Dreamforce: Releases Galore

SAN FRANCISCO — Salesforce.com wasn't the only company to announce something new. With 19,000 registered attendees, it's no wonder vendors are hoping to ride the coattails of the largest software-as-a-service vendor industry to bring light to their own product releases. Below, a snapshot of the excitement that took place here at Dreamforce 2009.

Appirio: Used internally for the past three months, Appirio publicly released its cloud ecosystem map to help ease the experience of navigating the "cloud" ecosystem. In doing so, Appirio hopes to decrease market confusion and accelerate the adoption of cloud solutions. The map was created in collaboration with technology consultant Troy Angrignon. Solutions are categorized based on their delivery model--public-cloud (i.e., multitenant), vendor-hosted (i.e., single tenant, multi-sourced), or private-cloud (i.e., on-premises)-and as either an application, platform, or infrastructure solution. According to Balakrishna Narasimhan, senior director of strategy and marketing, the tool is still very much a work in progress and the company welcomes feedback from its users.

Aprimo: Marketing software vendor Aprimo unveiled the on-demand version of Aprimo marketing software Aprimo Marketing Studio. "The game is changing," says Jeff Chamberlain, vice president of corporate marketing at Aprimo, pointing to the undeniable shift of consumer media consumption from analog to digital. The solution aims at this growing trend to help support all online marketing activities and essentially empower marketing to take control of its digital assets and decrease reliance on outside agencies and technology teams. The solution covers a wide variety of capabilities across the board from search engine management to banner ads to blog creation and optimization.

CCRM.com: CCRM's on-demand solution integrates the Salesforce.com database and maintains all relevant inbound and outbound correspondence relevant to a particular contact or lead. In other words, when a match between a lead and the recipient or sender is found, CCRM automatically logs the details of the email and any attachments with the contact, all without having to leave the email application (e.g., Outlook).

Contactual: With the release of its OnDemand Contact Center on the AppExchange, Contactual eliminates the burden of an on-premise infrastructure and enables users to work remotely. Additional capabilities include an integrated single user console, integrated reporting and dashboards, and the ability to store and retrieve call recordings, email interactions, and chat transcripts from Salesforce CRM.

DocuSign: The on-demand electronic signature solutions provider released its solution for Salesforce CRM on the AppExchange. Voted by thousands of Dreamforce attendees as Best Partner App at the fourth annual Salesforce.com Appy Awards, DocuSign aims to enable users to send documents for electronic signature and track progress in real-time within Salesforce CRM and sync the data with their Salesforce CRM database. The solution incorporates multi-layered authentication, transaction control, data collection and processing, workflows and templates, and user management and reporting.

I Love Rewards: A Web-based provider of loyalty and rewards solutions, I Love Rewards unveiled its SalesCentive product, a non-case incentive solution, on the AppExchange. The solution boasts usability and process efficiency to encourage salespeople to accurately update their progress and performance in a timely manner, and set goals using its reporting and forecasting tool-offloading the responsibility from the sales managers.

Informatica: Data integration software vendor Informatica released Informatica Cloud 9 to enable cloud data integration, featuring Informatica Cloud platform-as-a-service, address quality cloud services, and expanded support for Amazon EC2 for all Informatica PowerCenter and Informatica PowerExchange configurations. "A cloud application this not well integrated with the rest of your business is like having a beautiful house on an island you can't reach," says Darren Cunningham, senior director of marketing at Informatica. This release intends to empower customers, developers, and partners, with the tools necessary to manage complex integration and data quality requirements and collaborate with line of business by delivering custom cloud services.

Manticore Technology: With the release of the seventh iteration of its flagship marketing automation product, Manticore Technology highlights an improved, customizable user interface among its primary enhancements. Other feature enhancements were made to the vendor's digital marketing asset management offerings, email wizard, and drag-and-drop list building and segmentation capabilities.

Marketing Cloud: Business solution vendors Alfresco, Demandbase, Hoovers, Marketo, Jigsaw, On24, and PivotLink have come together to launch a new Marketing Cloud community that aims to provide "a set of open, interoperable and secure services," with the objective of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing operations. Each vendor brings to the cloud their own technology-from marketing automation to business directories to analytics-that will deliver on that goal. Companies are invited to join the Marketing Cloud community and participate in discussions around marketing strategies and best practices. Moreover, members can Members can access this portal for best practice information, access the knowledgebase, and attend virtual events.

MarketTools: A customer insight management solution provider, MarketTools release Zoomerang Surveys on the AppExchange. Intended to ease the creation and data collection of survey data, Zoomerang Surveys is applicable to marketing, sales, and customer service teams seeking customer insight and feedback. The solution will be available on the AppExchange in December. The decision to launch the product came as a direct result of conversations with Salesforce.com and the demand coming from users, says, Greg Marek, director of corporate marketing at MarketTools. No plans yet for pulling in unstructured, inbound data. "This is designed specifically for launching surveys from Salesforce application and bringing the results right back to the contact record."

TreeHouse Interactive: Provider of partner relationship management solutions and demand generation solutions, TreeHouse releases enhancements to its Marketing View product with deeper Salesforce integration and the addition of two new features. Remote forms allow marketers to create forms for the Web site. A download manager helps marketers streamline the visitor experience by requiring she fill out a form only once when downloading Web site resources (e.g., whitepaper). The tool also tracks the resources downloaded and provides lead nurturing capabilities.

Xobni: A new Salesforce CRM extension from the Microsoft Outlook search and relationship plug-in provider allows professionals to view Salesforce CRM data -- such as sales forecasts, collaboration data, account details, recent activity, lead information -- directly in Outlook inbox. The company reports that the solution contributes to productivity improvements by saving the average user saves more than 30 minutes a week.

News relevant to the customer relationship management industry is posted several times a day on destinationCRM.com, in addition to the news section Insight that appears every month in the pages of CRM magazine. You may leave a public comment regarding this article by clicking on "Comments" at the top; to contact the editors, please email editor@destinationCRM.com.

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