Salesforce.com Inc. is considering plans for a new service that would allow customers to share sales leads and other data directly with other companies using its on-demand CRM (customer relationship management) software.
Salesforce.com is asking customers to help it choose a name for the service, candidates for which include Salesforce Data Network, Salesforce to Salesforce (S2S) and Salesforce Partner Network, according to a posting in its blog Tuesday.
The service would take advantage of the fact that Salesforce.com hosts sales and customer data for thousands of clients in a standard format in its servers, making it relatively easy for it to share information among those who wish to do so.
Salesforce.com started soliciting feedback from customers earlier this year on the idea of a “Lockbox” that would allow them to share leads with their customers and other business partners, and get real-time updates on those leads, all within the Salesforce.com system.
Customers would be able to set up rules that allow them to publish the records they want to share, which other Salesforce.com customers could then subscribe to, according to a February posting on the company’s IdeaExchange Web site.
The new service was being planned for the Salesforce.com winter 2008 release, according to the posting. The winter 2007 release came out in January this year, and the fact that the company is soliciting a name for the service now suggests it could be close to fruition.
Nicholas Carr, author of the book “Does IT Matter?”, said such a service could represent an untapped opportunity for companies using hosted applications.
“Clearly, the company has something cooking, and I think it points to an as yet under-appreciated advantage of the multitenant systems that Salesforce and other utility-computing firms are running: the ability for companies using the systems to easily exchange data with one another,” he wrote in a blog posting Wednesday.
Companies offering hosted business applications, which also include NetSuite Inc. and Oracle Corp., don’t usually emphasize their ability to share their customers’ data, perhaps because one of the main inhibitors to hosted applications has been concerns about data security.
But with hosted applications more widely accepted today, Salesforce.com may think that the time is right to offer the capability.
The new service would allow customers to share “leads, opportunities and custom objects with each other (assuming both are using salesforce.com),” the company said in its posting this week.
Salesforce.com didn’t discuss the service at its Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last month, and spokespeople did not immediately return calls for comment Thursday.
“If Salesforce’s blog post is any indication, the company is likely prepping a set of tools that will build cross-client data sharing into its applications — in a way that goes well beyond its current ‘partner relationship management’ add-ons,” Carr wrote.
Salesforce.com already allows customers to buy partner licenses for sharing data with other companies in their supply chain. The new service appears to broaden that from a “one to many” to a “many to many” sharing model, said David Bradshaw, a principal analyst with Ovum Ltd.
Difficulties arise when customers want to share data with companies using a different software system, such as Oracle’s Siebel CRM On Demand, Bradshaw said. Salesforce.com may hope the data-sharing service will compel more companies to sign up for its service, or it could act more openly and allow other CRM systems to take part in the data sharing, he said.
