salesforce case study 2

7/30/2019 Salesforce Case Study 2

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Robert Brown

MIS 220

Prof Wang

3/1/2011

Case Study #2

Q1: The advantages for salesforce.com vary in multiple ways. First off its as easy as

creating a facebook account. There is no hardware for subscribers to purchase, scale, and

maintain, no operating systems, database servers, or application servers to install, no

consultants and staff, and no expensive licensing and maintenance fees. (Laudon) Its accessible

not only on a web browser, but mobile via too. Salesforce.com solutions offer better scalability

than those provided by large venders. (Laudon)The disadvantages of salesforce.com are that its

overly simple user interface that is quickly outgrown by experienced users. Marketing

management functionality is extremely limited. Another on is SFDC points to partner

applications for this purpose which involves additional costs and vendor management. Alsocustomization toolkits can be cumbersome to use even too many seasoned administrators.

Dashboards may not reflect the application security for specific users without significant

administration efforts. (CRM Exposed) Lastly salesforce.com depends on other companies for

service use.

Q2: The challenges that salesfoorce.com face is that larger enterprise industry leaders

are competing against salesforce.com by replicating its success. (Laudon) Doing this could put

them out the race because these other industries can sell the products for cheaper prices.

These companies consist of Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle and even smaller ones such as NetSuite.

They have already rolled out subscriptions based versions ofsalesforce.coms CRM products.These are companies leading the service industries with more users and customers than

salesforce.com as it is and these companies could then take salesforce.coms customers.

Another challenge is to expand its business models into other areas. Salesforce.com is only

currently used by sales staff needing to keep track of leads and customer lists. (Laudon) A third

challenge is that subscribers depend on the service being available 24/7, but every now and

then outrages have occurred causing some companies rethink their dependency on software as

a service. Thomas Reuters is a company using salesforce.com. Even though they improved their

services and benefited from salesforce.com advantages, they did face some challenges when

merging sales teams. We worked out how to get a single sales process into the system, but at

the back end it was still separate, ex-Thomson or ex-Reuters processes. Also, we had to load

two sets of customers, accounts and contacts data into the system. There was deduplication,and cleaning that was challengingand were still doing that, said Spillane. (Nguyen) To meet

these challenges, salesforce is providing additional functionality through a partnership with

Google and more specifically Google Apps. Also it opened its Force.com application

development platform to other independent software developers and listed their programs on

its AppExchange. (Laudon)


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Q3: I believe that small businesses would benefit more than larger ones from salesforce.com.

Larger firms are already expanded across the world and different areas. A smaller firm is too

small to generate a wide variety of areas. As stated in the case study salesforce.com needs to

expand to fit the needs of larger areas. (Laudon) Due to the identical format of facebook,

salesforce.com can hold many users, but due to the small area thats enough to keep track of.

But when you get into to larger areas that couple of thousand can jump to millions and I dontthink salesforce.com can keep track of that many. Its just not known for a well-defined firm to

use salesforce.com. For example a company by the name of BigMachines launched its

BigMachines selling platform on salesforce.com using the ChatterExchange. (Wiegler) This is a

company that serves 90,000 users with only 200 companies. (BigMachines) This shows the rage

of the company and how salesforce.com could help them versus a company say like Deloitte

who has over 120,000 professionals, located in 200 cities, and in 140 countries.

Q4: The main factors you should consider when you take into account whether to use

salesforce.com are security, availability, and dependence. No one would want to put their trust

into a reference that is lacking these factors. This is one of salesforce.coms challenges,

depending on them to be open 24/7 with services. An incoming business would probably over

look your services if you lack these factors.

MIS in Action Questions

Q1: The top applications on AppExchange are Outlook Integration, Email Integration for

Salesforce, Vertical Response, and Conga Composer. Outlook Integration allows you to simplify

Email Integration for your users, view Salesforce data directly in Outlook, and create a new

Salesforce contact directly from an email. Email Integration helps automate the logging of all

inbound and outbound emails to leads, contacts, opportunities, and cases, automate the

creation of contacts and leads from your email stream with our new, patent-pending emailstab. Vertical Response allows customers to send emails and postcards using and opted-in

contacts list and for contacts to send targeted marketing messages. Conga Composer gives

customers availability to easily create proposals, contract, account plans, and or with a single

click of your mouse. (Salesforce.com)

Q2: From a regular college student, could a company run its entire business from

salesforce.com? I would say yes because salesforce.com has the necessities to run a business,

but then again I dont believe it would last. So in other words I would not recommend it

because as stated above salesforce.com still faces these challenges and has availability and

security problems. AppExchange also has the applications needed to run a business but thenagain its apart of salesforce.com. So you could do it if you are a company not looking for the

main factors.

Q3: I think the new and upcoming businesses are more likely to use AppExchange. This I

believes helps them get the market up and running more easily because they can rent all these

apps and software. After getting on track I believe most companies buy the necessities for their

business and then salesforce.com is put on the back burner. Its like a rocket ship, it needs the


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boosters to take off and then when it gets to where it needs to be it detaches them because it

no longer needs them.


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Works Cited

BigMachines. 2010. 1 March 2011 .

CRM Exposed. 2009. 28 February 2011 .

Laudon, Kenneth C. Laudon and Jane P. Management Information Systems: Managing The Digital Firm.

New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2010.

Nguyen, Anh. "Thomson Reuters merges sales teams using Salesforce.com." 28 September 2010.

ComputerworldUK: The Voice Of It Manangement. 28 February 2011

.

Salesforce.com. AppExchange. 2010. 1 March 2011 .

Wiegler, Will. CNBC First In Business Worldwide. 15 February 2011. 28 February 2011.

salesforce case study 2

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