Salesforce.com Delivers Salesforce CRM Spring '09 Release

Salesforce.com has delivered Salesforce CRM Spring '09, its cloud computing solution for customer service and sales.

Built on the company's Force.com platform, Salesforce CRM Spring '09 is available to the company’s nearly 52,000 customers. It is Salesforce.com's 28th generation release and delivers more than 50 new features. Indeed, in the past year, Salesforce.com has put more than 200 new features into the platform. The Salesforce CRM Spring '09 offering features both a service cloud and a sales cloud.

"Salesforce.com is the leading cloud computing solution for customer service and sales," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research, in a statement. "The cloud computing model gives customers a low-cost, low-risk way to run their business without incurring significant upfront costs and helps customer service and sales representatives work smarter—a key advantage in today's climate."

"This is the year of cloud computing for the CRM industry, and Salesforce.com is the undisputed leader," said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com. "Salesforce.com is helping companies grow their business without growing costs by delivering a cloud computing solution for customer service and sales with Salesforce CRM Spring '09." 

The Salesforce.com Service Cloud brings together cloud computing platforms such as Google, Facebook and Amazon.com to capture all the conversations and community experts in the cloud. And the Service Cloud helps companies deliver the expertise of the community to customers, agents and partners regardless of location or device—ensuring that the quality of customer service is consistent across every channel.

For the Sales Cloud, Salesforce CRM Spring '09 delivers four new features focused on sales and marketing collaboration. One new feature is called the Opportunity Genius. The Opportunity Genius will let companies tap into the collective wisdom of their sales organizations to arm their sales representatives with the best practices and knowledge to close deals.

The new offering’s Content Assembly feature enables users to create new sales and marketing materials by leveraging existing presentations found in Salesforce CRM. The Content Delivery feature makes it easy to package presentations, videos, proposals and more and transform them into URL links that can be sent and viewed by external recipients. And Content Tracking works by delivering content as a hyperlink, so sales and marketing professionals will know who views their materials so they can follow up immediately. Companies can also track all of the actions taken with the link, including downloads and the amount of time spent viewing the content.

"Customers are already sharing knowledge and having meaningful support conversations in the cloud with their community of friends and experts. Salesforce.com and the Service Cloud will allow us to join the conversation with this expert community to improve the way we serve our customers," said Bill Hoban, CIO of Extra Space Storage, in a statement.