Salesforce forecasts a 'cloudy' Spring 09

Salesforce.com Spring 09 contains more than 50 updates

Salesforce.com has rolled out the latest version of its hosted customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

The company said that, while the Spring 09 version of the service will sport more than 50 updates, much of the attention has gone to the customer service and sales elements of the CRM offering.

The new 'service cloud' and 'sales cloud' services will beef up a CRM offering that the company considers to be of increasing importance.

Al Falcione, director of product marketing for Salesforce.com, said that managing and maintaining relationships with customers could be a deciding factor in whether companies can come out of the economic crisis.

"It is a big release for us," he said. "CRM has become more important than ever in the market."

In the 'service cloud', the company is hoping to increase the use of multiple web sources, such as search engines and social networking services, to provide customer service and support by way of built-in applications for the sites on the Salesforce CRM service.

This is aimed at easing reliance on call centres for customers and businesses, according to Falcione.

In the 'sales cloud', the company has taken a new approach to the way it allows users to organise and share data.

The new service will introduce the ability for sales people to search and tag presentations and multimedia files regarding a specific client or product, and then share the packaged materials on a single web site, thus removing the need to send large bundles of files to recipients and allowing multiple forms of content to be presented within a single URL.

Additionally, the Spring 09 release will offer the 'opportunity genius' feature, which categorises past and current business deals, allowing sales staff to compare notes and share ideas.

Salesforce hopes that the update will allow it to thrive in what chief executive Marc Benioff predicts to be a banner year for hosted services.

"This is the year of cloud computing for the CRM industry, and Salesforce.com is the undisputed leader," he said.

"Salesforce.com is helping companies grow their business without growing costs, by delivering a cloud computing solution for customer service and sales. "