Saleforce.com and Cisco on Service Cloud 2

New Delhi: Salesforce.com and Cisco announced a combined solution to deliver a complete contact centre in the cloud in two steps. The first concerns the establishment of a new standard of contact center based on five-minute upgrades' technology. The second concerns the partnership with Cisco.

The two together are profitable to the enterprise as it will bring it within the reach of companies of all sizes. Companies will now be able to access the Service Cloud 2 even during planned maintenance windows with the new five-minute upgrade technology. Towards this endeavour, Salesforce.com and Cisco unveiled a complete call centre running entirely in the cloud with a combined solution integrating telephony with CRM. The five-minute upgrade technology and new solution with Cisco are delivered with Service Cloud 2 customer service.

The five-minute upgrade represents a technology achievement which demonstrates the power of the Salesforce.com platform and infrastructure. This much has also been asserted by Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com. He said, “The five-minute upgrade is a revolution for the industry and a revelation for customers. The power of the Salesforce.com platform has eliminated yet another painful legacy from on-premise software by making upgrades nearly invisible for customer service organizations. No longer will the customer service market be held back by traditional technology.”

"With the introduction of five-minute upgrades, Salesforce.com has once again taken the traditional software model and turned it on its head. Allowing companies to access their applications, even during an upgrade is a monumental achievement that the rest of the industry will be spending the next few years trying to catch up to," said Bruce Richardson, Chief Research Officer, AMR Research.

The Cisco and Salesforce.com Customer Interaction Cloud brings together Salesforce.com's Service Cloud 2 with Cisco unified communication. The solution is meant to empower small and medium sized companies to run their customer service completely in the cloud. The duo claim to share a vision about moving technology into the cloud and leveraging social networking sites to deliver services to their customers where they are already collaborating.

The five-minute upgrade feature is currently scheduled to be available in beta in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 and pilot starting in Q1 of fiscal year 2011. The combined solution from salesforce.com and Cisco will most probably come out in the first quarter of 2010. Salesforce.com Knowledge is currently scheduled to be available in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 exclusively for corporate sales customers.

It will be available to the rest only in 2011. Salesforce.com Answers is currently scheduled to be available in pilot in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 and to become generally available in the first quarter of fiscal year 2011. Salesforce.com for Twitter is readily available at no additional charge on the Force.com AppExchange.