Last September, Salesforce bought social customer service SaaS startup Assistly for $50 million-plus to help expand its service cloud offerings to small businesses. Today, Salesforce is debuting a brand new Assistly-inspired social and mobile customer service platform for small businesses, called Desk.com.
As you may remember, Assistly helped companies collect and organize all of their customer conversations into a prioritized actionable list and equips support staff with the tools to respond to customers. The application allows businesses to filter conversations, access customer histories, automate processes and even tap into social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. And Assistly provides users with key metrics and analytics, such as case volume, interaction volume by channel, response time, service levels, agent performance and more.
→ Read More
CRM and cloud giant Salesforce has announced a key hire today—former U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra. Kundra has joined the company as executive vice president of emerging markets.
Kundra joined the Obama administration in March of 2009. As the first Chief Information Officer of the United States, Kundra managed more than $80 billion in technology investments and was an early evangelist of cloud computing in the public sector. Kundra also authored the ‘Cloud-First policy,’ which aims to guide government IT organizations around the world on how to be efficient with fewer resources.
→ Read More
Yesterday, Salesforce announced the acquisition of social performance platform Rypple, and revealed that it will be entering the human capital management (a.k.a. employee and talent management software) market with the launch of a new product Successforce. For Salesforce, the announcement of a new product vertical and the entry into a new market is a big deal. And when you consider SAP’s recent $3.4 billion acquisition of talent management software giant SuccessFactors, things start to get interesting.
We sat down with Salesforce EVP John Wookey, who will be leading Successforce and is a former SAP and Oracle alum; as well as Daniel Debow, co-CEO and co-founder of Rypple; to discuss what the acquisition means for Salesforce. → Read More
You’ve got to hand it to Salesforce: The big battleship of Cloud CRM is remarkably adept at turning its boat around to make war against the startups aiming torpedoes at its hull.
First, it was Yammer.
Flash back to the 2008 TechCrunch50: Yammer enters the market with a bold play: Build an enterprise collaboration app around the status update and newsfeed mechanic, give most of it away for free to let individual teams test it out, and then acquire enterprise customers from the bottom up. Once you’ve got the users and the attention of their bosses, (so the logic goes), you leverage what you’ve launched into a platform that can support a wide range of apps. Some of these apps you build yourself, some you open up to third parties. → Read More
Salesforce.com has announced the acquisition of cloud computing services startup Model Metrics. Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2011, have not been disclosed.
Model Metrics consulting firm that helps enterprise organizations accelerate the adoption of cloud computing. Specifically, Model Metrics focuses on helping companies adopt mobile and call center technologies, social enterprise solutions, business processes and more. In fact, Model Metrics has completed 1,000+ Salesforce deployments for mid-sized and Fortune 1000 companies. The company also helps businesses create custom mobile solutions for iPad and Android.
→ Read More
In September, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff hinted at a new work management product, Do.com. Today, the CRM giant is finally releasing more details about Do, which is a simple task management mobile and web app for both businesses and consumers. While the app is still in private beta, we have invites for 200 TechCrunch reaers. Using the invite code ‘XIBUSPAHYN’ you can sign up for the app here.
Do is born from Salesforce’s acquisition of social productivity and task management app Manymoon earlier this year. Manymoon is a favorite on the Google Apps Marketplace and is one the platform’s most downloaded Apps Extensions. → Read More
Enterprise CRM giant Salesforce.com is getting a COO today. The company is announcing that it is promoting George Hu to Chief Operating Officer. Hu previously held the title of Executive Vice President, Platform, Marketing, and Operations and will continue to report to Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff in his new role.
Hu joined Salesforce.com in 2002 and served as vice president of product marketing, senior vice president of applications, executive vice president of products, and chief marketing officer prior to joining the executive team in his most recent role. Hu also led Salesforce.com’s corporate development and investment strategy since 2009, including the acquisitions of Jigsaw, Heroku, and Radian6. → Read More
The narrative of the little guy going up against the hulking giant is baked into the history of Silicon Valley, starting with the traitorous eight leaving Shockley Semiconductor to subsequently found Intel, AMD, Kleiner Perkins, and many other industry disruptors of their time. Fighting unnaturally large battles is part of the technology industry’s DNA, and yet it would seem that every startup begins the process anew, rewriting the story of how to compete and succeed in the face of formidably large competitors.
