Salesforce.com

Editor's Notes

1. Customer relationship management (CRM) is about organising information—the phone calls, the emails, all interactions—for strong sales and customer careWhat Salesforce CRM does for youSales reps love Salesforce CRM because everything they need is at their fingertips, in a single online application. Best of all: Managers get an easy overview of reps’ activities and insight into their pipelines, so they can forecast with confidence.
2. Eliminates the need to install and run the application on the customer's own computers and simplifying maintenance and support. There are some hesitations in adoption here due to security issues — a company’s data is held under the provider’s watch possibly shared with other company’s data.
3. To run a business, you need to track a lot of information…Salesforce is a centralized place where you can track everything from contacts & accounts to sales deals & documentsBecause everything is on the cloud, all you need is a mobile device and internet connection to access it.
4. Facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software.
5. Currently, salesforce.com has not ventured into the iaas domain.Rather than purchasing servers, software, data center space or network equipment, clients instead buy those resources as a fully outsourced service. The whole cloud infrastructure, including servers, routers, hardware based load-balancing, firewalls, storage and other network equipment, is provided by the IaaS provider. IaaS delivers computer and web infrastructure through virtualization. Users can again pay for what infrastructure they require. When a company of IT department wants to outsource and host their data in a virtual world then using something like Amazon’s EC2 cloud is the way to go. Most anything can be run in a virtualized environment with a IaaS, offering massive flexibility. This can be especially helpful to SMBs that want to keep their infrastructure costs low and scale quickly (no hardware to own makes it easy to adjust); not to mention the access to enterprise grade IT for a “pay as you go” model.
6. The Cloud model has been criticized by privacy advocates for the greater ease in which the companies hosting the Cloud services control, and thus, can monitor at will, lawfully or unlawfully, the communication and data stored between the user and the host company. Instances such as the secret NSA program, working with AT&T, and Verizon, which recorded over 10 million phone calls between American citizens, causes uncertainty among privacy advocates, and the greater powers it gives to telecommunication companies to monitor user activity. The relative security of cloud computing services is a contentious issue which may be delaying its adoption. Some argue that customer data is more secure when managed internally, while others argue that cloud providers have a strong incentive to maintain trust and as such employ a higher level of security.Data SecurityNow from Sony to Google, various corporations have at various times come out in the open about their services being hacked and user data compromised. In a cloud based environment this threat takes on a whole new meaning as by definition cloud computing does not all any data including the most private and confidential documents to remain off the net!OwnershipDid services like Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Dropbox etc. exist a quarter of century back? No. Did businesses exists? Yes. Did personal files exist? Yes. Imagine that you give up your desktop in favor of a Chromebook and a decade from now Google decides that since bottom line is not as good as what it used to be 2011 they would be closing down the service. What do you do? There isn’t much you can do but hope that someone would see this situation as an opportunity for business and offer a (very costly) migration to their service. And this is just one such scenario!Bandwidth DependenceIn case your network in down or your datacard doesn’t work when you are traveling you lose all your data till the time you can connect to the Internet again.