June 2005 Archives

This morning brings the announcement of Salesforce.com Summer '05, the 18th inception of the San Francisco-based company's wildly successful hosted CRM system. Along with new features debuted with Summer '05 is the announcement that the company has created the world's first hosted operating system, Multiforce 1.0.

I agree in part with Marc Benioff's statement that Saleforce.com is, "the most robust, flexible and customizable on-demand applications that precisely conform to their business processes," but after having spent some time with SugarCRM (see blog from yesterday), I don't know if I'd call Salesforce.com "the most customizable."  Still...it's a product a great many people have had astronomical success with, and it certainly turned the enterprise business software industry on its ear.

Full release below.

TES

Salesforce.com
(NYSE: CRM), the technology and market leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM), today announced the general availability of Summer '05, the 18th generation of its industry-leading on-demand Salesforce and Supportforce CRM solutions. The Summer '05 product launch also includes Multiforce 1.0, the world's first on-demand operating system, the Customforce 2.0 on-demand application customization tool and the Sforce 6.0 on-demand integration platform. Salesforce.com's latest generation of products is an extraordinarily powerful, customizable and easy-to-integrate set of on-demand applications and application development technologies.
With Summer '05, salesforce.com enables enterprises of all sizes, industries and geographies to gather, organize, share and communicate information to raise customer satisfaction and employee productivity to new heights. And with the introduction of Multiforce 1.0, customers also now benefit from an on-demand operating system that serves as the hub for managing and sharing their information on-demand. Multiforce makes running multiple salesforce.com and customer- and partner-created on-demand applications that go way beyond CRM faster, easier and more effective than ever before.
"With the Summer '05 release, salesforce.com has taken its game to the next level," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. "Summer '05 further empowers salesforce.com's 15,500 customers with the most robust, flexible and customizable on-demand applications that precisely conform to their business processes, not the other way around. There's no question about it. The 'take it or leave it' era of legacy CRM vendors is officially over." 
Announced at salesforce.com's Summer '05 launch events, held June 21 in San Francisco, June 30 in London, and July 7 in Tokyo, Japan and Sydney, Australia, Summer '05 is now available to all 15,500 customers and 267,000 paying subscribers worldwide. Salesforce.com's on-demand model automatically delivers the new benefits and features of Summer '05 to the entire salesforce.com customer base at no additional cost. In addition, all existing customizations and integrations seamlessly migrate to the new release. Summer '05 is available in Personal, Team, Professional and Enterprise Editions, allowing customers to select the best product for their size of implementation and enterprise. Salesforce.com also continues its commitment to democratizing access to its solutions by making Multiforce 1.0 and Customforce 2.0 available in Professional Edition with Summer '05.

Summer '05 Product Details
Multiforce 1.0: The World's First On-Demand Operating SystemMultiforce 1.0
is the world's first on-demand operating system. It offers a complete environment that gives users a single platform to manage, deploy and access their salesforce.com applications, as well as whole new customer and partner applications created using Customforce. Multiforce 1.0 seamlessly unites all of these applications with a single data model, single security model, and a single user interface. With Multiforce 1.0, data can be easily shared and accessed across applications to enhance cross-organizational collaboration and eliminate silos of information.

-- Single Data Model -- All applications now share the same powerful data model, which enables users to streamline application access and eliminate deployment complexity. 
-- Single Security Model -- Multiforce allows the same security and information sharing model at the heart of salesforce.com to be used across all of a company's data, ensuring users from different departments or groups only see the information appropriate to their role, regardless of which Multiforce application they are using. 
-- Single User Interface -- During the past five years, salesforce.com has continued to deliver applications offering unprecedented ease of use. 
Multiforce 1.0 now offers that same benefit for customer- and partner-created applications. It provides a sleek, intuitive and consistent user interface across all applications that seeks to be as simple-to-use as Amazon.com or Google. 

"Multiforce is the complete on-demand application platform we've been waiting for," said Dean Dresser, Controller and Senior Director, Finance, ClearCube. "Multiforce literally puts all of our on-demand applications on the same page. With easy access, secure sharing and seamless application switching, Multiforce further underscores why salesforce.com's on-demand applications remain the unquestionable choice for driving sales and maximizing productivity while keeping IT costs to a minimum."

