TEC’s recent article Rootstock Software Steps Out on Force.com outlined the genesis of Rootstock Software and its cloud-based ERP offering. Rootstock Software and FinancialForce.com (a joint venture between UNIT4 and salesforce.com) announced a partnership earlier in the year to deliver a comprehensive manufacturing and accounting solution on Force.com. Rootstock is vying for its ERP solution to become the standard for manufacturing ERP solutions in the cloud, as discussed in the aforementioned recent blogpost all about Rootstock, looking at the background and capabilities of the Force.com-fortified solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Also today at Dreamforce, Salesforce announced Work.com, “a social performance management platform that helps companies align, motivate, and drive performance.” Salesforce partners with Workday, an important player in the HCM market, to offer functionalities meant to support and motivate sales and service teams. The system facilitates the communication and instant feedback between employees that work toward achieving common goals. In addition, employee performance can be easily assessed and rewarded. Perhaps the next development from Salesforce will be the integration of a social recruiting tool.

Today at Dreamforce Salesforce introduced the Marketing Cloud. The platform offers several capabilities that appear to be handy for marketers. Social listening enables users to gain real-time insight into more than 400 million social sources. Social content facilitates the publishing of content on venues that are close to customers (social networks, mobile apps, or Web sites). Social engagement allows for multichannel communication with customers. Social advertising enables marketing teams to organize and deliver social ad campaigns. Social workflow and automation uses analytics to filter and organize the large mass of conversations occurring simultaneously. Track campaign ROI displays real-time feedback regarding the profitability of campaigns.

Today, at Dreamforce, Infor announced the launch of Inforce Marketing, a marketing automation system developed on the Salesforce Platform. Some of the new functionality includes an improved visibility over leads, costs, results, and revenues; multi-channel support for campaigns that can include e-mail, direct mail, social media, and telemarketing; lead validation and assessment; and reporting and analysis tools that plan, manage, and monitor revenue objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs) across each stage of the revenue cycle. I would be interested to know how Infor plans to manage Inforce and Epiphany (its other CRM solution) in parallel.