As neither is a classic CRM application, the company was able to trumpet that it it now a multi-application, multi-category company.
The case we make for Salesforce.com has moved on, said CEO Marc Benioff. We are the first multi-application, multi-category SaaS company.
Salesforce Content appears to be the more prosaic of the two new offerings, as well as addressing a real need in the SMB market for a manageable, affordable content management system capable of dealing with unstructured data. But it is also another example of Salesforce.com taking from the consumer web and applying consumer web approaches to the business environment.
We manage structured information, columns tables, rows, said Benioff, but the reality is that most information is unstructured, around 85% is unstructured and it is unmanageable. People are wasting hours looking for information. We want to provide a dynamic new way of managing unstructured information. The Internet has found a better way.
Salesforce Content uses Web 2.0 technologies that enable it to draw on the wisdom of the crowd, supporting the tagging, content subscriptions, recommendations and content ratings activities that are so well used in social networking sites like YouTube and Flickr.
Rather than imposing hierarchical structures, folders and terminology, user activity generates the most intuitive and popular tags for example, and provides a way of sorting and searching by a set of metrics users find useful be that the most relevant or the most published articles or articles by a particular user. User input also determines other key content management activities such as content links.
The Content application will be an integral part of Winter 08.
The second application, Salesforce Ideas, was conceived as a way of capturing and and driving new ideas. The premise is that customers, partners, employees drive new ideas by their experience and their needs. Ideas provides a way for online communities to submit and discuss ideas. As with Content, the crowd determines which ideas bubble to the top for further investigation. The application is based on Salesforce.com’s own IdeaExchange and work by Dell on a similar idea called IdeaStorm.
In addition to the two new applications, Winter 08 will also include a host of improvements to the existing sales, marketing, customer management, and partner relationship management applications.
