the Apex development language is expected to give the company more sales boost.
Salesforce will be competing with industry giants, SAP, Microsoft and Oracle. SAP is reported to release later this year its A1S suit targeted for mid-markets. And Microsoft has announced the pricing for its Titan multitenant CRM. Oracle has acquired a great demand with their Siebel On Demand.
This triumvirate of juggernauts is not only industry leaders in customer relationship management but also of enterprise resource management (ERP). Modern ERPs have included many components what would have formerly been stand alone applications including CRM.
For sure these three giants would give up with top posts without a fight. I do not know how Saleforce will strategize to maintain its high sales in the future in the midst of these competition; but I'm sure its Google big brother will be there go lend a helping hand.
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