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Thursday, October 27, 2011

Salesforce Buys Radian for monitoring social networks.
More emphasis is being placed on social CRM by Salesforce as it buys Radian, which monitors hundreds of millions of social-media conversations. Radian6 monitors Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other sites, and Salesforce expects the acquisition to extend the value of its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com offerings Salesforce is increasing its position in social CRM by buying social-media monitoring firm Radian6. Radian6 monitors hundreds of millions of social-media conversations every day on behalf of such companies as Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, PepsiCo and UPS . The acquisition involves about $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock.
The environments monitored in real time by Radian6 include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and other online communities. Salesforce said the acquisition will extend the value of its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com offerings by providing business intelligence and capabilities related to social media.
'New Norm of Customer Engagement'
Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun told news media that his company's technology is "built for the new norm of customer engagement -- real time, two-way conversations that include social channels."
The company's products include a monitoring platform that helps analyze social-media campaigns and an engagement platform to help companies connect with online community members. These are intended to improve marketing and selling products, maintain customer service, and manage online reputations.
Radian6 said more than half of the Fortune 100 companies use its products. In its announcement, Salesforce pointed to a shift to what it calls Cloud 2. In Cloud 1, according to Salesforce, technologies were leveraged to be inexpensive, fast, easy to use, and available on the desktop. In Cloud 2, the company said, technologies are "social, mobile and open."
Among other utilizations, Salesforce plans to use Radian6 to help create a bridge between public social networks, such as Facebook, and its private Chatter social network for enterprises. Chatter feeds will now contain information that reflects comments on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and other environments.
For Force.com, Salesforce sees Radian6 as offering an opportunity for developers to build the social web into apps.
Integration with New Service Cloud
Social media for the enterprise has emerged as a major emphasis for Salesforce's new products. Earlier this month, for instance, it announced "the next generation of social contact centers," Service Cloud 3. It positioned the updated software -as-a-service platform as "customer service for the social era."
Service Cloud 3 was designed to let organizations more completely engage with customers in social communities such as Twitter or Facebook. To facilitate that, the platform included integration with a Radian6 app.
A key selling point of the new Service Cloud upgrade is that it allows companies to scale up quickly to analyze millions of conversations that involve their products or service. Real-time reports and customizable dashboards offer social-channel analyses, customer-conversation analyses, and social dashboards for identifying trends.
Comments in Facebook, for instance, can be filtered by the number of friends a commenter has, assumedly indicating how influential that person is. Facebook names can also be tied into customer records.
Facebook wall posts and comments can be converted into cases with Service Cloud 3, and Twitter conversations can similarly become cases -- with agents joining in the conversation.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Dreamforce 2011 Focuses on Post-PC Revolution

Salesforce.com is getting ready for Dreamforce 2011, its hallmark cloud -computing event. This year's conference is planned for Aug. 30 through Sept. 2 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, and will focus on something that's been in the news plenty in recent days: The post-PC revolution.
As Salesforce sees it, the post-PC revolution will further accelerate the social enterprise . There is clearly a rise in companies working to improve the way they collaborate, communicate and share information with customers and employees in the cloud. That rise, Salesforce said, is transforming companies into social enterprises, which it defined as those that build social profiles of customers, create internal social networks, and listen to and engage with customers over the Internet.
Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, offered a bold statement with which his competitors likely disagree. "Each year at Dreamforce, we set the agenda for the cloud-computing industry, and this year will be no exception," he said. "At Dreamforce 2011, we will showcase customers that have embraced innovation and transformed themselves into social enterprises."
Cloud Battles
The gestalt the technology market is wandering through is moving to an ever more web-centric world, a world that surrounds companies like Salesforce -- and favors them, according to Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.
"Salesforce is not really known as a social-networking company by any stretch of the imagination," Enderle said. "Both Salesforce and IBM are having a little trouble grappling with it as a result. On the other hand, it's not like the social networks are flooding into the businesses overtly, it's more covertly and carried by the employees."
As Enderle sees it, Salesforce's take on the market is correct. But He questioned whether the company can position itself to leverage the evolution. While Salesforce was initially one of the biggest enterprise cloud players, he noted, cloud leadership has shifted to the likes of EMC and IBM.
Tapping Relevant Trends
"To a large extent I think Salesforce needs to return to being more relevant in the trends that they themselves helped create," Enderle said. "Salesforce is doing a marginal job riding these trends. The right thing to do is to get back and start talking about yourself as a leader. But the danger is that they aren't anymore, and they need to address that."
Salesforce will work to trumpet its cloud leadership at Dreamforce with sessions on government, healthcare and the social world. Special guests at the annual user and developer conference include Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google. The event aims to teach attendees how their companies can take advantage of Salesforce's cloud offerings. The company expects more than 25,000 people to attend the 450 sessions.

CEO Followed Two Loves to Success
No matter how hard Dave Alberga trained, he'd routinely be "thrown a beating" whenever he entered a mountain biking race.
Frustrated, the CEO of Active Network, who at the time in the 1990s was working at a technology company, asked a friend what to do. His friend's advice? "Give up."
That wasn't exactly what Alberga, a 48-year-old graduate from West Point and Stanford, had in mind. Alberga had tried to balance his passion for competitive sports like biking with his desire to succeed at business. But Alberga's friend told him he wasn't wired to multitask and do both and should focus on one thing that combined his love of sports and business.
The chance came in 1999, when Alberga got a call from a venture-capital firm looking for an executive to head up a small but fast-growing business that processed athletic competition registrations. Alberga knew this was exactly the kind of company that could blend his interests in athletics and online commerce. "This is the closest ever to get, as I can't be a professional athlete," to integrate sports in his life and career, he says.
Growing Fast
Now Alberga and Active Network are turning into small-business winners. Just 12 years after being founded, Active Network is the fast-growing leader in the push to take registrations of mainly outdoor events online. The San Diego-based company, which generated revenue of $289 million over the past year, launched an initial public offering last week and now has a market value of $180 million.
Active Network also has some big-time corporate backers: Walt Disney's ESPN and Barry Diller's IAC/InterActive own stakes.
The company is best known for providing the electronic back-office systems used by race organizers to allow competitors to sign up, pay and receive updates on competitions ranging from 5k's and 10k's to marathons and other endurance sports. Active Network handles the registrations of some of the nation's best-known races, including the Marine Corps Marathon, the Chicago Marathon and San Francisco's Bay to Breakers race.
Organizers say Active Network is the answer to their nightmare situations of receiving thousands of crumpled registrations forms, loose checks and wads of cash and trying to keep track of it all.
The Bay to Breakers race has used Active.com for more than 10 years. The latest race, completed in May, sold out its registration with more than 55,000 registrants, says race organizer Angela Fang. Using Active.com allowed her to process the thousands of payments, something that would have been much more costly and cumbersome to deal with otherwise, she says. While the race added a $5 service fee for the Active service, runners appreciate the convenience and think the charge is reasonable.