Rival hosted customer relationship management application providers Salesforce.com Inc. and UpShot Corp. are going head-to-head at the Demo 2002 conference in Phoenix this week as both target enterprise-class customers.
Salesforce.com is demoing its next offerings—the Salesforce.com Offline Edition and Enterprise Edition—which will be formally announced next Friday at the companys annual Freedom from Software celebration in New York. Separately, UpShot will announce Tuesday at the show a new version of its software targeted at large companies and a hosted marketing automation application.
Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition, available by next Friday, is targeted to large organizations. It adds what company officials said is an “open enterprise-class infrastructure,” providing advanced customization, application integration and administration capabilities.
San Francisco–based Salesforce.com also plans to support full back-office integration and visibility, giving users insight into all customer interactions including orders, invoices and agreements, by later this year, company officials said. Salesforce.com. and hosted software services in general have long been criticized for falling short in the integration, customization and administration areas.
Upshots answer to Enterprise Edition is Upshot XE (Extended Edition), which the Mountain View, Calif., company will roll out today. It boasts many of the same capabilities—integration with other systems through XML application program interfaces and the UpShot data gateway, plus customization according to users roles and a workflow engine to automate business processes and data transfers.
Salesforce.com also will announce next week, its Offline Edition, which will allow users to view and update customer and prospect information offline through the same interface as online. That will be available in the second quarter of this year. Upshot announced similar technology last November with its Offline Express offering.
Upshot meanwhile, though it has traditionally positioned itself as more sales-focused, will match Salesforce.com in marketing capabilities with a marketing automation offering called UpShot Marketing.
The new hosted application will allow users to execute e-marketing campaigns; manage and control lead flow and quality; identify and fix process breakdowns; and “close the loop” between marketing and sales with reports and analysis.
Salesforce.com added marketing automation capabilities last June.
Pricing for Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition is $125 per user per month. The existing Salesforce.com service is renamed Professional Edition and priced at $65 per user per month. Offline Edition is included with Enterprise Edition at no additional cost. It adds $25 a month to the Professional Edition fee.
Upshot XE is priced at $1,150 per user per year [$95.83 per month], plus an undisclosed implementation fee. UpShot Marketing is available now for a one-time implementation fee of $2,500. The implementation fee for the email campaign module runs an additional $5,000.
