NEW YORK—Hosted CRM services provider Salesnet Inc. plans to add new functionality for dashboards and foreign language and currency support in coming versions of its service.
By the end of September, Salesnet plans to release version 2 of its dashboard, adding full drill-down capabilities. Users will be able to click on graphical presentations of sales data to see underlying data. The current version provides only a graphical interface to reports without drill-down capabilities.
Then by the first calendar quarter of 2003, Salesnet expects to add support for foreign language and currencies. The service is currently used in 39 foreign countries without this support, according to Mike Doyle, chairman and CEO of Salesnet, who spoke to eWEEK at the DCI CRM Conference and Expo here Tuesday.
Doyle did not comment on how many languages and currencies will be supported in this release.
Microsoft is adding support for nine foreign languages in version 1.2 of its Microsoft CRM suite, expected in the fall. Microsoft has the largest booth at the show, though the upcoming version is not being demoed.
Boston-based Salesnet is quietly establishing itself in the hosted CRM space while larger West Coast rivals Salesforce.com, UpShot Corp. and NetLedger Inc. slug it out. Doyle said Salesnet has recently signed a number of four-figure seat deals and boasts an average seat size of 40 seats per installation.
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Unlike its rivals, Salesnet only focuses on sales applications and has no intention of expanding into customer service and marketing.
“Salesforce.com is broad and shallow,” Doyle said. “Were narrow and deep. We clearly have the best hosted SFA on the market. We have no intention of building hosted marketing automation and call center applications. SFA is the first thing our customers are looking for.”
Doyle declined to comment on how many customers Salesnet actually has, frankly conceding that if he did, Marc Benioff, the flamboyant, high-profile CEO of acknowledged market-leader Salesforce.com, would use it against his company.
“We have a lot less than Salesforce.com does,” Doyle admitted. But he pointed to his companys average installation size, which he said is more than double Salesforce.coms well publicized numbers, which currently stand at 7,200 customers and 98,000 users, an average of about 14 users per customer installation.
“We sell to divisions of the Fortune 500 and companies with between $15 million and $500 million in annual revenues,” Doyle said.
While Doyle describes Benioff as an “enigma,” he says the mountains of press the charismatic Salesforce.com head has generated helps all companies in the space.
“Most people making a purchasing decision [for hosted CRM] look at the full set of offerings,” Doyle said. “[Benioff] has really helped to create the whole category.”
In other news at the show, NetLedger announced a partnership with Artisoft Inc. to provide integrated Web-based phone support for NetLedgers NetSuite hosted CRM applications.
Branded as NetSuite TeleVantage, the new offering links callers account numbers to their customer records hosted on NetSuite. Accounts are then verified to indicate level and type of support to be delivered. Calls are then routed to the appropriate support representative, based on information stored in NetSuite, such as type of service contract, purchase history and whether the customer merits special support consideration, such as for a partner or reference account.
The integration can also be used for outbound calling, with customer account information being displayed to a telesales team once a call is answered.
The integration is based on Boston-based Artisofts TeleVantage 5.0 software-based phone system, which includes call management, IP telephony support, browser access and graphical desktop call control.
