Other Companies Shared the Dreamforce Spotlight
With more than 135,000 people in attendance this year, more than 1,250 sessions scheduled, and more than 350 companies exhibiting their products and services, salesforce.com's 11th annual Dreamforce user conference in San Francisco Nov. 18-21 was undoubtedly the world's largest software conference. But salesforce.com wasn't the only one using the event to make news and capture attention. Many other companies with a stake in the cloud-based CRM space turned out to launch new products that have a direct tie-in to related salesforce.com products and services.
InsightSquared
InsightSquared, a provider of Salesforce Analytics software for small and midsized companies, released InsightSquared 3.0 at Dreamforce 2013. The new release introduces more than 300 reports and significant feature improvements designed to drive effective sales performance management.
InsightSquared 3.0, which the company says can be up and running in less than a day, offers the following:
- Instant Sales Insight: instantly see your sales conversions from sales activities to opportunities and to deals.
- Sure Forecast: get a more accurate sales forecast that is based on your pipeline and stage conversions.
- Smart Pipeline Manager: manage your pipeline and see high-probability and at-risk opportunities.
"We are taking sales and marketing innovation to a new level by making business intelligence powerful yet easy to use, which has never been done before. We're delivering industry-changing innovation and setting a new standard for what modern business intelligence should be," said Fred Shilmover, CEO of InsightSquared, in a statement.
Cirrus Insight
Cirrus Insight, which provides an app for integrating Salesforce with Gmail and Google Apps, announced the pilot rollout of a mobile app for its service. With Cirrus Insight Mobile, users can now save email to Salesforce, create leads, set reminders, and even close opportunities right from a mobile inbox designed for the enterprise.
Cirrus Insight's new mobile offering allows users to follow up with leads and close deals without their computers.
"We've heard from thousands of users who are looking for an enterprise mobile email app with Salesforce built into the inbox. We're thrilled to deliver an app that combines email with Salesforce in a clean, modern interface that will enable users to save emails to Salesforce, create new leads, set follow up reminders, and close more deals on the go,” said Brandon Bruce, co-founder of Cirrus Insight, in a statement.
Xactly
Xactly used the gathering to launch Xactly Incent on the Salesforce1 AppExchange.
With single sign-on through Salesforce1, joint customers now have full transparency into their customer data, can view quota attainment and commissions information, and accurately forecast the value of deals directly within their Salesforce1 Apps.
The integration of Xactly Incent with Salesforce1 provides sales with a one-stop location to manage their entire customer lifecycle, from initial point of contact, through to the final sale. The Xactly Incent application will be available from the left navigation bar within Salesforce1 App. With the offering reps and managers can do the following:
- Sign-on once to Salesforce1 and get immediate access to all their Salesforce CRM deployment and sales performance data, all from one mobile interface;
- View their commission plans and sales performance, including quota progress, sales ranking and payment details from a single, mobile dashboard;
- Use the integrated commission estimation feature to estimate the payout of a deal or model how deal modifications can impact their potential payout;
- Search for and drill into incentive information on each deal to view compensation payments and owed commissions; and
- Communicate with their teams and get valuable updates through Salesforce Chatter.
"For sales, time is money," said Christopher Cabrera, founder, president, and CEO of Xactly, in a statement. "With Xactly Incent for Salesforce1, reps can run an entire sales cycle from their mobile device, from initial customer contact, to estimating the potential payout of a deal, to viewing their commission statements. With reps either in the field or constantly on the move, this is crucial to their productivity."
CloudLock
CloudLock, a cloud information security provider, extended its security suite to cover Salesforce.com.
The newly announced solution allows Salesforce's customers to implement their compliance and security policies, automatically and continuously securing all of their Salesforce.com objects, finding and highlighting sensitive data (e.g., PII, PCI, intellectual property, financial information, and other business-critical assets), and enforcing governance and regulatory compliance at scale.
The combination of CloudLock's Compliance Scan technology with its Policy Engine protection allows organizations to enforce their acceptable use policies instantly, across their entire Salesforce environment. Used in conjunction, organizations can securely measure and promote the vision of a truly social enterprise, while ensuring that their most critical data is not leaving the organization when staff depart, or inadvertently being publicly exposed.
"Organizations adopting Salesforce are doing so across their organization," said CloudLock founder Gil Zimmermann, in a statement. "As their use of the cloud grows, so does the need for a scalable security solution that can do more than simply audit and report on potential exposures. CIOs are looking for ways to reduce risk through action."
