Netsuite Looking to Steal Salesforce Customers

Reuters is reporting that Netsuite is offering 50% discounts and up to 100 free hours of training and integration time for customers willing to dump Salesforce.com in favor of Netsuite.  In this down economy pricing is expected to play a bigger role in product selection and Salesforce will likely face some challenges in the coming months.

Salesforce.com spokesman Bruce Francis declined comment but chief financial officer Graham Smith recently told investors that he expected “much more aggressive pricing” from rivals, causing the stock to fall more than 25% in the past week.

Get Salesforce.com Certified

Salesforce.com has announced a certification program along with a roadshow where you can get a refresher before you take an exam.  Roadshow loacations include San Mateo CA, Atlanta, Chicago, Washington DC, and New York City.  Its free if you’ve had the admin 201 or 301 or a very reasonable $99 if you haven’t.  Looks like the normal price will be $200.

Find out more information here.

Benioff on Fortune

you can check out a new video interview with Marc Benioff on Fortune:

http://money.cnn.com/video/ft/#/video/fortune/2008/07/23/fortune.brainstorm.lashinsky.benioff.fortune

Schmidt on Salesforce Partnership

from alwayson.goingon.com

Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks about the new partnership with Salesforce.

Salesforce for Google Apps Announced Today

There’s already been some coverage on the topic from Techcrunch, Mashable, and SalesforceWatch as well as on the official Salesforce Blog so I won’t rehash that here.  There will be a live webcast of the announcement at 3pm EST / 12pm PST that you can watch here, and in the meantime you can check out the quick videos on the basic capabilities:

ZD Net blogger Joshua Greenbaum has been skeptical since the start, claiming that Google’s terms of service make it nearly impossible for corporations to take any product integrations seriously.  Since my company already uses Google to host our corporate mail, having some of this new functionality certainly won’t hurt even if it doesn’t live up to the hype.

Oracle to buy Salesforce.com?

Former FT reporter Tom Foremski is reporting for SiliconValleyWatcher that Salesforce has been shopping itself to Oracle for $75 a share or around $9 billion.  He points out several reasons why the deal would be good for Oracle, one of which is that Benioff could take over for his former boss Larry Ellison when he elects to retire.

Marc Benioff Named as 1 of 10 Most Influential Leaders in Business

Tech Republic has recently named Marc Benioff as one of the most influential leaders in business. Also on the list are Benioff’s pal John Chambers of Cisco and his old boss Larry Ellison from Oracle. Benioff came in at number 9, you can find the full list here.

Salesforce.com Rival Buys Business Objects

Salesforce Rival SAP has announced a $6.3 billion buyout of Business Objects.  It will be interesting to see how this will impact the products they have integrated into the Salesforce appexchange, namely crystal reports.  One has to think they will cut off ties with Salesforce and incorporate the Business Objects products into their recently announced on demand CRM product.

Salesforce AppBar vs. Firefox Plugin

I’ve been using the Salesforce Firefox Plugin for more than a year now and its been absolutely fantastic. I was just browsing some applications on the exchange and noticed a listing for The AppBar, which is a browser toolbar specifically for Salesforce.com. I’m not normally a fan of browser toolbars simply because of the amount of space they take up, but I think this one might really be a winner for Salesforce users.

The Firefox Plugin is really simple – once installed it adds a searchbox inside your browser and lets you perform an advanced search across any object in your organization. It actually works better than the default search on the homepage since it uses the “advanced” search, not a standard search.

The new Appbar developed by 3 Salesforce employees (although it doesn’t see to be an official Salesfoce app) goes way beyond the simple search functionality and creates a bunch of shortcuts into your application. When you complete a search you can choose from several options, even searching the appexchange. One of the big time savers should be the ability to directly link to add accounts, contacts, tasks, etc. The next big time saver are the views buttons. Each of these buttons lets you instantly link to any of your pre-formatted views, saving at least a few clicks each time.

I’m definitely going to try this out a bit longer to see if I hit any snags, but so far the only drawback seems to be the real estate I lose at the top of my browser.

I highly recommend trying out both of these if you haven’t already. If you’re stuck using IE as your only choice of browser, well then I really feel sorry for you….

Salesforce Content Demo

Salesforce.com recently added some more information about the new Salesforce Content product coming out soon (late Q4?). You can check it out at Salesforce.com/content or view the demo here. This product was developed after Salesforce acquired the 9 person, San Mateo based Koral.com

The features look really nice – making it much easier to organize, find, track, and use documents but once again I’m left feeling that this should be an included upgrade to the sub-par document system we currently have rather than paying an additional fee for an add on service. I would hope that at some point this is rolled into the service levels much like Google Adwords product was but I’m guessing that will depend on how high the demand for the product will be.

This is definitely something we would use and would make our work more efficient (the product really does look good), but as a small business owner the price we pay for Salesforce is already a significant part of our overhead and this could increase it by an additional 30% – 50% if the buzz I heard about pricing is true. I understand that they would need to limit bandwidth but perhaps this is a product that could be based on usage or total storage rather than the standard per user / per month pricing we’re used to.