Dell expands SME cloud offering

cloud customer relationship management (CRM) service with the addition of Salesforce.com's Service Cloud customer service software, the companies announced on Wednesday, PCWorld reports.

The service joins Salesforce.com's core CRM sales application in Dell's Cloud Business Applications offering, which also incorporates the Boomi integration framework for connecting the software to on-premise systems or other cloud services.

A key to Dell's cloud strategy - and its answer to why a company would sign on with Dell rather than go direct to Salesforce.com, not exactly a fly-by-night vendor itself - is its belief that cloud adoption is moving rapidly into the mainstream, Information Week says.

While trailblazers and SMEs with particularly high-tech IQs might have no issue buying and managing cloud applications a la carte, Dell thinks the mainstream wants all-in-one platforms from a single vendor. While the company will continue adding applications over time, it's not interested in becoming an app store.

"This is not a marketplace," Bill Odell, senior director of SME Dell Cloud Solutions Marketing, said. "This is not going to be an app exchange where we're going to have thousands of applications."

Dell VP and GM Paulette Altmaier explained further in a blog post that SME users “can maintain top-notch customer service interactions across every service channel and maximise the value of existing applications in their IT infrastructure, leveraging data streams critical to servicing their customers”, ZDNet reveals.

More specifically, customers who subscribe to this offering should be able to accomplish more tasks, such as being able to identify early indicators of customer dissatisfaction in business systems, view complete customer case details, and share data between the Service Cloud and bug tracking systems for responding faster to product issues.