Salesforce.com Tries to Buy Its Way into Call Centers

Salesforce.com acquired InStranet, which makes software used in call centers, for $31.5 million, according to the company. It’s a sign that Salesforce.com is ramping up its efforts to establish itself as a rival to customer-management systems from Oracle and SAP.

Salesforce.com believes in no software. Unless its buying the software company.

Salesforce.com is known for its online sales-automation software. Sales people like it because they can sign up and start using it without having to get the tech department involved. While Salesforce.com likes to draw attention to its large corporate accounts, many of its customers are still departments or teams within businesses.

Salesforce.com has had a pretty easy time getting sales teams to buy its software. But call centers – the other principle buyers of customer-management software – are a different beast. Running a call center requires everyone to have access to the same information and hence use the same system. This has traditionally been a harder sell for Salesforce.com and it lags far behind Oracle’s Seibel and SAP when it comes to winning large call centers, Bruce Richardson, an analyst at AMR Research tells the Business Technology Blog.

InStranet makes software that call centers use to organize and find customer information. Bruce Francis, Salesforce.com’s vice president of corporate strategy, tells us that InStranet’s technology finds more relevant product and customer information than any other product out there – which of course he would say. He says that adding InStranet’s technology to Salesforce.com’s current call-center software should help “get us into large call centers.”

One ironic note: InStranet’s software is “on-premise,” meaning that businesses install it on tech equipment that they own and operate. Salesforce.com’s whole spiel is that software delivered this way isn’t as good as software that workers access over the Internet through a Web browser. In an attempt to do away with the apparent contradiction, Salesforce.com will rewrite InStranet’s software so that it runs online. But that project won’t be complete until sometime during Salesforce.com’s 2010 fiscal year, which begins in February, Francis says.

-Ben Worthen

Image: Salesforce.com

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