What’s Next For Salesforce.com Full CRM or ERP ?
Monday, May 2nd, 2011
Now that Salesforce has released Chatter the marketplace will have a new collaboration software for consumers to choose. This provides a platform for an iteration of a unified communication strategy.
Now that Salesforce.com has introduced their Force.com application development platform for enterprise software development allows integration much easier than before. Organizations now have a base technology platform to integrate and design their infrastructure around.
The recent acquisition of Radian 6 for social media marketing and analysis tools suggests that SFDC will morph into an eventual enterprise vendor with full ERP functionality. By adding Radian 6 to their marketing mix of Chatter and Jigsaw SFDC is quickly rounding into a full CRM with marketing automation and saleforce automation functionality. It would seem the strategy is build out a robust CRM with full functionality and then attack other parts of the enterprise functionality. The Force platform allows other third party vendors to tap into the popularity of SFDC and quickly add their own functionality to the CRM based SFDC thereby extending usable enterprise software modules.
Microsoft has Outlook, Dynamics CRM and Sharepoint that provides a decent content management system along with workflow. LoutsNotes has the Domino Suite and since Netsuite has added suiteflow to its offering all vendors in this space must take notice as to the new players in this field. LotusNotes has included many new communication tools for unified communication strategies.
Chatter and Radian 6 provide the social media and analytics aspect for SFDC. Features such as full marketing automation, customer self service, reporting, workflow management, cataloguing, customer service integration and knowledge management may be indications as to the types of vendors they are looking to acquire next. If extending to full CRM capabilities to the likes of SAP, Oracle (Siebel) Pivotal etc. then SFDC has some ways to go before they start acquiring other enterprise applications and may be a while before you see an ERP created by Salesforce. The logical course of action would be to fully create an enterprise level CRM with full capabilities of the bigger CRM functions and then move onto building other parts of the platform and application
With force starting as a CRM and adding social components it challenge will to find equally compatible solutions to round out their offering towards more of an ERP like solution. The ecosystem of partners for SFDC is vast and many vendors are racing to tweak the API’s for seamless integration to the Force platform to add additional functionality.
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