Salesforce.com Unveils Salesforce Communities

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, today unveiled Salesforce Communities, which will enable any enterprise to create private social communities to connect with customers and partners in entirely new ways. Salesforce Communities will combine social networking features such as profiles, real-time feeds, trending topics, recommendations and influence measurement, with the business information and processes in Salesforce. With Salesforce Communities, enterprises will be empowered to deliver completely new levels of collaboration and productivity through custom, branded communities.

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Comments on the News:

• "Today, more than ever, companies need to put customers at the heart of their business," said Doug Bewsher, senior vice president, Salesforce Chatter. "With Salesforce Communities, enterprises will be able to break the boundaries of their companies, connecting them much closer to their customers and partners."
• "Our goal was to build deeper relationships with our mid-size business partners across the world, and be seen as builders, not just bankers," said Ian Forrest, vice president, Global Marketing, GE Capital. "With Access GE built on Salesforce Communities, we have deployed more than 50 custom communities, leading to stronger partnerships with companies."
• "Salesforce Communities will enable companies to build stronger, more valuable relationships with customers, partners and employees through custom communities – designed to address and support specific business needs," said Mary Wardley, vice president, CRM and Enterprise Applications, IDC. "When delivered within the context of the business process of Salesforce, Communities has the potential to facilitate strategic collaboration across enterprises and with customers and partners above the capabilities of online peer communities, which have the tendency to be either entirely conversational or entirely transactional."

Connect Customers, Partners and More with Salesforce Communities
Legacy technology has failed to deliver on the promise of connecting companies with their customers and partners. Existing offerings are either entirely conversational, such as discussion forums or entirely transactional, such as portals, and so are disconnected from the business.

Today, more than ever, enterprises need to connect with their customers and partners in meaningful ways to increase efficiency and productivity. Combining the simplicity of developing groups and hangouts on the social Web with the trusted business processes salesforce.com is known for, companies will now be able to quickly deploy communities to: 

• Connect with Customers: Salesforce Communities will help social enterprises combine knowledge-driven, peer-assisted and agent-assisted customer service communities into a single unified experience giving customers better and faster service, every time. Companies will also be able to create a variety of marketing communities around events, campaigns or even spin up focus groups on the fly.
• Connect with Partners: Companies, along with their partners, suppliers and distributors, can create custom communities to drive more sales through seamless deal registration, access to proven sales tools and collaboration with the right experts.
• Connect with Any Community: Deploy communities to support any business process - from franchises sharing best practices, to high-end retailers delivering custom shopping experiences, to universities looking to connect students with alumni.

Deploy Private Social Communities Instantly with the Trust of Salesforce
In order to be successful, companies must engage with the right people, at the right time - seamlessly across multiple communities. Because Salesforce Communities is built on the Salesforce Platform, the world's most-trusted cloud platform, companies will be able to:

• Quickly build and deploy branded communities within minutes, all with the trust and private sharing model of the Salesforce Platform;
• Move seamlessly across multiple communities with a single identity; and,
• Scale instantly to support communities of all sizes - from a few people to communities with millions of members.

Accelerating the Social Enterprise Transformation
The number of social networking users has surpassed e-mail users. Nearly a quarter of all time spent online is spent on social networks like Facebook. People access the Internet more from mobile devices than from desktops. Salesforce.com is helping companies meet the challenge of this social revolution with its social enterprise solution. By providing new and more powerful ways for companies to connect with their customers and partners, the introduction of Salesforce Communities will continue to accelerate the industry's transformation to the social enterprise.

Pricing and Availability

• Salesforce Communities is currently scheduled to be available in limited pilot in fall 2012.
• Salesforce Communities is currently scheduled to be generally available the second half of 2013.
• Pricing of Salesforce Communities will be announced at general availability.

Additional Resources:

• Like salesforce.com on Facebook: http://facebook.com/salesforce
• Follow @Salesforce on Twitter
• For more information on Salesforce Communities, please visit: http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/communities/

Tweet This:

• Click to Tweet: Extend your #social transformation to customers and partners with private social communities @Salesforce Communities

About Salesforce.com
With more than 100,000 customers, salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company that is leading the shift to the social enterprise. Social enterprises leverage social, mobile and open cloud technologies to put customers at the heart of their business. Based on salesforce.com's real-time, multitenant architecture, the company's platform and application services allow customers to:

• Create employee social networks with Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Rypple and Salesforce Force.com.
• Develop customer social networks with the Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Data.com, Salesforce Service Cloud, and Salesforce Site.com.
• Connect with customers on public social networks with Salesforce Heroku, Salesforce Radian6.
• Empower small business to become social enterprises with Salesforce Desk.com and Salesforce Do.com.
• Extend a company's social enterprise with apps from the leading enterprise app marketplace, AppExchange.
• Run apps on Database.com, the first social enterprise database.

Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM." For more information please visit http://salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

©2012 salesforce.com, inc.  All rights reserved. Salesforce.com, Salesforce, Chatter, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Radian6, Jigsaw, AppExchange, Force.com, Heroku, and all associated logos are trademarks of salesforce.com, inc. in the United States and other countries. Salesforce.com offers its Siteforce products and services in Germany under the Force.com Sites trademark. Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.  Other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE salesforce.com