Salesforce Summer 2009

This week saw SalesForce launch version 9 of their popular online CRM product. The two things that interested me the most were the workflow visualiser and the free version of the SalesForce platform:

Workflow Visualiser & Process driven CRMs

In the CRM world there are three main types of CRM vendors; interactive, process driven and record centric CRMs:

CRM Vendor Types Current Market Leaders
Interactive eGain Communications
KANA Software
RightNow Technologies
Talisma
LivePerson
KNOVA
Business Process Driven Sword Ciboodle
Record Centric Microsoft
Salesforce.com
Oracle Siebel
SAP
Oracle CRM on Demand
Entellium

At the moment the market leader for process driven CRMs is Ciboodle (who I used to work for) and with the Workflow visualiser it really reminds me of Ciboodle and a more process-driven CRM. Ok, you’ve always been able to do workflow in salesforce but they are now allowing you to see visually what your workflow actions are doing and how they flow into each other and with complex workflow actions this is really good news. The only limitation being you can only see your workflow and have to go back to salesforce to continue to edit the workflow. More >