Salesforce.com Tackles the Next Frontier in Contact Center Technologies with Service Cloud 2

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 5 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) , the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced five-minute upgrades and a new partnership with Cisco, further extending its leadership position in cloud computing and bringing Service Cloud 2 to companies of all sizes. Companies will be able to access the Service Cloud 2 even during planned maintenance windows with the new five-minute upgrade technology. Making industry leading service and support technology available to companies of all sizes, salesforce.com and Cisco unveiled a complete call center running entirely in the cloud with a combined solution integrating telephony with CRM. The five-minute upgrade technology and new solution with Cisco are delivered with Service Cloud 2, salesforce.com's next generation solution for customer service. The Service Cloud 2 exponentially increases the quality of service, while lowering the cost, by leveraging the expertise of the community.

The New Standard for Contact Centers - The Five-Minute Upgrade

Upgrades and planned maintenance windows have always been viewed as a necessary evil in the world of software. Many times these upgrades actually made the application less useful with broken customizations and integrations. Ten years ago, salesforce.com built applications on the multi-tenant, real-time Force.com platform and was able to deliver completely seamless and invisible upgrades to customers three times a year. Salesforce.com delivered the industry's best technology, upgrades that improved its applications, and did it all without creating headaches for companies.

Today, salesforce.com is unveiling another revolution for the cloud computing industry with the new five-minute upgrade. The five-minute upgrade represents an incredible technology achievement demonstrating the power of the Force.com platform and infrastructure. Never before have companies been able to take advantage of the latest technology innovations and evolve their customer service at the rate they are able to with the Service Cloud 2. Salesforce.com is the only company able to provide its customers with the five-minute upgrade technology, which will deliver:

Access: Now, companies will have read-only access to their Service Cloud 2 deployment during planned maintenance windows, enabling companies to continue servicing their customers all while going through a full upgrade. Maintenance windows will allow customers to access their data in read-only mode for the duration of the maintenance, except during a five-minute cut-over time, setting the new standard that all cloud computing applications will be measured against.Real-Time, Mirrored Data Centers: Five-minute upgrades are only possible because salesforce.com has real-time, fully mirrored data centers. When salesforce.com upgrades the service in one data center, companies will still be able to access their applications through one of salesforce.com's other global, real-time, mirrored data centers.

Cisco and Salesforce.com - Delivering the Contact Center in the Cloud

Salesforce.com and Cisco today announced a combined solution to deliver a complete contact center in the cloud. The Cisco and salesforce.com Customer Interaction Cloud brings together salesforce.com's Service Cloud 2 with Cisco Unified Communications. The solution empowers small and medium sized companies to run their customer service completely in the cloud. Salesforce.com and Cisco share a vision about moving technology into the cloud and leveraging social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google to deliver services to their customers where they are already collaborating.

For more information on this announcement, please refer to the joint press release issued earlier today.

Service Cloud 2 - New Product Innovation for Customer Service and SupportOn September 9th, salesforce.com announced the next chapter in the customer service revolution with Service Cloud 2. New product innovations introduced for the customer service industry included:

  --  Salesforce Knowledge: A year after salesforce.com acquired Instranet,
      salesforce.com will offer the world's first integrated multi-tenant
      knowledge base, the first ever multi-tenant knowledge base fully
      integrated with CRM and designed for cloud computing. The core Service
      Cloud 2 knowledge base will deliver the same benefits available to any
      application built on the Force.com platform including rapid
      deployment, immediate results, simple customizations, automatic
      upgrades and more.
  --  Salesforce Answers: For years, customer service centers have been
      limited to knowledge articles produced by company employees, and have
      not benefited from the explosion of consumer wisdom that exists across
      the Web. Utilizing the Service Cloud 2, Salesforce Answers will
      deliver a unique online experience that helps companies leverage the
      expertise in the cloud to bring the right answer to their customers.
      Salesforce Answers will enable companies to start the conversation
      with a unique online customer community, crowd-source knowledge and
      leverage Facebook.  --  Salesforce for Twitter: Twitter provides a free platform for users to
      answer the question "What are you doing?" in 140 characters or less
      and broadcast the answer to a broader community. These "tweets" can
      cover any topic area, including specific companies, brands and
      products.  In today's Web-driven world where there is an expectation
      of real-time interaction, Salesforce for Twitter and the Service Cloud
      2 give companies an easy way to join the real-time customer service
      conversations happening on Twitter by enabling them to search Twitter
      in real-time, monitor service issues on Twitter, join Twitter
      conversations, establish a Twitter support channel and deliver
      real-time knowledge.  Comments on the News:
  --  "The five-minute upgrade is a revolution for the industry and a
      revelation for customers. The power of the Force.com platform has
      eliminated yet another painful legacy from on-premise software by
      making upgrades nearly invisible for customer service organizations.
      No longer will the customer service market be held back by traditional
      technology," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com.
      "The Service Cloud 2 represents the future of customer service."
  --  "With the introduction of five-minute upgrades, salesforce.com has
      once again taken the traditional software model and turned it on its
      head. Allowing companies to access their applications, even during an
      upgrade is a monumental achievement that the rest of the industry will
      be spending the next few years trying to catch up to," said Bruce
      Richardson, Chief Research Officer, AMR Research.  --  "Since we started using salesforce.com's Service Cloud 2, we have been
      able to streamline our incident management process and provide an
      improved self-service experience for our customers, together improving
      their overall satisfaction. We think the new innovations coming from
      salesforce.com, including Salesforce Knowledge, will be the next step
      forward in allowing us to focus on our customers' needs, instead of
      our infrastructure," said Brent Flanders, Perceptive Software vice
      president technical services.  Pricing and Availability
  --  The five-minute upgrade feature is currently scheduled to be available
      in beta in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 and pilot starting
      in Q1 of fiscal year 2011.
  --  The combined solution from salesforce.com and Cisco is currently
      scheduled to be generally available in the first quarter of calendar
      year 2010.
  --  Salesforce Knowledge is currently scheduled to be available in the
      fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 for corporate sales customers. It
      is currently scheduled to become generally available in fiscal year
      2011.
  --  Salesforce Answers is currently scheduled to be available in pilot in
      the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 and to become generally
      available in the first quarter of fiscal year 2011.  --  Salesforce for Twitter is available today at no additional charge on
      the Force.com AppExchange for Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited
      Edition customers.

  Supporting Resources
  --  For more information, please visit
      http://www.salesforce.com/servicecloud2

  --  Follow salesforce.com on Twitter @salesforcenews

  About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company's portfolio of Salesforce CRM applications, available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that companies collaborate and communicate with their customers across sales, marketing and service. The company's Force.com platform (http://www.salesforce.com/platform/) enables customers, partners and developers to quickly build powerful business applications to run every part of the enterprise in the cloud. Based on salesforce.com's real-time, multi-tenant architecture, Salesforce CRM and Force.com offer the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing.As of July 31, 2009, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 63,200 customers including Allianz Commercial, Dell, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and SunTrust Banks. Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM". For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com/, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
Copyright (c) 2009 salesforce.com, inc. All rights reserved. Salesforce and the "no software" logo are registered trademarks of salesforce.com, inc., and salesforce.com owns other registered and unregistered trademarks. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050216/SFW105LOGO
http://photoarchive.ap.org/
PRN Photo Desk [email protected]

Source: salesforce.com