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Salesforce stacks the cloud to ease operations

ZDNet Senior Editor Sam Diaz shares his views on Saleforce.com’s cloud strategy. He says its new upgrade, Summer '09, is helping customers be more flexible by adding real-time features.

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Speaker: Salesforce.com has been upping its cloud-based game lately, adding features and services that play on the overall theme of real time. The company's most recent announcement, an upgrade called "Summer '09," really didn't contain any sort of earth-shattering new features, but instead enhanced the tools that customers use daily. Or sure, new charts that allow customers to examine real time data points will provide valuable insight for executives, and the ability to share information with vendors and partners from inside the sales force cloud can help streamline business operations. What's powerful is that the updates are provided to the customer in real time, which allows the flexibility to keep up with today's changing business environment. Earlier this year, the company rolled out a Twitter application that allows businesses to monitor, again in real time, the chatter on Twitter that relates to the companies brand or products. Some may bash Twitter as being nothing more than a noisy, online fad, but for the moment, it's one of the hottest communication tools on the web. Salesforce customers didn't have to ask for the Twitter upgrade, it just appeared one day. And, down the road, if Twitter loses its luster and becomes an outdated tool, Salesforce can simply pull the app, in real time, without asking the customer to download and install an update. As businesses weigh the pros and cons of adopting a larger cloud strategy, Salesforce.com keeps adding tools, in real time, that makes that decision that much more of a no-brainer.

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