Salesforce Summer '05
Salesforce Summer '05 builds on the industry's leading on-demand sales force automation product with comprehensive and customizable sales methodologies, enhanced forecasting capabilities, marketing analytics and mass address updates.

-- Sales Methodologies -- Through salesforce.com's open approach, users can integrate many selling methodologies into Salesforce Summer '05, including several built-in best-of-class offerings from Miller Heiman, SPI (Solution Selling), The Complex Sale and ValueVision. These methodologies help sales representatives capture and analyze data more effectively to support all aspects of the selling process. All of these methodologies can be tailored to mesh with any organization's existing processes. This open system makes legacy CRM vendors' model of locking users into a single methodology a thing of the past.

-- Customizable Forecasting -- Salesforce users can now roll-up forecasts according to exacting business criteria such as product line, time period, direct report, forecast stage and revenue schedule. Users can drill deep down into opportunities and benefit from an integrated, global view that can be customized to meet different business needs. 
Users also have the ability to override data to control overall forecasts.
-- Marketing Analytics -- Enables users to ensure marketing campaigns accurately reflect the sales pipeline by providing comprehensive 
real-time visibility into campaign lead status. Users can leverage that analysis and make immediate adjustments to marketing campaigns to ensure they are accurately targeted and segmented for maximum ROI. 
Salesforce also embeds state-of-the-art data management and cleansing functionality to maintain data validity for precise reporting. 
-- Mass Address Update -- Identifies inconsistencies in data entry and standardizes data values for higher data quality. It can also handle large-scale updates to eliminate poor-quality data, enabling more accurate reporting and greater business insight.

"We are excited to roll out the new features available in the Summer '05
release from salesforce.com," said Patricia Menadier, Director of Sales Operations, Macromedia. "Summer '05's customizable forecasting will help increase confidence in sales forecasts and give us better visibility across our enterprise."

Supportforce Summer '05
Supportforce is salesforce.com's on-demand customer service application, launched with the support of the industry's leading contact center infrastructure providers including Avaya, Cisco Systems, Alcatel, Aspect Communications and Genesys (an Alcatel company). Supportforce Summer '05 updates include: 

-- Email Case Management -- Meets the needs of more sophisticated customer service and support environments and greatly reduces the processing and response time for customer emails. By using multiple customer service email addresses, incoming messages can automatically generate cases that are routed to appropriate case queues. Ongoing email interactions with customers happen from within their cases for greater efficiency and better tracking of all email dialogue.
-- Advanced Case Escalation -- Handles even the most challenging service level commitments by adapting escalation rules to complex requirements. 
This new feature also helps ensure all cases are "touched" in a timely manner through multiple escalation options.
-- Self-Service Portal Style Editor -- Enables users to make their self-service portals match the look and feel of their company's corporate Web site. Now, companies can quickly and easily configure and launch easy-to-use self-service portals without any design or technical assistance.

    "The Summer '05 edition of Salesforce has impressive features and functionality that enable us to deliver excellent customer support with unprecedented ease," said Ginny Boney, Salesforce Project Manager, MedImpact.
"This is a product clearly designed to deliver the highest customer satisfaction levels possible while simultaneously maximizing the value of each customer interaction. Supportforce Summer '05 edition also enables us to produce the metrics we need to manage our business through its custom report formulas and calculated fields. Without question, salesforce.com represents the future of customer service and support solutions."