There are times when competing against the incumbent feels like an insurmountable challenge (and by “times,” I mean pretty much every day). Your larger, more established and better-resourced competitor is an ominous and omnipresent danger to your existence. It will subsidize its products to compete with you, monopolize the distribution channel, spend more on marketing a single launch than you will ever raise, and create uncertainty in the market about your product among customers. Given all this, startups should be in an inherently disadvantaged position in any market, emerging or mature. And in most industries outside of technology – those that rely on high fixed costs, retail distribution, or a vast network of partners – this is absolutely the case. But in the world of internet-delivered services, rapid innovation and evolution, and constant disruption, no one’s power is guaranteed. This creates huge opportunities for startups going up against the big guys, if executed properly. → Read More
Checkmarx, an Israeli provider of static application security testing solutions, this morning announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount of financing in a round led by earlier backer Ofer Hi-Tech, with participation from cloud computing company Salesforce.com.
The additional capital will be used to promote Checkmarx’s cloud-based source code scanning service CxCloud and ramp up sales and marketing efforts. → Read More
The fun continued this morning at Oracle’s OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco. Or, I should say, the fun continued at a restaurant across the street. Fine dining and location aside, for those unfamiliar, yesterday afternoon Oracle CEO Larry Ellison cancelled a keynote that was planned for this morning by none other than his former employee and frenemy: CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff.
As we reported yesterday, Benioff tweeted last night to his followers, “Sorry #oow11 I don’t know why….Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Join me@St.Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! I’m disappointed too!”
Though Oracle representatives were quick to say that the cancellation was simply a result of “overwhelming attendance”, and that Benioff was offered a keynote later in the week, it’s hard to say that this isn’t the result of something more than a full schedule. → Read More
Well, well, well. The Oracle OpenWorld Conference is in full swing, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was scheduled to be one of the keynote speakers tomorrow (Wednesday). “Was” being the operative word here. Thanks to a recent update from Benioff’s Twitter account, it seems that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has cancelled Mr. Benioff’s keynote tomorrow.
Hmmm. Instead, Larry will be king of the stage, with a one hour and forty-five minute keynote, kicking off at 2:45 p.m. PST. No word as of yet on why Ellison cancelled the Salesforce CEO’s keynote. Not even Benioff was sure: “Sorry #oow11 I don’t know why….Larry just cancelled my keynote tomorrow! Join me@St.Regis AME Restaurant at 10:30AM! I’m disappointed too!” → Read More
Cloud storage platform Box.net has raised a whopping $50 million in new funding with participation from CRM giant Salesforce.com. Past investors also participated in the round, as well as new ‘strategic partners’, who will be revealed soon. Box’s past investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Emergence Capital Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Scale Venture Partners and U.S. Venture Partners. This brings Box’s total funding to $128 million.
Box, which has 7 million users and stores over 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a fils storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, sync files remotely, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others. → Read More
At the company’s first customer conference today, cloud storage platform Box.net is revealing a number of new features and products. The company is debuting a cross-platform enterprise sync solution for both Mac and PC devices, additional security features as well as new social capabilities.
For background, Box, which has 7 million users and stores 300 million documents, is a cloud storage platform for the enterprise that comes with collaboration, social and mobile functionality. Box has evolved into more than just a file storage platform, and has become a full-fledged collaborative application where businesses can actually communicate about document updates, access the platform via the mobile web, and even add features from Salesforce, Google Apps, NetSuite, Yammer and others.
→ Read More
Salesforce has just bought social customer service SaaS startup Assistly. The purchase price is $50 million, and the deal is all-cash.
