Salesforce.com's front office suite play

ZDNet

Right now it is convenient for Salesforce.com to hammer home the ’social business’ play because that’s how it drives attention as the leader in that space. They also have the benefit of encouraging a large subset of otherwise under employed PR and marketing people to declare expertise in this field and so amplify the broader message. The projected numbers are impressive as well. From the Benioff conference call:

Gartner says that CRM is 15% of the purchase intention of global CIOs this year. That’s the       number one global purchasing intention.

While I am usually down on Gartner I’m not going to argue about that prediction for several reasons. It is sufficiently near term for there to be good reasons to assume they’re not far off the mark and from soundings in the market, CRM as a broad category within the ERP framework is still a big draw. There are other factors in play that reinforce this idea....

3. The explosive growth in demand at Appirio for applications that stitch together elements of the marketing online puzzle with Salesforce.com implies there is much experimentation going on...