Customforce 2.0: The On-Demand Customization Tool
    Customforce 2.0 builds on the extraordinary success and popularity of Customforce 1.0 that has seen users create more than seven million customizations to date. Customforce enables users to customize Salesforce and Supportforce features including workflow, controls, fields, tabs and objects with unprecedented ease and speed. Customforce 2.0 also allows customers and partners to build whole new powerful applications quickly and easily. Just a few of the hundreds of new application possibilities that go way beyond CRM include expense reporting, project management, schedule management and recruiting. Customforce 2.0 combines these unique abilities features with a brand new set of rich functionality, including:

-- Customforce Analytics -- Gain comprehensive visibility through real time analysis of business data that incorporates visual highlighting and custom calculations in reports and dashboards.
-- Customforce Formulas -- Create customized business formulas for immediate, accurate decisions. Spreadsheet-style formulas and calculations can be applied to any field in the application.
-- Customforce Business Processes -- Boost productivity and visibility by leveraging more than 100 pre-built processes such as lead scoring, discounting, quota attainment, round robin lead/case assignment, price totals, case aging and auto-dialing.
-- Customforce Standard Related Lists -- Customize any related list to show relevant data for accounts, contacts, opportunities and cases. 

"Customforce 1.0 was a terrific achievement that made the inflexibility of traditional client/server CRM a thing of the past," said Chip Vanek, Director of Corporate and CRM Applications, Magma Design Automation. "Now, salesforce.com has taken many of our suggestions for further enhancements and incorporated them into Customforce 2.0. Customforce 2.0 is a tremendous base for new innovative corporate applications."

Sforce 6.0: The On-Demand Integration Platform
With its sixth major release, Sforce continues to enhance the Web services and integration capabilities that enterprises need to ensure their on-demand CRM systems seamlessly mesh with the rest of their enterprise architecture. Sforce 6.0 features these new capabilities:

-- Sforce Parter Portal Toolkit -- Helps companies easily create Web portals to better collaborate and communicate with partners, as well as get better insight into channel activity.
-- Sforce 6.0 Web Services API -- Now includes compatibility for applications written for earlier versions of the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) API (Application Program Interface), starting with API 2.5. The new API also includes powerful enhancements that further improve any integration already in place between Salesforce and other systems. 
-- Sforce Data Loader -- An easy-to-use, highly scalable data management tool that can perform large data uploads, mass updates, mass deletes and exports for any Salesforce, Supportforce or custom application or object.
-- Import De-Duplication -- Offers rapid import performance with built-in data cleansing tools that eliminate duplicate data. 

"The combination of Sforce, Multiforce and Customforce further solidifies salesforce.com's technology and market leadership," said Cathy Bensink, Director, Americas' Sales Operations, TANDBERG, Inc. "Salesforce.com's Summer '05 release sets a new bar for on-demand applications. It's the most powerful, customizable and easy-to-deploy CRM solution we've ever encountered. With the Summer '05 release, we can focus on hitting our core deliverables and business goals instead of navigating through the endless maze of head-scratching complexity offered by traditional CRM vendors."

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM). Through its award-winning salesforce.com family of products including Salesforce (http://www.salesforce.com ) and Supportforce (http://www.supportforce.com ), the company provides a comprehensive suite of CRM applications to help enterprises of all sizes, industries and geographies meet the complex challenge of sharing and managing information on-demand. Salesforce and Supportforce are built on the Sforce on demand integration platform and include Customforce tool complete on-demand customization. Sforce (http://www.sforce.com ) and Customforce(http://www.customforce.com ) allow customers and independent software vendors to customize and integrate salesforce.com's products, as well as build their own on-demand enterprise applications. As of April 30, 2005, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 15,500 customers and approximately 267,000 paying subscribers including Advanced Micro Devices, America Online, Automatic Data Processing, Avis/Budget Rent A Car (Cendant Rental Car Group), Dow Jones Newswires, Nokia, Polycom and SunTrust Banks. 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 our services 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 http://www.salesforce.com , or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

Having been a science fiction fan most of my life, and in particular a fan of the great Arthur C. Clarke, I was extremely pleased to read this bit of news today about the launch of the very first solar sail-powered craft. In recent days, I've picked up and re-read my ancient copy of "The Wind From The Sun," Clarke's 1971 collection of short stories. The book's titular story involves a race between solar sail crafts of different nations.

For someone like me, it's particularly poignant to note that the experiment has been funded by sci-fi author Carl Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan. Sagan may no longer be around to witness the event, but Clarke remains alive and involved in all things science at age 88.

TES

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -- The world's first solar sail spacecraft takes flight on Tuesday, launched by space enthusiasts who cobbled the privately funded mission together on $4 million and an untested theory that light can power limitless space exploration.

