Salesforce.com last week unveiled the 20th generation of its hosted CRM software and announced a connector integrating its CRM software-as-a-service with SAP’s R/3 ERP applications.
Salesforce.com in June announced new features of Summer ’06, notably a version aimed at partners that combines CRM and partner relationship management features.
The Summer ’06 package integrates the company’s CRM product with interactive call scripting to improve the performance of sales, marketing and service staff. The call scripts, built on an Asynchronous JavaScript + XML interface, are easy to navigate and can be revised in real time. With them, staff keeps a running tally of how prospects respond to questions, so they can identify sales leads more easily, the company says.
Summer ’06 includes lead-history tracking to assist in sales-call compliance and auditing. With it, managers have a better sense of how sales staff turn leads into customers and have a complete audit trail of a customer interaction.
Salesforce Connector for SAP R/3 is set to be released at the end of this month. It will be available on request as a free option for the Unlimited Edition of the vendor’s CRM software and will cost Enterprise Edition customers $12,000 per year.
Connector lets users integrate Salesforce.com CRM applications with SAP’s R/3 ERP software to view customer data from both products in one place. It also supports bidirectional synchronization of information between Salesforce.com and R/3.
“A few years ago, integration was said to be the Achilles’ heel of on-demand software,” says Kendall Collins, vice president of product marketing at Salesforce.com. “That has not been the case,” because Salesforce.com partners have built connectors between the vendor’s CRM offerings and third-party products, he adds.
To create Connector, Salesforce.com worked closely with partner Sierra Atlantic, Collins says. They linked the CRM software to R/3 through SAP’s Java Connector tool kit to its Intermediate Document data container, which lets an SAP and a non-SAP systems exchange data.
Salesforce.com decided to offer a connector to SAP’s older R/3 technology, not its more recent mySAP offerings, because the “overwhelming majority of our customers are using R/3 [Release] 4.6C,” Collins said.
He wouldn’t comment on future connectors Salesforce.com might offer. The vendor plans to weigh the integration capabilities its partners have built and offer via its AppExchange network.
Oracle, the other leading ERP vendor, also has hosted CRM products. Microsoft has announced it will offer a hosted version of its Dynamics CRM software in 2007. Salesforce.com also competes with other hosted applications vendors, such as NetSuite.
