Enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com this morning announced the appointment of Miguel Milano to the position of president, EMEA and executive vice president, EMEA sales. Milano hails from Oracle, where he served as senior vice president and headed European sales for Exadata.
Prior to Oracle, worked at McKinsey, i2, Telefonica and PeopleSoft. → 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
Cloud solution provider Appirio this morning announced it will be expanding internationally to more adequately serve its customers in the European and Asia Pacific markets.
The expansion, which the company says will be through a combination of organic and inorganic growth, is being funded by a strategic investment from two existing investors: VC firm GGV Capital and partner Salesforce.com. → Read More
Taptera, which builds enterprise iPhone and iPad applications, has landed $2 million in Series A financing in a round led by well-known Silicon Valley investor (and former Oracle exec) Terence Garnett, who will also be joining the startup’s board.
Other participants in the round include Salesforce.com and a slew of company CEOs and professional investors, including M.R. Rangaswami and former HP executive David Murphy. → Read More
After adding online payments exec Bill Ready as an Executive-In-Residence, Accel Partners is shoring up another area of expertise with the addition of former Salesforce.com executive Chuck Ganapathi as the firm’s newest Entrepreneur-in-Residence. At Accel, Ganapathi, who was the creator of Salesforce’s “Facebook for the Enterprise” Chatter, will focus on developing a company in the social enterprise space.
Prior to joining Accel, Ganapathi served as Senior Vice President of Products for Chatter and Mobile at Salesforce.com, leading the company’s product development efforts in enterprise social networking. Not only was Chatter Salesforce’s first real foray into social, but the platform has been lauded as the company’s most successful product release ever. → Read More
Radian6, which was acquired by Salesforce for $326 million earlier this year, has offered some of the world’s largest brands a web-based social media monitoring platform. But the company has not offered a mobile component to clients to monitor brands on the go, until now. Today, Salesforce’s Radian6 is announcing its first mobile presence with a new iOS app.
Radian6 helps clients like Dell, GE, Kodak and UPS monitor, analyze and engage in ‘hundreds of millions’ of social media conversations. The UI is similar to the Radian6 web platform, and agencies and marketers can now monitor overall volume, share of conversation, geographic distribution and more data from the app on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. You can filter by keyword, media type, date range and more to view conversations. → Read More
Salesforce just posted its Q2 2012 earnings today, posting record quarterly revenue of $546 million, which is up 38% Year-Over-Year. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share increased 3% year-over-year to $0.30. Analysts expected EPS of $0.30 and $529 million for revenue.
Subscription and support revenues were $509 million, an increase of 38% on a year-over-year basis. Professional services and other revenues were $37 million, an increase of 44% on a year-over-year basis. → Read More
Considering that current forecasts estimate that as many as 8 trillion text messages will be sent in 2011, and that people are increasingly turning away from landlines in preference to mobile communication, SMS is becoming an increasingly important part of a business’ communication strategies. And this is especially relevant when it comes to customer service.
As businesses move to incorporate SMS into customer service and CRM, they face several challenges, among them the fact that customers often have separate numbers for voice and text and that messages sent from devices or SMS apps outside of the company’s CRM system are tricky to manage and record for quality. → Read More
In what must be an amazing day for the Heroku founders, the creator of Ruby, Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto has announced that he will be joining the former Y Combinator startup as Chief Architect of Ruby.
“As a member of our platform development team, Matsumoto-san will continue his work on the Ruby language in close collaboration with the Ruby community, keeping the language open and advancing the technology in exciting new ways,” Heroku General Manager Byron Sebastian said in a release. → Read More
VSee, a video collaboration service provider, has received a capital injection from Salesforce, TechCrunch has learned. The amount was not disclosed, but we’ve been informed that the investment amounted to ‘multiple millions of dollars’.
Coinciding with the investment announcement, the company today announced the upcoming release of ‘One-Click Collaboration’, which it calls a ‘no install experience’ that instantly starts a rich video collaboration session between distributed users. → Read More
Salesforce has just revealed the designs and plans for a new campus for its global headquarters, which will be located in the Mission Bay neighborhood of San Francisco, California. Currently, Salesforce’s corporate headquarters are located in the Financial District of San Francisco.
Architects Legorreta + Legorreta will design a campus of eight buildings over 14 acres of land. The headquarters will comprise 2 million square feet of office space. There will also be space for shops, restaurants, plazas and parks within the campus. As the release states, the new headquarters wants to create an urban setting for both residents and employees of the neighborhood. → Read More
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post written by Prasad Thammineni, the CEO and Co-Founder of OfficeDrop, a scanner software and digital filing system. You can follow him on Twitter @OfficeDrop_CEO.
Competition between software companies used to mean safeguarding your code and suing anyone that came close to it. Today, many larger technology companies are adopting a different strategy of actually bringing new users to companies they would have tried to squash a decade ago. The cloud is changing the old-school software mentality that a customer’s data needs to be locked down—giving rise to a new ecosystem where everything interoperates. So companies that in the past would have been bitter enemies are now working together as pseudo-friends—“frenemies,” if you will.
Software is absolutely nothing like it was even just a few years ago. App marketplaces have made it possible for buyers to select just the features they need, where in the past they were forced into “bloatware” that had a ton of features they didn’t even touch. Packaged software is becoming more and more scarce as small businesses and consumers have this “a la carte menu” of options to choose from—with all of these options playing nicely together in the cloud. → Read More
Just over a year ago, Salesforce acquired Jigsaw, which provides crowd-sourced data services in the cloud. The startup crowdsources information on professionals and companies and currently has a database of information on more than 24 million professionals at nearly 4 million companies. Now Salesforce is integrating Jigsaw’s data into its CRM product, giving sales representatives greater, realtime intelligence when curating and following up on leads.
So Jigsaw will be natively available to all 94,000 users who are using Salesforce’s CRM. Jigsaw’s data was previously only available via an app on the AppExchange. Salesforce says that the Jigsaw community adds 36,000 new contacts and updates an additional 12,000 existing contacts daily. → Read More
A little over a month after announcing the $326 million acquisition of social media monitoring company Radian6, Salesforce has closed the deal. The purchase of Radian6 is Salesforce’s largest acquisition to date.
Radian6 helps clients like Dell, GE, Kodak and UPS monitor, analyze and engage in ‘hundreds of millions’ of social media conversations. Salesforce will be using Radian6′s technology to enhance all of its products, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com. → Read More
Salesforce originally launched Chatter as a way to add a social layer on top of its CRM, Service Cloud and other offerings. BranchIt for Chatter makes Salesforce.com even more social by bridging the gap between corporate email and CRM.
Specifically, BranchIt for Chatter aims to uncover relationships held by employees across the entire company and feed them through Salesforce Chatter. Functionality includes automated contact syncing, relationship strength scoring, contact following, account following and more. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
