Samanage, makers of customer service software in the cloud, had a couple of major announcements today. For starters, they got a $20 million investment, and they also announced a major step: the launch of their enterprise product on the Salesforce platform.
Let’s start with the funding. The round included money from Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israel Ventures, Marker LLC, Salesforce Ventures and Vintage Investment Partners. The Salesforce Ventures investment wasn’t a coincidence given that the company is launching an app in the Salesforce AppExchange this week. In fact, Samanage CEO and founder Doron Gordon indicated that half of today’s investment came from Salesforce.
The product enables users to manage service interactions with employees, customers and field service agents in Salesforce’s Service Cloud. The new partnership with Salesforce is a deliberate move on the part of Samanage to move beyond its SMB roots into the enterprise.
Gordon believes hitching its wagon to Salesforce will help his company accelerate the shift to enterprise customers. “We believe the partnership with Salesforce would allow us to accelerate the time to serve enterprise customers and successfully compete with vendors like ServiceNow. We want to go after larger customers,” he explained.
Samanage in Salesforce. Image: Samanage
The company began discussions with Salesforce began at the end of 2015. Gordon assigned a development team to get familiar with the Salesforce Lightning platform at the beginning of 2016. It took them about 11 months to deliver the new version, which Gordon says was remarkably quick. “It’s a testament to the platform to come in and get to GA so quickly,” he said.
Up until now, Samanage had aimed mostly for the small to medium sized business (SMB) market. That product will continue to run on AWS in the US and Europe as it has been, and the company plans to develop the two platforms in parallel. Gordon says he doesn’t see this as a major problem as the same interface runs on both products, and while the back ends are obviously different, they have set up a system to accommodate this.
Salesforce launched Force.com back in 2007 to allow businesses to build their own applications on top of their platform. Today with the modern Salesforce Lighting tool set, companies like Samanage can build applications using development tools that Salesforce has built. Samanage will be available in the Salesforce AppExchange, and will run inside the Salesforce Service Cloud, the company’s customer service platform.
Samanage launched in 2007 and has 1400 customers.