Is That All We Want from Human!

Bei lei Hao

Professor Wang

MIS 220

Case study 2

March 1, 2011

Q1: “Salesforce.com is an innovative business model that offers CRM solutions in the form of software-as-service that is leased over the internet, instead of software bought and installed on machines locally” (key fact). There are several advantages of the software-as-service model as follow:

First, the on demand model has low prices and saves business investment compared with other software. For small sales and marketing teams, the subscriptions just start as low as $9 per month and per user. For large companies, the subscriptions start as $65 per user (key fact). No hardware needs to be purchased, installed, or maintained.

Second, salesforce.com is very convenient. Customers and users don’t need to install it, and businesses can choose what time they want via salesforce.com and log on any time and anywhere.

Third, because salesforce is a form of customer relationship management solution, it can help companies choose and manage the most valuable customer relationship effectively. Business can find a right direction and strategy to their sales and marketing functions (advantages and disadvantage).

Besides, the model provide 14 languages for users, it make salesforce.com more globalized.

As we can see, salesforce.com is becoming increasingly popular and successful. However, the disadvantages still exist.

First of all, users should pay attention to their safety and security, some data may be unreliably and doubtful, after all, some information and browsers are not so private. Then, because businesses are working online, if they lack communication and are not integrating their purpose to all departments, it will result in different departments contacting the same customers for the same purpose (advantage and disadvantage).

Q2: The first challenge is derived from increased competition, both from traditional industry leaders and challengers hoping to duplicate salesforce’s...