Infer
Infer launched its predictive lead scoring AppExchange app, which includes pre-built dashboards for customers with an Infer lead scoring model.
With Infer's AppExchange app, a company's sales reps can now sort their incoming leads by Infer score to better prioritize their daily work, and view dashboards to monitor things like the quality of incoming leads.
The new app includes custom fields, pre-built dashboards, and a configuration tab to define lead buckets. It comes with pre-built connectors for Salesforce, Eloqua, and Marketo.
HP
HP and Salesforce announced a strategic partnership in cloud computing. The two companies plan to create the new Salesforce Superpod, a dedicated instance in the Salesforce multi-tenant cloud, running on HP's world-class Converged Infrastructure. The companies plan to jointly develop and market the Salesforce Superpod to the world's largest enterprises. HP intends to be the first customer to be deployed on a Salesforce Superpod.
"The salesforce.com and HP partnership is a breakthrough in cloud computing," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, of salesforce.com. "The Salesforce Superpod will allow individual customers to have a dedicated instance in the Salesforce multitenant cloud, powered by HP's technology and fully managed within salesforce.com's world-class data centers."
"Trends like cloud, mobility and big data are creating a new style of IT and transforming what enterprise customers expect and need from technology. I'm excited to have HP and salesforce.com work together to help customers tackle these exciting challenges," said Meg Whitman, president and CEO, HP. "By jointly developing and using each other's technology, the Salesforce Superpod will deliver the highest standard in performance, reliability and management. HP intends to be the first customer of the Salesforce Superpod."
Coveo
Coveo launched Coveo for Salesforce Communities, expanding its Coveo for Salesforce line of search and relevance applications. This new application assembles personalized information from multiple social and knowledge sources and presents it in the context of members within Salesforce Customer Communities and Portals.
Coveo automatically recommends relevant content and experts (such as community MVPs) as the customer interacts with and searches community and portal content.
With Coveo's search and relevance technology directly within the Communities and Customer Portal environments, members view content tailored to their profiles, from all knowledge sources, including information contained in Salesforce Chatter and across the Salesforce Platform and beyond. Coveo unifies data and information from across an organization's knowledge ecosystem, including cloud-based, on-premises, and social sources. Coveo brings this unified information directly into the Salesforce Community. Content and experts within additional Web sites, forums, knowledge bases, Microsoft Sharepoint, Google Docs, communities such as Lithium, Jive, Twitter, Web content management systems such as Sitecore and SDL, issue-tracking systems such as Jira,and more, can all be incorporated into the Salesforce Community as well.
The Coveo application includes Coveo Smartfacets and SmartInsights to provide a tailored, more sophisticated online search experience and to recommend relevant content directly within the Salesforce Communities user interface.
Diane Berry, senior vice president of marketing and communication at Coveo, said the salesforce event was the perfect launching pad for the product."Salesforce customer demand is behind our launch of Coveo for Salesforce, Communities Edition. Nearly every customer of our application for Salesforce Service Cloud has also wanted to implement Coveo within their Salesforce Community or Portal as soon as they understand the power of the technology to present relevant content from anywhere in the user's context, leading to significant increases in call deflection, more satisfied customers and a more 'customer company' approach."
Emma
Emma, a provider of Web-based email marketing, announced its integration with Salesforce.com. Current Emma customers using Salesforce can now sort audiences, manage contacts, and track email results all from within Salesforce.com.
With Emma's Salesforce integration, users can close the loop on their data with two-way syncing of complete contact and lead details, providing a single point of truth for information and eliminating the need to import or export spreadsheets or move between platforms to gather email marketing results. Emma's drag-and-drop design tools let users create HTML email. Every Emma account comes with free mobile-ready template designs and built-in optimization tools like A/B/C subject line split testing. Beyond access to advanced Emma features, the integration provides additional smart insights, including data on individual opens, clicks, shares, and opt-outs, in the user's Salesforce account. Emma customers can also aggregate the email data in customized campaign reports to spot trends and create smart, targeted follow-up strategies.
"Many of our passionate customers rely on Salesforce for advanced contact and data management, and we're happy to make their marketing efforts easier and more streamlined," said Clint Smith, co-founder and CEO of Emma, in a statement. "Organizations using Salesforce can now empower sales teams and account managers with more data-rich profiles for every lead and contact. Emma just got even more powerful."