Salesforce made a purchase recently of another company, and while that is often not something overly new in Silicon Valley, this latest purchase had the mamoth pricetage of USD $2.8B which is one major credit card debt to rack up, not that Salesforce is without the means to cover such a purchase. So for the remainder of the year, they will be doing a lot to wrap up the deal, integrate the current staff and activities and certainly looking to take the new capabilities out for a spin.
In terms of offerings to the market, Salesforce has been a major disruptor from their humble beginnings to being a major force in CRM tools. Rightly so as well because they are very easy to use, the products are easy to work with and with their cloud capabilities the offering of speed when using products like SalesforceIQ are simply astounding. There are of course many facets to Salesforce’s products beyond just CRM and their marketing cloud platform can get a business up and running with a new marketing platform (including web pages, online forms, surveys and analytics) in a matter of weeks. You can hire Brisbane web designer from here!
While not a full content management system for your website, it certainly is not too far from being the full set of tools needed for digital and they are ready to be able to do this in a very big way. In short, with this purchase, Salesforce is set to become the dominating player in this space if they are able to integrate more of the CRM and Marketing platforms with the eCommerce platforms of Demandware. With Salesforce’s applications in the cloud, clients can get access to a range of tools and applications such as data management, reporting, marketing and CRM all of which can be either used out of the box, or developed on take on further functions particular to a business and linking these applications to thier marketplace brings an astonishing range of further possibilities.
Demandware on the other hand offers an eCommerce platform that has inbuilt capabilities for web, mobile and point of sale solutions with online shopping carts built in to boot. They are highly customisable (and easy to manage) and provide the full suite of online commerce platforms. On a further note, the client list of those that are using the Demandware platform exceeds more than 300 brand-name businesses which is sure to be enviable with brands like Addidas, L’Oreal and Marks & Spencer to name just a few.
Both companies have the Silicon Valley DNA built in to their teams, so there is likely a good cultural fit between the two organisations. There is the challenge of matching the pricing models, where Demandware takes a cut on products and services sold through its applications and this would likely need some re-engineering to be packaged and offered with the other products, or at least some massaging.
Joined together, Saleforce has truly arrived and is set to become the dominating player in this space and is positioned to knock IBM off the top with their agility and flexibility. Major Australian online retailers such as Myer are already using the Salesforce CRM and Marketing platforms, and this new combination brings Salesforce in a position to offer eCommerce as well to their existing customers with a viable end-to-end platform to deliver personalised customer experiences. These types of experiences can be tailored by business folk and the business analysts in product and marketing teams rather than needing solid developers at every turn to get things done.