Cosmos 1, a disc-shaped craft whose two segmented sails suggest flower petals, is set to blast off from a submerged Russian submarine in the Barents Sea at 12:46 p.m. PDT (1746 GMT) on Tuesday.

Mission controllers hope to fill each sail's four 49-foot (15-meter) segments with streams of photons, or light particles, emanating from the sun to lift Cosmos 1 to a higher orbit.

The mission's sponsors at the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, think Cosmos 1's flight ultimately will prove the science-fiction conceit that sailing to the stars aboard a light-powered ship is possible.

"Our role is as the dreamers and instigators behind this spacecraft," Emily Lakdawalla, project operations assistant, said on Monday.

"It is very promising technology but one that nobody is really pursuing into space. All we are trying to do is to demonstrate that the technology can work," Lakdawalla said.

The project started as a dream held by Planetary Society founders Carl Sagan, the late science fiction writer, and Louis Friedman, who proposed sending a solar sail craft to rendezvous with Halley's Comet in the 1970s when he worked at NASA.

Friedman, the society's executive director, and others believed the impact from a constant stream of photons bouncing off a huge sail be enough would impel a craft through frictionless space at an ever-increasing rate of speed.

With sunlight as its only fuel, a solar sail craft could open the farthest reaches of the solar system to space travel.

Off drawing board

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the need to find commercial uses for Russia's long-range missiles helped Cosmos 1 get off the drawing board three decades later.

The project was funded mainly by an entertainment company run by Sagan's widow, Ann Druyan, and by contributions from Planetary Society members and philanthropist Peter Lewis.

Cosmos 1 was built by Russian spacecraft contractor NPO Lavochkin. It will be launched in the tip of a converted intercontinental ballistic missile that was part of the Soviet Cold War arsenal. The plan is for it to orbit Earth for at least a month.

The rocket trip and a boost from a "kick motor" will put the 220.5-pound (100 kg) spacecraft into orbit about 550 miles (885 km) above Earth shortly after 1 p.m. PDT (1800 GMT).

Cosmos 1 will orbit for several days to acclimatize its instruments to the vacuum of space before its twin sails are deployed via inflatable booms. Mission controls now plan to deploy the sails late on Saturday.

Each sail is made up of eight triangular blades whose combined structure looks like a disk. The reflective Mylar sails are about 5 microns thick, or about one-quarter the thickness of a plastic trash bag.

After it deploys its sails, Cosmos 1 will be visible as it circles the Earth about once every 100 minutes.

I'm recently back from a tour of Northern California companies, and still have a lot of notes to assimilate. One of the biggest standout companies was SugarCRM. What an interesting story they have to tell. For those of you unfamiliar with the Cupertino, California-based SugarCRM, the company offers the first completely open-source CRM product. The company, founded by former Epiphany employees, aims to fit in where other CRM companies cannot: by offering their products via open source, they can appeal to companies that need low cost and a high level of flexibility: something for which traditional CRM companies are not well known. (Director of Marketing Tara Spalding told me the cost for SugarCRM is approximately $240 per user, per year.)

Predictably, SugarCRM, which is built on a Linux/Red Hat base, has shown it has great appeal to the IT community. Tara Spalding indicated that while Salesforce.com skipped the IT departments of companies to appeal to the business users of CRM solutions, SugarCRM has decided to begin from an IT perspective, understanding that today's IT departments have a great deal of influence on business processes, and they do not like to be cut out of the process of business software implementations.

For more information about SugarCRM, visit www.sugarcrm.com.

TES

I'm out on the road this week, visiting vendors up and down the Northern California coast. But I have a great "Web news" story to relate. Of course, it's only great in retrospect. It wasn't great at the time.

About 9:00 pm PST last night, I was checking e-mail, with a television doctor drama (House M.D.) on in the background. Suddenly, the show is interrupted for a newscast. The anchorwoman's voice was fairly urgent. "Due to an offshore earthquake of 7.5 magnitude off the coast of Eureka, California, the northern California coast has been issued a tsunami warning. The tidal wave, should it occur, will happen within the next 15 minutes. More information to follow. Now, back to your program."

