Webcloud World

If you want to perform better with your customer relationship management, the fastest and easiest way is to choose and implement sales force automation tools, and lucky you, many are available “in the cloud”.

For Years, managing your customers required buying and hosting very expensive tools such as Siebel or Oracle, but today, whatever the size of you company may be, you will find powerfull services charged on a subscription basis. The market is so big and actors are so numerous that we won’t present every single web based CRM tools, but we highly recommend :

-For small companies : Highrise, which is a tool developped by the team behind the well-known Basecamp, and provides an accessible while powerfull customer relation management. Thanks to its API and some patnerships, Highrise can be integrated in many other services (email marketing, billing….).
- For big companies : Salesforce, which is the leader in the online customer management field thanks to its flexible development platform Force.com. Salesforce given its price and its complexity, should be adopted by pretty big companies in order to integrate it properly in the various departments.

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In just 2 days, the quiet OS Market has been shaked by two major announcements :

- Google will launch in the second semester of 2010 an OS named”Chrome OS”, which will run on X86 and ARM-based computers.
- Jolicloud, the French startup launched by Netvibes’ forme founder Tarik Krim, raised $4.2M from famous investors.

We can guess that the following months will be particularly hot among the OS’ market, since, besides those latest news, Apple and Microsoft are about to launch their new operating systems within the end of the year….

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• Nice timing: Netbook OS startup Jolicloud raises $4.2M (deals.venturebeat.com)
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Inspired by the Cable-TV market, Nimbus is about to launch its “cloud computer plans” , which give people access to a computer with web and desktop softwares for $19/month or even for free thanks to an ad-supported version of their offer. The offer is not, for sure, targeting hard core gamers (even if cloud computing could embrace gaming as soon as 2010) but it should suit to people surfing on the internet on a daily basis.

Discover Nimbus

“It’s time to stop thinking about these servers as being things for geeks and start thinking about them as things for people with ideas” said Dave Winer, when introducing EC2 for Poets, a step-by-step howto helping people setting up a server on Amazon cloud’s infrastructure EC2.

A must read for anybody willing to embrace cloud computing.

Read Dave Winer’s EC2 for Poets

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Presented during Demo 09, Appzero is an innovative solution enabling online services’ developers to easily deploy their software into the cloud (or any new environment) by packing a server application and all its components together. Once created, the “package” can be moved from one environement to another, by a simple drag and drop as shown in the video bellow :

Appzero Demo 09

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For those of you who couldn’t assist to the conference, you can watch the video highlights from the roundtables involving  Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff,  Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, Ning CEO Gina Bianchini and FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit.If you are interested in watching more, you will find the full event on Techcrunch.

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• “The Cloud Is The New Dotcom” (Video Highlights) (techcrunch.com)

To not loose ground to Salesforce’s CRM solution and Force.com platform, SAP announced the aquisition of Coghead, a PAAS provider in which SAP had previously invested and which was about to shut down.

Read the full story here :

• SAP Acquires Coghead’s Technology As It Looks Towards The Cloud (techcrunch.com)

The two giants have successively announced during the last 6 months a flurry of partnerships concerning the integration of their tools (even leading to rumors of a merger). Here is a brief overview of the products that are concerned by those partnerships and the impact they may have on clients.

Salesforce for  Google Adwords

Salesforce for Google Adwords enable companies to manage their Adwords’ marketing campaigns directly from within Salesforce.  Marketers and Deciders can then measure the exact return on investment on search marketing programs, linking  Adwords’ cost with lead and sales tracked within Salesforce with custom reports.

Click here to know more about Salesforce & Google Adwords

Salesforce for Google Apps

Salesforce for Google Apps make it  easy for users to  collaborate, and share business information between Salesforce and Google Products.

Google products, which are concerned by this integrated access are :

• Gmail
• Gtalk
• Google Calendar
• Google Doc
• Google Start Page

Click here to know more about Salesforce for Google Apps

Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs

This toolkit offers developers to have access to Google Data APIs  directly within the Force.com environment  in order to take advantage of Google tools among application hosted by Salesforce’s platform. The concerned APIs are :

• Google Documents API
• Google Calendar API
• Google Spreadsheet API
• Blogger API
• Contacts API
• Google Data Authentication

Click here to know more about Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs

Force.com for Google App Engine

Force.com for Google App Engine is a way to connect Google’s and Salesforce’s Cloud Platforms. Thanks to a Python library, Google App Engine developers are able to create apps with direct access to Force.com functionality through Force.com Web Services API.

Click here to know more about Force.com for Google App Engine

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One day before Apple’s keynote at Macworld (the latest), a rumor has spread over several blogs : capitalizing on the work made around MobileMe, Apple would announce an online version of iWork.

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The equivalent of Salesforce, for the supplier side (contrary to Salesforce’s tools, which tend to focus on prospects) just announced a Serie D funding of $7 Million to continue to grow in the supply chain area.
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