Salesforce Case Study 2

Robert Brown MIS 220 Prof Wang 3/1/2011

Case Study #2 Q1: The advantages for salesforce.com vary in multiple ways. First off it’s as easy as creating a facebook account. There is no hardware for subscribers to purchase, scale, and maintain, no operating systems, database servers, or application servers to install, no consultants and staff, and no expensive licensing and maintenance fees. (Laudon) It’s accessible not only on a web browser, but mobile via too. Salesforce.com solutions offer better scalability than those provided by large venders. (Laudon)The disadvantages of salesforce.com are that its overly simple user interface that is quickly outgrown by experienced users. Marketing management functionality is extremely limited. Another on is SFDC points to partner applications for this purpose which involves additional costs and vendor management. Also customization toolkits can be cumbersome to use even too many seasoned administrators. Dashboards may not reflect the application security for specific users without significant administration efforts. (CRM Exposed) Lastly salesforce.com depends on other companies for service use. Q2: The challenges that salesfoorce.com face is that larger enterprise industry leaders are competing against salesforce.com by replicating its success. (Laudon) Doing this could put them out the race because these other industries can sell the products for cheaper prices. These companies consist of Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle and even smaller ones such as NetSuite. They have already rolled out subscriptions based versions of salesforce.com’s CRM products. These are companies leading the service industries with more users and customers than salesforce.com as it is and these companies could then take salesforce.com’s customers. Another challenge is to expand its business models into other areas. Salesforce.com is only currently used by sales staff needing to keep track of leads and customer lists. (Laudon) A third challenge is that subscribers depend on the service being available 24/7, but every now and then outrages have occurred causing some companies rethink their dependency on software as a service. Thomas Reuters is a company using salesforce.com. Even though they improved their services and benefited from salesforce.com advantages, they did face some challenges when merging sales teams. “We worked out how to get a single sales process into the system, but at the back end it was still separate, ex-Thomson or ex-Reuters processes. Also, we had to load two sets of customers, accounts and contacts data into the system. There was deduplication, and cleaning that was challenging – and we’re still doing that,” said Spillane. (Nguyen) To meet these challenges, salesforce is providing additional functionality through a partnership with Google and more specifically Google Apps. Also it opened its Force.com application development platform to other independent software developers and listed their programs on its AppExchange. (Laudon)

Q3: I believe that small businesses would benefit more than larger ones from salesforce.com. Larger firms are already expanded across the world and different areas. A smaller firm is too small to generate a wide variety of areas. As stated in the case study salesforce.com needs to expand to fit the needs of larger areas. (Laudon) Due to the identical format of facebook, salesforce.com can hold many users, but due to the small area that’s enough to keep track of. But when you get into to larger areas that couple of thousand can jump to millions and I don’t think salesforce.com can keep track of that many. It’s just not known for a well-defined firm to use salesforce.com. For example a company by the name of BigMachines launched its BigMachines selling platform on salesforce.com using the ChatterExchange. (Wiegler) This is a company that serves 90,000 users with only 200 companies. (BigMachines) This shows the rage of the company and how salesforce.com could help them versus a company say like Deloitte who has over 120,000 professionals, located in 200 cities, and in 140 countries. Q4: The main factors you should consider when you take into account whether to use salesforce.com are security, availability, and dependence. No one would want to put their trust into a reference that is lacking these factors. This is one of salesforce.com’s challenges, depending on them to be open 24/7 with services. An incoming business would probably over look your services if you lack these factors. MIS in Action Questions Q1: The top applications on AppExchange are Outlook Integration, Email Integration for Salesforce, Vertical Response, and Conga Composer. Outlook Integration allows you to simplify Email Integration for your users, view Salesforce data directly in Outlook, and create a new Salesforce contact directly from an email. Email Integration helps automate the logging of all inbound and outbound emails to leads, contacts, opportunities, and cases, automate the creation of contacts and leads from your email stream with our new, patent-pending emails tab. Vertical Response allows customers to send emails and postcards using and opted-in contacts list and for contacts to send targeted marketing messages. Conga Composer gives customers availability to easily create proposals, contract, account plans, and or with a single click of your mouse. (Salesforce.com) Q2: From a regular college student, could a company run its entire business from salesforce.com? I would say yes because salesforce.com has the necessities to run a business, but then again I don’t believe it would last. So in other words I would not recommend it because as stated above salesforce.com still faces these challenges and has availability and security problems. AppExchange also has the applications needed to run a business but then again its apart of salesforce.com. So you could do it if you are a company not looking for the main factors. Q3: I think the new and upcoming businesses are more likely to use AppExchange. This I believes helps them get the market up and running more easily because they can rent all these apps and software. After getting on track I believe most companies buy the necessities for their business and then salesforce.com is put on the back burner. It’s like a rocket ship, it needs the

boosters to take off and then when it gets to where it needs to be it detaches them because it no longer needs them.

Works Cited BigMachines. 2010. 1 March 2011 . CRM Exposed. 2009. 28 February 2011 . Laudon, Kenneth C. Laudon and Jane P. Management Information Systems: Managing The Digital Firm. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2010. Nguyen, Anh. "Thomson Reuters merges sales teams using Salesforce.com." 28 September 2010. ComputerworldUK: The Voice Of It Manangement. 28 February 2011 . Salesforce.com. AppExchange. 2010. 1 March 2011 . Wiegler, Will. CNBC First In Business Worldwide. 15 February 2011. 28 February 2011 .