Article 3: Dell and salesforce.com Launch Cloud Compting Offerings for SMBs

Hmmm….is this a case of beauty and the beast? That is – on-premises paradigms marrying cloud-based solutions? The Odd Couple redux? Time will tell for sure but in the “truth is stranger than fiction department” I present to you BREAKING NEWS from Dell and salesforce.com. The net-net is that Dell is offering salesforce “certified” solutions for small and medium businesses (SMBs). As you know, I am a huge fan of CRM and the power of sales force management, so this news was especially interesting to me and I felt a strong need to share it.

The big question of the day: how will the SMB channel partner make money from this endeavor?

cheers…harrybbbb

Dell and salesforce.com Launch Cloud Computing Offerings for SMBs

ROUND ROCK, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced the availability of new certified Dell-salesforce.com solutions, joint offerings for small and medium businesses (SMBs), that deliver customer relationship management (CRM) applications via the cloud.

These solutions will allow small and medium businesses in the United States to manage their people and processes more efficiently by deploying sales force automation and CRM across their businesses. The joint offerings require no incremental hardware or software to install or maintain, and customers will be able to manage all their customer information, activities, and conversations, with subscription based pricing starting from $9 per user per month. SMBs can get started today at http://www.dell.com/crm.

“Dell and salesforce.com are providing customers with an integrated and proven solution that we have been testing extensively in our own organizations,” said Steve Felice, president of Dell’s global small and medium-sized business operations. “Today, salesforce.com runs its datacenters and PCs on Dell equipment and Dell has integrated Salesforce CRM with our on-premise applications using Dell’s PowerEdge servers and Dell Integration Services,” he added.

“Our work with Dell opens up a whole new world for small and mid-sized businesses, empowering them to harness the power of cloud computing without the cost and complexity of managing infrastructure,” said George Hu, executive vice president, marketing and alliances, salesforce.com. “Working with Dell will help accelerate the adoption of cloud computing by SMBs worldwide.”

According to technology analyst firm Gartner, SaaS-based software models will represent the area of growth for applications over the next five years for midsize businesses, anticipating a compound annual growth rate of 29.1% through 2013 in North America*. The certified Dell-salesforce.com solution addresses critical integration issues between applications, thereby reducing IT costs for SMBs.

For growing businesses with more complex IT environments, the Dell–salesforce.com solutions also offer the expertise of Dell Integration Services, which provide fixed low cost, quick migration and integration for businesses with the salesforce.com Sales Cloud.

This out-of-the-box integration solution for SMBs was born and road-tested by Dell’s SMB team within the company, and helps SMBs easily and painlessly integrating cloud technology into their IT environments without disrupting their business processes.

SMB Success in the Cloud with Dell and salesforce.com – How it Works

Joint Dell and salesforce.com sales teams will introduce these solutions to existing and prospective small and medium customers, with salesforce.com providing the CRM solution and Dell providing integration and migration services, where needed.

The Dell–salesforce.com offerings include:

• Salesforce Contact Manager Edition – Contact Manager Edition works with any email application including Outlook and Gmail, and provides a cloud-based contact management application for 1-2 users to store contacts, track customers, run activity reports, manage tasks and meetings, and more. A free six month subscription to Contact Manager Edition is available as an exclusive to customers of Dell Vostro laptops and desktops.
• Salesforce Group Edition – Group Edition provides basic CRM for small groups up to five users. Group Edition features Salesforce for Google AdWords, includes all the Contact Manager features and also allows users to track sales opportunities, run sales reports and real-time dashboards.
• Salesforce Professional Edition – delivers a complete picture of your customer interactions. It includes everything in Group Edition plus no user limit, reports and analytics, custom dashboard, sales forecasting, mobile access, and much more.
• Salesforce Enterprise Edition – Enterprise Edition provides everything in Professional Edition, plus workflow and approvals, advanced security, territory management, offline access and more, so users can customize and integrate CRM for the specific needs of their company.

The Dell–salesforce.com solutions also offer the expertise of Dell Integration Services, which provide fixed low-cost, quick, data migration and integration for businesses. Dell Integration Services are available with Salesforce Enterprise Edition for IT staff that may lack the budget or expertise to integrate existing on-premise data from an Oracle, MySQL or homegrown database with cloud computing applications such as Salesforce CRM. Dell Integration Services include:

• Dell Integration Appliance – Tested and implemented internally by Dell’s team on the company’s award winning PowerEdge servers, this out-of-the-box Salesforce CRM integrated solution provides data cleansing and migration tools, along with a library of prebuilt integration templates for connecting many commercial software-as-a-service products.
• Virtual Integration Appliance – Enables users to deploy integration appliance functionality on any hardware in their virtualized environment.
• Cloud Integration Service – Ideal for integrating Salesforce CRM with other cloud computing applications.

Organizations interested in these solutions can visit http://www.dell.com/crm. The site also has more information about Salesforce CRM and Dell Integration Services along with a free trial subscription of Salesforce CRM for Dell SMB customers.

*Source: Gartner Inc., 1 May 2009, Dataquest Insight: Top 10 Practices for Selling to SMBs in Any Economy, Joslyn Faust.

Join Dell, salesforce.com and customer SPS Commerce for a free joint Webinar on November 4, 2009 from 10 a.m. – 11 a.m. PT to showcase the benefits of Dell Salesforce Certified Solutions.