Dell announces agreement with cloud computing service provider Salesforce

Dell announced a sales agreement with cloud computing service provider Salesforce in October, and the two sides have cooperated to test the water enterprise Service market.

Under the agreement of both parties, Dell's new corporate customer will receive a 6-month free probationary period for the Salesforce Contact management tool, Salesforce 5 USD per month for the service normally charged. If you pay 40 dollars a month, Dell will also help small businesses integrate Salesforce products into software systems. "We offer a comprehensive service at a price," said Marc Stein, head of cloud computing strategy at Dell, Mark Stern. ”

Salesforce is also working with Google. Two companies offer a variety of integrated products, such as Google Apps, which support documentation, contacts, and calendar information. Salesforce's programming language force.com is also a powerful contender for Microsoft. NET products.

Dell and Salesforce have formed an unlikely alliance-upgrading CRM for Salesforce Core SMB (SGT and medium-sized businesses, SME) users This kind of software that relies on product mix is not a desirable mode of operation for Salesforce to provide customized service on demand.

The two companies that are themselves customers are going to collaborate in the SME market, with Salesforce software taking the lead, and Dell will provide hardware and services for the migration of local data, applications and Salesforce on-demand custom services.

SMEs often use a mid-range application to manage their clients ' resources, sometimes just their emails or spreadsheets, says Bruce Francis, vice president of the Salesforce business strategy. These companies are also likely to use the Intuit Company's QuickBooks, Microsoft's dynamic management tools, even their own development applications, or MySQL.

"We've found that sometimes when we start a sales process with a small business, it's email or spreadsheets that we need to fight against." The company is very excited when it finds everything is in order. So the real difficulty in the focus is clear and the actual size of the enterprise. He said.

Dell Integrated Services allows customers to continue to use their already licensed applications, consolidate data with Salesforce, and consolidate data in both directions, Dell's SME cloud strategy director Marc Stein said. For example, data that is readable when consolidated from QuickBooks to Slesforce and updated in Salesforce, while remaining in QuickBooks, is also updated synchronously.

By working with Salesforce, Dell is actually working with Google, and Microsoft is not in Dell's consideration.

A new opportunity for Salesforce

"No one understands the needs of SMEs better than Dell," Stein added. "Dell has a huge impact in the market and is a trustworthy supplier," he said. For Salesforce, this is a chance to find a new audience among Dell users. ”

Dell already has information about small and medium customers, each of whom pays 9 dollars a month.

This price can be used in one of the four versions of the contact Manager, which works with Outlook and Gmail, providing a cloud-based contacts management program for one or two users, tracking customers, conducting online reporting, managing tasks and meetings, and so on. Salesforce

There is also a group version for five groups of people to use, professional version can provide customer interaction, Enterprise Edition will include Professional Edition, but also can manage workflow approval, advanced security and Rights management and online access.