2016 have started off, and I am optimistic on the fact that it awaits with some great news and updates from CRM industry. When we talk about CRM, the first name that comes to our mind is Salesforce.com which happens to be one of the most highly valued cloud computing company with a market capitalization of over USD 50 billion.
But before we look forward to what we can expect from Salesforce.com going forward in 2016, let us take a moment, to look back and find out the new things they gave us in 2015 and their major achievements.
- March 18 2015: Salesforce released its brand new Salesforce APP for Outlook. This Cloud based App, namely The Salesforce APP for Outlook will provide all the Salesforce user with a new way to use and experience Salesforce from within Outlook and Office 365. The APP was built with a goal of enabling the user to view Salesforce leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, cases and users in context of email — seamlessly inside of Outlook. However, at present The Salesforce APP for Outlook is in beta stage and requires a user to have Salesforce Enterprise Edition (Or Higher) Subscription to use this.
- July 23 2015: Salesforce, was positioned by Gartner, Inc. as a leader in its latest July 2015 Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation (SFA) Magic Quadrant. This is the ninth year at a stretch when Salesforce have achieved the top spot in this prestigious listing.
Gartner defines SFA as applications that
support the automation of sales activities, processes and administrative responsibilities for B2B organizations’ sales professionals. Core functionalities include account, contact and opportunity management. Additional add-on capabilities focus on improving the sales effectiveness of salespeople. Among those capabilities are sales configuration, guided selling, proposal generation and content management, and sales performance management support, including incentive compensation, quota, sales coaching and territory management.
- August 25 2015: On this day Salesforce announced the release of Salesforce Lightning, which have set a new standard for CRM’s altogether while delivering a greater level of customer success. Salesforce Lightning is an amalgamation of the new Lightning Experience along with the new Lightning Design System, Lightning Components and Lightning App Builder, which have expanded the Salesforce1 Platform by enabling anyone to easily create modern enterprise apps.
- September 16 2015: The biggest strategic announcement came from both Salesforce and Microsoft on Dreamforce 2015 on this day, when these two Organization declared their plans to expand their strategic partnership to connect Salesforce CRM to Microsoft Office apps and services. Both the Organization announced plans to bring out new solutions that would integrate Salesforce with Skype for Business, OneNote, Delve and Windows 10 to empower the users and the organizations to connect and collaborate with their customers in a more effective way.
So, in every sense we can say that in the year of 2015 Salesforce have not only come out with some great product upgrades but, they have also entered into some effective strategic partnerships with other leaders in the market to empower the users with more features under the roof of one single CRM platform.
For additional Information please refer to:
The 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SFA is available here
