Dell, Salesforce Buddy Up For Cloud Offerings

Dell and Salesforce.com are hoping to remove the uncertainty felt by small and medium businesses looking for CRM applications to be delivered via the cloud, after announcing a number of certified solutions.

The companies said the joint offerings require no hardware or software to install or maintain, and mid market companies will be able to subscribe to the service starting from $9 (£5.68) per user per month.

The offerings include Contact Manager Edition, which works with any email application and provides a cloud-based contact management application for 1-2 users to store contacts, track customers, run activity reports and manage tasks.

A free six-month subscription is available as an exclusive to customers of Dell Vostro laptops and desktops.

Dell and Salesforce are also rolling out Group Edition, which provides basic CRM for small groups up to five users. Group Edition features Salesforce for Google AdWords, and includes all the Contact Manager features and also allows users to track sales opportunities, run sales reports and real-time dashboards.

“Dell and Salesforce.com are providing customers with an integrated and proven solution that we have been testing extensively in our own organisations,” said Dell’s president of global small and medium-sized business operations, Steve Felice. “Today, salesforce.com runs its data centres 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 said.

The companies are also reaching out to SMBs through Dell Integration Services, available with Salesforce Enterprise Edition. This offering includes the Dell Integration Appliance, an out-of-the-box Salesforce CRM integrated solution provides data cleansing and migration tools, along with a library of pre-built integration templates for connecting commercial software-as-a-service products, a virtual integration appliance and cloud integration service.

According to analyst firm Gartner, SaaS-based software models will represent the area of growth for applications over the next five years for mid-size businesses, anticipating a compound annual growth rate of 29.1 percent through 2013.

Dell and Salesforce.com claim their partnership would allow small and medium businesses in the United States to manage their people and processes more efficiently by deploying CRM across their businesses.

“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 of marketing and alliances for Salesforce.com. “Working with Dell will help accelerate the adoption of cloud computing by SMBs worldwide.”