The wife of our COO, Mark Feldman, was experiencing contractions last week. She calmly asked him if there was an iPhone App to help with timing the contractions. Mark searched the App store and discovered multiple applications, all able to help with timing, recording, and sharing pre-labor contraction information.
It’s clear that the open-system iPhone has enabled developers and partners to solve many needs in our complex lives-and it is astounding. Think of the volume of innovation that an open platform provider like Apple creates with the iPhone. We’ve all heard ‘there’s an app for that’- and it’s true! But this concept is not limited to the B2C world.
A platform where we’ve noticed a flourish of innovation is in sales and marketing automation. (We're talking doubling the productivity of sales and marketing teams here). There are hundreds of companies using Salesforce.com’s platform to develop applications designed to assist sales and marketing processes. When used together, these applications hook together to create an amazing ecosystem of innovation.
It’s this ecosystem of innovation within a cloud-computing environment that has given Salesforce an edge over Oracle, Siebel, SAP, and Dynamics.
Salesforce.com is still vastly under-penetrated in large corporations where the big guys hold sway with bundled, corporate-wide financial database systems. These big guys are starting to ape Salesforce by offering API access, but they're not serious quite yet. A bloom of innovation in sales and marketing is happening, and it's happening without the major players in the market... Salesforce and friends have the big guys surrounded.
NetProspex will be releasing our own Salesforce application this year at Dreamforce (come say hello in booth #12!) Our tool is cloud-based, bringing verified contact information to the desktops of sales and marketing teams.
Have you done better business thanks to external apps within Salesforce.com?
Do you agree that the idea of an ever-changing ecosystem of partners can eventually overtake an inert, static system?
Gary Halliwell
CEO
NetProspex
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