Salesforce.com Winter ’04 — World’s Most Popular On-Demand CRM — Deployed Seamlessly to 8,400 Customers and 120,000 Subscribers Worldwide
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (December 08, 2003) – Salesforce.com, the world leader in delivering on-demand applications, today announced the immediate availability and deployment of salesforce.com Winter ’04, the newest release of its award-winning on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) service. The fourteenth generation of salesforce.com and the third major release the company has introduced this year, Winter ’04 provides more than 1000 state-of-the-art on-demand CRM features such as analytics, dashboards, workflow automation, real-time alerts, and contract management. Salesforce.com Winter ’04 additionally includes sforce 2.0, the world’s first on-demand application server, and features advanced customization, globalization, and integration capabilities businesses need for successfully managing profitable relationships with their customers worldwide.
“Salesforce.com Winter ’04 is our company’s dashboard, helping us track not only where we are headed but also where we should be,” said Phil de Cabia, senior vice president of sales, Lightpath, a service of Cablevision. “Management gets a bird’s-eye view of our entire business, and each team sales, operations, marketing, and customer care — has access to the dashboards they need to be proactive and successful.”
Representing more than $150 million in research and infrastructure investment, salesforce.com Winter ’04 offers an award-winning suite of scalable on-demand CRM solutions for integrated sales force automation, marketing automation, customer service and support, contract management, analytics, and document management. The salesforce.com software-as-service model automatically delivers the benefits of the new release to more than 8,400 customers and 120,000 subscribers worldwide without any of the headaches and hassles associated with traditional software upgrades.
“Tying together sales operations in over 40 countries and nine languages used to be unthinkable,” said George Skaff, vice president, worldwide marketing, Wyse Technology. “Salesforce.com’s on-demand model, on-the-fly translation, and automatic currency conversions not only make it possible, but as easy as picking up the phone.”
“The software-as-service model makes delivering salesforce.com Winter ’04 and upgrading our entire customer base a piece of cake,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “I would challenge other enterprise CRM providers to make their solutions as compelling and valuable to their customers. As the clear market leader in on-demand CRM, salesforce.com will continue to deliver state-of-the-art customization, integration and globalization features that our customers need to meet their unique requirements and grow their businesses worldwide.”
State-of-the-art CRM Features
Salesforce.com Winter ’04 adds dozens of new state–f-the-art on-demand CRM features designed to immediately benefit companies with their dramatic business impact and ease of use. An integrated analytics engine with personalized dashboards summarizes and delivers critical information and can be customized to provide a real-time snapshot of corporate metrics and key business performance indicators. Workflow automation creates business rules and triggers to automate and standardize business processes. Real-time alerts deliver automatic notifications of critical business events any time, anywhere — even via wireless devices. Contract management, part of the new operations and finance module, moves beyond closing the deal to creating and tracking customer contracts.
Customization
Salesforce.com gives companies control over end user and programmatic customizations. New custom objects and sforce controls allow businesses to extend the salesforce.com database and build custom applications, screens and forms without requiring any on-premise infrastructure.
Integration
Salesforce.com Winter ’04 on-demand CRM allows seamless integration with enterprise applications and the most commonly used desktop applications such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. The new sforce 2.0 enterprise Web services API provides more powerful and standards-based integration capabilities including dynamic WSDL generation and SQL-like object querying.
Globalization
With support for 11 languages and all currencies, salesforce.com offers advanced globalization capabilities for international CRM deployments. The new global translation workbench provides on-the-fly language translation, support for bilingual names, and automatically summarizes data and reports for managers in the language and currency of their choice.
Sforce 2.0 On-demand Application Server
Open, secure and reliable, sforce 2.0 is the world’s first on-demand application server for building on-demand applications, and allows developers to customize, integrate and extend the salesforce.com user interface, business logic and data model to support their specific business requirements with unprecedented simplicity and success. For more information, please see separate release at www.salesforce.com
Source: salesforce.com