Today was CloudForce in London – SalesForce.com’s big event, which is touring the world, and touted as “your chance to get the insight you need to take advantage of cloud computing and salesforce.com applications in 2009.” And that’s probably where the problem starts. There wasn’t much cloud on show, at least not cloud computing as I understand it.

They had me in the palm of their hand. I was waiting to be wowed. Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s highly energetic Chairman and CEO took to the stage and had at it like a fervent preacher, although one who’d slightly forgotten his gospel, having to glance down at his autocue as he stumbled over customer and competitor names, but that didn’t dim his obvious passion for what SaleForce.com had to offer. SalesForce.com has done a great job of selling to sales people. It is an excellent pipeline management tool for sales managers, and dashboard provider for exec teams, and I’ve used it successfully from both of those angles in the past.

However, during the day, salesforce was promoted as a customer service management tool, a financial data management tool, a content management tool and a social media monitoring tool. That’s a big stretch from where they started. Add to that, a firm claim on the cloud space. Benioff said that they had been “talking cloud” for ten years.

Salesforce.com is certainly evolving from a SaaS-based CRM provider, where it has done well, to a PaaS (platform as a service) provider. That puts it on a direct collision course with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft’s emerging Azure platform, as well as Google’s very own App engine. Those are big players, one’s that know their apples and pears.

During the morning Benioff made a big play about their ‘live demos’ and that’s where the wheels came off for me. Not in the demos themselves, they were super slick and flawless, almost too good to believe. And indeed they were. Orange was touted as a major customer, with 10,000 Orange customers claimed to be using SalesForce.com’s Facebook monitoring application. The problem was, the orange customer service twitter account used in the ‘live demo’ was a fake, as Redmonk’s James Governer discovered after tweeting about it (tweets in reverse chronological order):

And digging into the account they used as the example customer, well, that was a fake too, as you can see from their stream:

2 updates, 4 followers. In fact there’s a veritable ecosystem of fake accounts around ddbenson. Now, I have nothing against demos with dummy accounts. I’ve done the occasional one myself. Sometimes needs must, and they are important to protect people’s privacy, but when you do them, call them as such. Both James and I had asked our Twitter followers if they had any experience of interacting with Orange customer services via twitter. That’s a good few thousand people between the two of us. The answer? Nothing. Not a sausage. And why would there be? If Facebook asked you to install a SalesForce.com app into your profile would you? No, you probably wouldn’t. I even trawled Facebook trying to find this mystery app, but couldn’t see anything with more than 40 users. I’m clearly missing something here, since the Facebook integration was heavily promoted during the day.

There was much talk of how great SalesForce.com is, what wonderful things they do and their commitment to ‘the social contract’ (and their 1:1:1 model) and heavy claims for their social media credentials. A fair few people left during the keynote session, some tweeting their departure, and there was a general shuffling of feet around me as the pitch went on.

The sales pitch just didn’t seem to be connecting with those around me. Sure, the bloggers and journalists were comfortable at their big desks, with coffee and Ethernet connections, but talking to the customers and potential new SalesForce.com users in the pews, there seemed to be a general disquiet. “How am I going to use this for my support organisation?” asked one attendee, “the maintenance windows don’t allow me to run 24/7″. And indeed, while SalesForce.com proclaims >99.9% (the same uptime as this web hosting provider), that doesn’t include the scheduled maintenance windows, when they do their software upgrades. That’s the “No software” company’s software upgrades.

They are certainly transparent about system availability, with a real-time view of their operations, although that is fairly standard for a large service provider these days.

no software dude hugs me at cloudforce 09 on 12seconds.tv

Now, maybe I’m just smarting because I didn’t get hugged by the no software guy, but maybe that was because he was keeping his distance. I wanted to ask about the software the sales team had to run on their Blackberries to use SalesForce.com. I wanted to ask about the iPhone software from SalesForce.com. I wanted to know if they were going to support the Nokia platform that I happen to like, and what their plans were for Windows Mobile. Lots of software to ask about.

Anyway, you can watch the whole keynote - the SalesForce.com team got the content up quickly. I’ll write more about the new features just as soon as I have checked them out.

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Tagging makes navigating and organising large amounts of data significantly more efficient. Tactile CRM now even features a tag cloud, which makes a nice visualization to help you understand how your CRM tool is being used. As you’d expect, tags can be renamed, merges or deleted. 

I’ve blogged about Tactile before and we have given it a good try out here in the office. With the latest release, the number of sales opportunities supported in the ‘Micro’ and ‘SME’ versions of the service have also been increased. The team are very excited about the new functionality. I caught up with Jake Stride via Twitter earlier today, and over the course of a few tweets he said:

“It’s great to finally release all the hardwork the team has put into Tactile CRM based on our user’s feedback & suggestions over the last couple of months. We now have powerful searching and data maintenance, which even established competitors are missing and we’re not stopping there – we’ve already started on the next set of features which will see integration with other online services and some new graphing/reporting functionality”

For those wanting to dip their toes into the CRM water, you can sign up at http://www.tactilecrm.com/signup and use the code ‘redcatco’ in the ‘Sign up Code’ box, That will enter you into a prize draw for their business plan, which is worth £420. Sounds like a good deal!

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Jake Stride of Tactile CRM (photo: Benjamin Ellis)

It’s is fair to describe CRM as mainstream these days. It doesn’t take much convincing to get business managers and the sales team to see the value of tracking customer interactions.

Salesforce.com transformed the industry with their SaaS model (software as a service), but whilst they have wandered off to the shiny new pastures of PaaS (platform as a service) others have arrived to snap at their CRM heels. 

Most businesses need a finite set of features in their CRM system, and want something simple and usable that fits with their existing processes. After all, the whole point of Customer Relationship Management is to be able to understand customer behaviours and shepherd in repeat business. CRM is as much about process as it is about technology. One of the reasons new entrants are thriving is that users want something that is UaaS (usable as a service)!

A UK vendor that is on our radar, helped by their larger-than-life CEO’s presence on the recent Digital Mission, is Tactile CRM - They will be exhibiting at the upcoming Future of Web Apps in London.

Tactile CRM takes a pragmatic and open approach to CRM. They publish a roadmap of upcoming features, which is a good move for a SaaS player, especially as the SaaS model allows you to take advantage of new features as soon as they are released – no waiting to upgrade servers or desktop software, just fire up the web browser and go. 

It is free to sign up and try (pricing goes up to £75/month for 100 users) and provides an easy entry into the world of CRM. Contacts can be imported (and just as importantly, exported) easily to get you started and there is apparently an API in the pipeline.

Related Posts

• CloudForce – SalesForce.com Jumps about in the Clouds
• CRM from Tactile goes 2.0
• SaaS – Dead Before it is Born?!