Jeremy Cooper, VP, Marketing , Salesforce on Latest CRM solutions offerings, future plans and much m

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Being the Vice President of Marketing for Asia Pacific, Jeremy Cooper oversees the development and execution of salesforce.coms regional market development strategy in the companys fastest growing region worldwide.

In an interaction with Jalaj Roy Choudhury, Jeremy provided an insight to Salesforces latest CRM solutions offerings, about segments targeted by the Company, Companys future plans and much more. Following are the excerpts.

ITVN: Kindly shed some light on Salesforce CRM solutions that you are offering?

JC: Our portfolio of Salesforce CRM applications has revolutionized the way companies collaborate and communicate with their customers across functions like sales, marketing and service. Most companies do not have the luxury invest and make large capital purchases such as for data centers, hardware, and business software applications. Instead, they are turning to Cloud Computing, which requires no capital investments, and follows

a pay-as-you-go subscription model for enterprise applications. Companies like salesforce.com are leading the way with cloud applications for CRM and custom applications that are developed on the Force.com platform.

We have 3 \\\"clouds\\\" that we offer to customers: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Custom Cloud.

Sales Cloud

The Sales Cloud delivers the next generation of collaboration between sales and marketing across the enterprise. When sales, marketing and partner organizations collaborate, everyone is connected to the best information, best content, best strategies and best practices across the entire enterprise - helping companies close more deals and grow their business. The Sales Cloud gives business users the ability to tightly manage and integrate their sales process and marketing spend. Best of all it\\\'s all delivered in the cloud on the Force.com platform, so there is no hardware, software or datacenter equipment to purchase

or maintain.

Service Cloud

The Service Cloud transforms customer service through the power of Cloud Computing. It combines traditional customer service channels like phone, email and chat with industry leading Cloud Computing services like Google, Facebook and Twitter to capture every conversation and leverage every community expert in the Cloud. By capturing all of these conversations in one central location, the Service Cloud helps companies deliver the expertise of the community to customers, agents and partners regardless of location or device - ensuring that the quality of customer service is consistent across every channel.

Custom Cloud - Force.com

Force.com is the fastest platform for building and deploying enterprise business applications that run in the cloud. Unlike a stack of disparate client/server hardware and software products, Force.com unifies the development and deployment model from the database to the devic

e, allowing developers to easily build applications and then instantly deploy them on salesforce.com trusted global infrastructure. Customers have built more than 135,000 custom applications on Force.com including all kinds of business applications from supply chain management to compliance tracking, brand management, accounts receivable, claims processing applications and much more.

Coming soon this year is our Collaboration Cloud - Chatter. As both a collaboration application and a platform for building social Cloud Computing applications, Chatter helps customers connect and share information securely all in real time. In the Collaboration Cloud, customers can stay on top of everything that\\\'s happening in their company with real-time updates on people, groups, documents, and application data. Customers can find experts and discover new information in the Chatter real-time feed. And all of this will fuel better-and faster-business decisions.

ITVN: To

what extent salesforce CRM helps in minimising time and resource investment in IT and helps in Streamlining sales and marketing processes?

JC : Small companies can benefit a great deal from the use of technology but often don\\\'t want to invite the extra cost or management headache in-house and as such hold back from investing in tools that could transform their business. Often that reticence is reinforced by experiences of buying technology that hasn\\\'t delivered the expected value.

A first major benefit to Cloud Computing is that the need for infrastructure and therefore upfront capital expense is greatly reduced. To run business applications many companies would previously have needed high-spec PCs and servers running the applications in-house. Internal networks would also need investment and management. However, Cloud applications require no more infrastructure than an Internet connection and can even work wirelessly on devices such as iPhones and

BlackBerrys.

In addition, with Cloud Computing small businesses do not have to pay the maintenance streams they incur with legacy client vendors that seldom offer innovation. Cloud Computing applications and platforms ensure that innovation is constantly delivered at affordable operating expenses, a benefit that is increasingly important in challenging times.

Speed is also a concern to small companies, especially when it comes to reacting quickly to opportunity or obstacle. Through Cloud Computing, speed to deployment can in theory be as quick as signing up for any service online. It certainly need not take months of installing and configuring software as is often the case with traditional, legacy on-premise software. Real-time multitenant Cloud Computing offers small companies the critical advantage of being nimble and quick to respond.

Also, because software delivered as a service - in the Cloud - can be switched off as easily as it is swi

tched on, it means service providers are perpetually accountable and must continually deliver service and support.

ITVN: What are the security measures adopted by the company to ensure privacy and safety of customers\\\' data?

JC : One of the major benefits of security in a multi-tenant Cloud like salesforce.com is that all customers benefit from the same rigorous security standards set by some of the most security conscious organizations in the world like Citibank, Japan Post, Symantec, and many public sector organizations. Every customer benefits from our efforts to exceed those standards. Salesforce.com has also received formal certifications like the SAS70 Type II and ISO 27001.

ITVN: How do you see the potential of Indian market? Is the market saturated or wide open for new opportunities?

JC : The beauty of cloud computing is that it makes world class enterprise applications available to both small and large organizat

ions, from one user to more than 100,000 users. There\\\'s a significant amount of interest in India from customers of all sizes who are looking to the public cloud as a way to rationalize the cost of their existing IT infrastructure, but also as a means to respond faster to market requirements with innovative applications and services.

ITVN: What are the segments that you are targeting for your products?

JC : We see a huge market potential in India. Cloud computing has witnessed quick adoption by product and service companies in the banking, finance and healthcare verticals. Other verticals like IT, BPO, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, government and education are also embracing this model.

ITVN: What are your future plans?

JC : We recently announced growth in our India customer base by 42%, outpacing the company\\\'s growth in the Asia Pacific region during its full fiscal year ended January 31, 2010. We will continue to bui

ld a business that focuses around customer success. That includes strategic partners - stay tuned for new announcements in the coming weeks.

We are bullish about India\\\'s appetite for running and developing enterprise applications in the Cloud. We intend to increase our presence in India to capitalize on pent up demand from small and large enterprises looking for enterprise class CRM that can be implemented in days or weeks, versus months or years.

We also see an opportunity to work more with developers in India. People are often surprised to hear that we have 36,000 independent developers in India developing applications on Force.com, our development platform. Force.com has created an explosion of creativity and diversity in the developer community and we believe we\\\'re going to see more innovations coming from India in the next few years.