E-Commerce Blog

At its annual Dreamforce event, Salesforce.com and several of its partners — Facebook, Google and Amazon — made announcements intended to encourage more businesses to pursue Web-as-a-platform using their Force.com business process platform. Taking away significant amounts of hype, there were three themes for the conference: Cloud computing that takes SaaS-based application delivery to the business process platform level; customer success announcements and ecosystem partnerships designed to provide industry; and business-process applications as part of the Force.com platform strategy.

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Force.com Is One to Be Reckoned With

It was just a matter of time before businesses started to respond to the financial meltdown with some creativity, and as usual, the biggest advantages will go to the early movers. I have been noodling on several convergent ideas recently, and they seem to be taking shape in the marketplace, but in some quarters where you might not expect innovation or creativity. Exhibit one is the return of layaway in retail. People of a certain age and background, myself included, can remember the concept of buying something at a store and leaving it there while you paid for it over a few months.

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Blue Light Special

RightNow Technologies has gone deep with contact center functionality in November 08, the latest quarterly update of its flagship Software as a Service CRM application. The new version builds on RightNow’s strong self-service platform with the addition of agent-scripting technology, a desktop add-in framework, and guided assistance. RightNow has also bundled many of its contact center features into a new software package. It includes the agent scripting introduced in November 08, feedback features, and cross-sell and upsell functionality.

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RightNow Adds Agent Scripting to Contact Center Toolbox

For the second time since its acquisition of Siebel, Oracle is rolling out a major upgrade of the iconic on-premise suite. Version 8.1.1 has rehabbed many of its features — as well as lavished a great deal of attention on the loyalty functions. The company is also introducing Oracle CRM Gadgets for Sales — five mini-applications that provide enterprise data and service leveraging Web 2.0 content. In this version, Oracle has updated Siebel Self-Service, including Siebel eSupport and Siebel eCommerce applications, with industry-specific customer self-service applications.

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Siebel Suite Gets Major Overhaul

A small group of us were standing on the Dreamforce trade show floor surveying the more than 200 booths and vendors assembled there. We were trying to put a finger on what, exactly, the show had become. Was it a user group meeting, a conventional trade show, a partner meeting, or some hybrid? By process of elimination hybrid won out simply because we could not conclude that the show was anything else. Most interesting to me was the number of new companies with very different ideas about applications and specific business processes.

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The Dreamforce Dream Team