Dreamforce: the sociable Salesforce.com partners get to work

With the social enterprise firmly established as the central agenda item at Dreamforce, other Cloud firms have been shoring up their own offerings to map onto the social theme.

HR Cloud firm Workday confirmed it will deliver two new offerings that will extend data from Workday through Salesforce.com's social, mobile and open technologies. The first will enable Workday data to be integrated into Salesforce Chatter to enable users secretly to share, collaborate and act upon workforce data in real-time.

The integration pushes traditional Workday business processes, such as approval requests, into a real-time social stream. It also allows real-time enterprise-wide collaboration on topics that cross traditional departmental barriers, such as sales cycles, personnel, payroll, budgeting and spend on company initiatives.

The second offering allows Workday customers, partners and developers to securely pull workforce data residing within their Workday application into Force.com to build custom apps.

Field service firm ServiceMax announced that its newly released, ServiceMax Summer '11 is powered by Service Flow Manager (SFM), which the firm is pitching as a leap forward in field service technology.

With SFM, service organizations can integrate their business processes directly into ServiceMax via a drag and drop interface, ensuring field technicians provide a consistent level of service and allowing processes to be easily adapted as business needs change. ServiceMax says SFM can be configured on the fly in a matter of hours and instantly extended to all instances of ServiceMax within the organisation.

Also part of ServiceMax Summer '11 is the release of the new ServiceMax for iPad 2, available soon in the Apple App Store., which offers crucial field-based functionality like signature capture, time and expense tracking, and parts management. ServiceMax for iPad 2 is currently in beta, and will be generally available in September. ServiceMax for iPad 2 allows field technicians to tap the collective expertise of their entire organisation in real-time via Salesforce.com's Chatter or the fully integrated FaceTime video application.

Kevin Rusin, CFO of ServiceMax customer McKinley Equipment, said:

“With ServiceMax for iPad, the role of our workers in the field will extend far beyond merely repairing equipment. They will be armed with a tool that will allow us to expand the reach of our company expertise to our entire customer base, and make field service a strategic aspect of our business growth. ”

Data provider Dun & Bradstreet is teaming up with Salesforce.com to deliver Data.com, a Cloud-based warehouse of contact information, accessible via Salesforce CRM.

Designed to power the social enterprise by enabling businesses to access a unified source of data and build out complete social customer profiles, Data.com will build on Salesforce.com’s previous acquisition of Jigsaw, a crowdsourcing-based contact data service which keeps records clean.

Dun & Bradstreet will provide company information on 200 million global businesses, with Data.com integrating this information with Jigsaw to deliver company and contact data in the Cloud, directly within Salesforce CRM.

According to Salesforce.com, Data.com will “enable market segmentation and targeting for sales and marketing professionals to execute complex account plans and custom marketing campaigns”. This will create a highly targeted pipeline directly within Salesforce CRM,

Mary Wardley, program vice president, CRM Applications at IDC, said:

“The impact of poor data can have negative ramifications through entire business processes. This announcement from Salesforce.com and D&B simplifies the process of gathering quality company information, allowing businesses to bolster their effectiveness and improve productivity across sales and marketing. ”

Data.com is available immediately with contact information from Jigsaw. Company information from D&B is currently expected to be available later this year with pricing and packaging announced at that time.

Revenue Performance Management specialist Eloqua has launched a new suite of social media applications for the company’s marketing automation platform that allow B2B marketers to consider an individual’s social persona when capturing, tracking and scoring leads.

The social media suite allows B2B marketers to capture, track and score leads over social channels offering an overview of buyers’ social activity, network of peers and level of influence. Eloqua users can now incorporate social media into the entire revenue cycle, from lead capture through close.

The release consists of four components that the vendor says provide Eloqua users with the ability to improve form conversions, increase campaign reach, monitor real-time conversations, and even score leads – all based on a prospect’s social media behaviours.

New features of the Social Media Suite include klout segmentation, which enables Eloqua to score leads based on their social activity and social sign-on, which gives visitors a one-click option for form completion and sign-on from LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter accounts. Other new features include twitter for sales, which publishes a live feed of a prospect’s most recent tweets in the Eloqua Profiler dashboard and social sharing tools to facilitate the spread of promotions by allowing recipients to share relevant campaigns across their social graph.

Joe Payne, CEO of Eloquam, said in today’s market, getting a full view of the buyer required understanding that went beyond a prospect’s role and function:

“It requires insight into what content they create, which social channels they participate in, and who they trust and influence. You need to see and participate in the conversations buyers are conducting with their industry because it finally gives marketers the ability to incorporate social media at all stages of the buying process. ”

Future versions will enable marketers to use a “drag and drop” interface to incorporate “social currency” icons, such as Facebook “Likes” and Google “+1” directly into landing pages, the company said.