There has been a lot of talk about Software as a Service and one of the poster children in this space has been SalesForce.com, But in a recent note published on June 22, analysts from JMP Securities LLC suggested that a deployment of CRM software from San Francisco-based Salesforce.com Inc. had been temporarily delayed. Salesforce.com signed a deal with Cisco during the second half of 2004 that called for an initial rollout of up to 2,000 seats and a later installation of as many as 10,000 seats by June 2005, according to the JMP Securities report.

It is beleived that end-user resistance and integration challenges forced the deal to be renegotiated so that the rollout is staggered.Completion is now set for March 2006.

The JMP analysts said their "due diligence" suggests Cisco's end users have been slow to embrace the system because it doesn't support desirable sales tools such as territory management, advanced account hierarchies and forecasting. IT staff at Cisco are also struggling to link the Salesforce.com software with those tools and are questioning the wisdom of relying so heavily on a customized hosted application.

Another analyst raised questions about Salesforce.com's ability to support deployments of 2,000 seats or more, even if the vendor was successful at delivering rapid rollouts and return on investment at small and midsize companies. "There's nothing wrong with the platform, but it's not proven that it's a CRM solution that scales," said Rebecca Wettemann., analyst at Nucleus Research Inc. in Wellesley, Mass. Her opinion was based on a survey of 29 Salesforce.com customers.

Source: Computer World

Prashanth RaiTag(s): CRM, SAAS