Assistly helps companies collect and organize all of their customer conversations into a prioritized actionable list and equips support staff with the tools to respond to customers. The application allows businesses to filter conversations, access customer histories, automate processes and even tap into social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. And Assistly provides users with key metrics and analytics, such as case volume, interaction volume by channel, response time, service levels, agent performance and more. → Read More
“We’ve seen Mubarak fall,” said Salesforce’s Marc Benioff of the corporate need to focus on social networks at the recent Dreamforce conference. “We’ve seen Khadafy fall. When will the first CEO fall for the same reason?” What a fantastic comparison! Because, as we all know, dictators who brutalize, torture, and murder thousands of their own people over a period of decades are just like CEOs who miss quarterly profit targets.
Benioff isn’t a bad guy, it was just a dumb thing to say — but it’s stuck in my mind, because Salesforce, cloud-computing’s poster child, is the future, and his seems to be the voice of the zeitgeist. This feels a little like the end of an era. While I have issues with Apple’s hegemonic approach, during his career Steve Jobs repeatedly changed our sense of what was possible, and the world, by making genuinely revolutionary products. Now he’s gone. Meanwhile, Google has spent the summer laying waste to vast swathes of its product line. Google Labs, its experimental playground? Dead. Slide, bought last year for $182 million? Dead. Aardvark, bought last year for $50 million? Dead. A whole grab bag of other products and services? Dead.
And it seems that whatever survives the ongoing Mountain View bloodbath will be thoroughly monetized. Massive price hikes are on the horizon for Google’s (terrific) App Engine platform. Russell Beattie of PlusFeed reports that he’s shutting down his service because otherwise his server costs would increase by a factor of thirty. I use App Engine for my own open-source-travel-guide pet project, and my costs will apparently increase fiftyfold. → Read More
Salesforce CEO and founder Marc Benioff sat down for an hour-long interview with Google’s Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt last night at Dreamforce, and here’s the full video of the interview. We’ve embedded it into the post as well.
→ Read More
Google’s Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt took the stage at CRM giant Salesforce’s annual conference Dreamforce this evening. Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff is interviewing Schmidt. Google’s chairman started out with complimenting Salesforce how they’ve managed to become a company that defines modern enterprise computing, and that the company has the ‘best vision for how enterprises will organize themselves.”
Schmidt explained that enterprise customers can now be empowered with simpler solutions and don’t have to access a complicated system, but thing are turnkey. “We went through a phase that is basic connectivity, then we have a connection and publishing phase (early parts of the web), and now we have a connecting phase,” explains Schmidt.
→ Read More
Assistly, the cloud-based customer support platform that’s backed by Bullpen Capital, Index Ventures, Salesforce, as well as several other angels and VCs, launched version 2.0 of its platform back in July, along with rolling out a new pricing model that includes a full-featured version of its service for free.
Today, the summer features keep on rolling out for Assistly, which today announced that it would be adding two-way integration with Salesforce. Assistly for Salesforce is an AppExchange app that, according to the Assistly blog, will enable sales and support teams to “share a complete view of the customer” — in other words, customer support teams can now see data, like customer contact info and status while working on cases — direct from Salesforce. → Read More
Today, at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, founder and CEO Marc Benioff took the stage to adress the event’s 40,000 attendees. We know Salesforce is bullish on the social enterprise and Benioff kicked his keynote off with this statement about Salesforce: “We’re were born cloud, and now we’ve been reborn Social.”
Benioff also said that Salesforce has passed a $2 billion annual run rate in revenue. The company is now powering more than 36 billion transactions a day for over 100,000 customers. And Benioff called out Apple’s Steve Jobs, who he said led the mobile era. → Read More
Social application developer Seesmic is making a big move into the social enterprise and is debuting a dedicated Android app and iPad app for Salesforce’s CRM product (Windows Phone 7 will also be added soon), called Seesmic CRM. The Android app will be launched tomorrow morning at Salesforce’s annual conference, Dreamforce, and Seesmic will launch the iPad app in a few weeks.
For background, Seesmic, which was founded by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, helps you monitor and track the social web. Seesmic’s desktop, web, and mobile clients integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. The bonus of using an app like Seesmic is the ability to aggregate your streams from a number of social web services, like YouTube, Foursquare, Techmeme, LinkedIn and others.
→ Read More