Yeah. I was really interested to see the rest of that show. Nothing else to do while I wait for the tidal wave! (My hotel is a block from the water.) I spoke with my equally freaked out colleague, Karl Sundstrom, on the phone, and quickly logged into Google, using "California" and "tsunami" as search terms. Within 15 minutes I found that the tsunami warning had been rescinded. Not from the TV news or the San Francisco newspapers...but from the U.K. newspaper "The Scotsman." They were the first to post the info.

Geographical proximity means less than nothing nowadays in the era of Internet news.

TES

Ever wanted to hurl your phone away from you in frustration? Unless you're Russell Crowe in a New York hotel lobby, chances are, you generally restrain yourself. But now's your chance to do it officially, with chances to win prizes. On June 25th, Germany will play host to an expected 160 contenders in the mobile phone throwing championships. The winner will, of course, be eligible for the world championships to be held in Finland this August. (No, I'm not making this up.)

You'd better start working on your throw now, however...the world record is 82.55 meters...that's over 270 feet for those of us who are metric-challenged. (And by the way...perhaps Russell Crowe was just practicing for the championship, did anyone think of that?)

TES

BERLIN: Germans will bring new meaning to the term "long-distance call" when they compete in the country's first mobile phone throwing championships later this month.

At least 160 competitors are expected to take part in the contest in Bielefeld, on June 25, with the winners qualifying for the world championships in Finland in August.

The organiser of the German event, Virpi Staar, said on Thursday: "People often get annoyed with their mobile phones and want to chuck them as far as they can. Now is their chance."

The competition phones must weigh between 200 and 400 grams.

"Opinions differ on which brands and what weight is best for throwing," Staar said.

The German competitors have some way to go to beat the world record which currently stands at 82.55m.

The best by a German is the 67.50m achieved by Nico Morawa last October.

In the June issue of Customer Interaction Solutions magazine, Wade Baker, CEO of Sivox Technology, wrote an article entitled, "Simulation Training: The Power of Continuous Performance Optimization." In it, he discusses the importance of not only training, but training properly. SIVOX, which offers a product that allows agents to interact with virtual customers via real-seeming but simulated customer situations, believes that simulation is the very best way to train agents well without compromising customer service.

Wade's article includes some interesting statistics about training. Perhaps these statistics will surprise you, perhaps not:

Two-thirds of contact center costs are related to agents, with the total costs to train new agents estimated to be $15 billion per year, according to Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co. Inc. Here is the business problem contact center operators face:

• Ninety-two percent of consumers form their image via the contact center;

• Two-thirds of costs are related to agents;

• 30 to 60 percent agent attrition;

• Cost to recruit and train a new agent is $10,000;

• Nearly 1.5 million new agents are recruited and trained each year in North America;

• Total annual cost of recruiting and training new agents exceeds $15 billion; and

• One percent reduction in turnover equals $500 million annual savings.

For companies that still believe that the call center is a cost center, think again. These numbers tell a different story: that is no more important department in your organization than the place your customers end up first.

TES

According to yet another study, this time from DiamondCluster International, "buyers of outsourcing services in growing numbers are dissatisfied with offshore service providers." Why? Probably because their customers are dissatisfied with offshore outsourcing. Other studies have borne these facts.

But the most striking part of the study is this: "China rapidly emerging as next offshoring hot spot. In 2004, only six percent of survey respondents said they planned to establish offshore operations in China. Today, that number has soared to 40 percent."

 OK, let's get this straight. "Hey, guys! We can save a bundle of money by going to India! We can offshore our customer service, pay them one-tenth of what we pay U.S. agents, and take home huge, fat bonuses with the money we save! It's a "win-win" situation." (What happens if there's more than two partners in such positive negotiations? Does it become a win-win-win-win-win-win situation?)

Next came, "Uh, oh, guys...throw out your yacht brochures...it turns out that customers don't like offshoring to India or the Philippines. Shockingly, it appears that the people there don't speak English with an American accent, or necessarily know the latest 'American Idol' stats! Open up the call center in Cincinnati again!"

But wait...there's more. "China is the new hotspot! Let's outsource to China!"

