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SAN FRANCISCO—With the fervor of recent religious converts, Salesforce.com users say they are convinced that using a hosted application service provides significant potential cost savings and management benefits over trying to develop or support important business applications in-house.
Customers attending Salesforce.coms Dreamforce user conference here said the decision to go with a hosted application was easy once they started evaluating what services were on the market.
For example, Mirapoint Inc., a maker of e-mail and security appliances in Sunnyvale, Calif., has deployed Salesforce.com just in the past two months.
“We liked the idea of not having to deal with back-end support, the servers or the infrastructure required” to run the applications, said Jim Crum, senior manager of business systems at Mirapoint. Like most businesses today, “we are trying to stretch a dollar as far as we can.”
The decision to go with Salesforce.com was relatively easy because several sales executives had experience with the on-demand CRM applications at other companies, Crum said. As a result, “sponsorship in the organization was fairly straightforward. It wasnt hard to sell the idea” to company executives, he said.
The company was using sales automation and customer support applications from SalesLogix Inc., but “that was getting so old that it seemed like pretty much like a no-brainer that it was time to replace it,” he said. While Mirapoint still uses SalesLogix for customer support, Crum said his company also will look at the Salesforce Supportforce.com contact-center service.
SalesLogix allows the company to manage customer support tickets and cases. But Crum said he believes that these features could be just as effectively managed in the Supportforce service.
He also indicated that the company would look at the Customforce.com application customization tool kit. While Crum said he doesnt have programming expertise, Mirapoint might work with Salesforce.com to contract out the customization services if its needed.
Customforce.com is part of the Winter 05 release of Salesforce.coms on-demand CRM subscriptions service that also includes the Supportforce.com customer service tool that the company released in September.
Select Business Solutions Inc. of Trumbull, Conn., a producer of mainframe reporting and system modeling tools, has used the Salesforce.com CRM software for more than three years, making it one of 5-year-old companys earlier customers, said Scott Stoney, vice president of information systems.
Stoney said Select Business Solutions didnt see any conflict in the concept of outsourcing its sales force automation systems to a hosted application service. The money that the company saves in outsourcing the sales applications leaves more to invest in its bread-and-butter business applications, Stoney said.
Next page: Building confidence in Salesforce.com.
Building Confidence
The Customforce and Sforce development tools have been valuable extensions to the companys product line because they have provided a ready means for the company to add features, fields or new pages to the online sales automation applications, Stoney said.
The tools are easy enough to use that a nonprogrammer or businessperson could add special features to the online applications they work with, Stoney said.
These tools provide an advantage over other hosted CRM applications “because you can cash in on the entire infrastructure,” he said. The company can provide improved customer service without having the overhead of trying to develop and maintain the support systems itself, he said.
The steady growth in Salesforce.coms business also has helped Select Business Solutions confidence that Salesforce.com was the right choice, Stoney said.
There are more partners exhibiting their products at the Dreamforce user conference this year. “It looks more like a regular trade show” than it did during Salesforce.coms inaugural user conference in 2003, he said.
“Its almost grown too fast,” in the sense that there are a lot more users competing for the attention of the sales staff and company executives, he said. But he said Salesforce has done a good job of keeping up with his companys needs. Salesforce.com officials estimate that between 2,000 and 2,500 customers registered to attend the conference.
For Arroweye Solutions Inc., a provider of online greeting card services for multichannel retailers and consumers, Salesforce.com was a natural choice to provide its sales management applications.
As an “online service provider ourselves, we were pretty well sold on the concept” of working with a hosted sales automation system, said Jeffrey Keller, chief marketing officer at Chicago-based Arroweye. The company works with large catalog companies and online retailers to allow consumers to send personalized greeting cards or gifts with personalized greetings, Keller said.
Its a significant advantage “for a small company like ourselves to have access to all the functionality” thats available in Salesforce.com, Keller said. The Salesforce package allows Arroweye to monitor the status of its sales pipeline and provides companywide visibility to its sales and marketing efforts, he said.
Arroweye has been using Salesforce.com for about the past 18 months. It also evaluated the Upshot Corp. online CRM package that has since been acquired by Siebel Inc. But the company selected Salesforce.com because it seemed to be more “firmly established and stable,” Keller said.
“Being an early-stage business, we didnt spend a lot of time” reviewing the decision, he said. Salesforce.com seemed to be a reliable choice, and Arroweye moved decisively to deploy the service, he said.
The company generally has been happy with the service and expects that the number of people working with the Salesforce.com tools will “perhaps double or treble” over the next year or so from the five employees who use it now, Keller said.