This, to me, proves once again that commen sense is seldom applied at upper management levels in U.S. businesses.

Do the people who designated China "a hot spot" remember that:

1) Doing business within the borders of a Communist country, no matter how market-friendly it is, carries inherent risks? India is democratic and has a court system similar to our own. What's it going to be like navigating business legalities in China, where "Because we said so" is still considered an acceptable legal verdict?

2) Chinese agents are no more likely to speak English that is intelligible to the average American than Indian agents...probably less so, in fact.

3) India is our friend...China is, at best, a tense acquaintance; at worst, a potential "small cold war" adversary. Read the papers.

The fact that ANYONE could believe that what didn't work in India will work in China boggles the imagination.

Here ends my rant for the day. Clearly, I need a bit more coffee.

TES

Rampant abuses by a few attracting the attention of politicians and legislation? A slew of state laws to be followed, plus pending federal legislation? Strong lobbyists arguring for self-regulation? Public outrage? Is it 2003 all over again, when outbound telemarketers found themselves bound to obeying a federal do-not-call list?

No, but it's like one of those formulaic romance novels where you merely change the names and occupations of the principal characters, slap a new photo on the cover and re-publish it.

This time, it's the personal data brokers getting the heat turned up. (Granted, in some instances, the outbound telemarketers and the data brokers are one in the same.) The recent and very public shakeups that followed the announcements by companies like ChoicePoint Marketing and LexisNexis, plus a half dozen others, that personal information on hundreds of thousands of people had been stolen by crooks have begun the same domino-effect process that we saw two years ago with do-not-call legislation.

The only reason we even know about the loss of personal data by these companies is because of a California state law that requires the disclosure of such an event by a company. Were it not for California, the public would be none the wiser now. Based on these high profile data thefts, many other states have either passed or have pending legislation regarding the theft of these data (North Dakota's law went into effect yesterday). According to an article yesterday in the Washington Post (yes, there was a little news there that didn't involve the revelation of the identity of Deep Throat.)

The topic is also attracting Congressional attention in a big way. Though no official bill has been put forward yet, it's only a matter of time.

The Washington Post article, which may be found here, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/01/AR2005060100359.html, states that, "But taken together, the state laws may backfire as businesses lobby Congress to enact new -- and most likely less stringent -- federal statutes to preempt what critics say is quickly amounting to a patchwork of disparate, confusing and costly new regulations."

I've got news for the data brokers...the outbound telemarketing industry has had to figure out how to navigate the state and federal patchwork...ask them how it's done.

TES

It's a shame, really. There are few places left in the world where one can get a break from the seemingly endless chatter of addicted cell phone users. Subways used to be one of them.

The London Underground, the oldest subway system in the world, was a shelter for millions of Londoners during the Blitz of World War II. To date, the Underground, like dozens of other urban subway systems, has been a refuge where one can read, snooze or stare into space, free from being subjected to a neighbor's loud 40-minute conversation to his cousin detailing his recent hemorrhoid surgery.

It seems the respite will soon be over...according to the London Times Online, the city of London has detailed plans to build an underground network to allow mobile phone and laptop users access to wireless signals while they commute. The system will be implemented in stages, and the entire network is expected to be up and running by 2008.

Just when you thought you were safe from the Spice Girls ring tones...

TES

Mobile Phones On Underground The London Times

MOBILE PHONES will work in all 270 London Underground stations within the next three years, Transport for London announced yesterday. After the summer of 2008 the technology will then be extended to put mobile phone connections inside all tunnels so that Tube passengers have uninterrupted reception while on trains travelling through the underground network. Transport for London said that 70 companies had expressed interest in providing the mobile technology to cover the capital’s 270 Underground stations. Trials could begin at one station next year, with a contract being awarded possibly around late 2007 in time for the system to be operational by the summer of 2008. This new technology could also make it possible for Tube passengers to use their laptop computers even in the deepest of stations and lines. Richard Parry, the strategy and service development director for London Underground, said: “We have received an excellent initial response from the market, who have demonstrated considerable interest in providing both mobile phone services and other exciting technologies for our London Underground customers.”