Salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) has been named the most innovative company in the United States for two consecutive years by Forbes magazine. No, however, it seems that they are interested in storing your corporate documents in something that can only be called already done by many others.
The innovation of which Forbes was speaking was as a seller of tools to help sales people make a better pitch to clients, and track businesses they already have made contact with in the past. However, CEO Marc Benioff has been looking to move out of this pigeon-hole and become more used by other departments in the companies whose salespeople already love the company.
Salesforce Files
The newest iteration of this strategy is Salesforce Files, that will allow for easy file sharing between colleagues in the same company.
This is by no means something new, rather Salesforce Files will face competition from cloud-based providers of the same service like Dropbox, Box, Microsoft and Google. Salesforce.com is clearly hoping that its work with corporations will entice businesses to view Salesforce Files as a more professional approach than, say Dropbox, whose customers are primarily individuals.
Nasi Jazayeri, a Salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) executive overseeing the file-sharing project, said its goal is not to compete with companies like Box. For one thing, the company doesn’t plan to sell Salesforce Files as a standalone product.
“This is the next-generation enterprise file system,” said Jazayeri, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce’s Chatter messaging service.
Not unlike Dropbox and others, Salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) files will allow users to drag documents into a folder on the desktop to save the material in the cloud without much in the way of muss nor fuss. From there users will be given a search tool to find corporate files and use its existing Chatter program to share that with colleagues working remotely by computer, smartphone, or tablet.
Salesforce Files is expected to launch on a large scale in February but the company presently have 50 of its customers test driving the platform today.
In a briefing this week, the company said about 50 Salesforce customers have been trying Salesforce Files, which is slated for a wider launch in February.
Salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE:CRM) is not looking for a standalone product but rather just an additional package to offer its customers.
“Everything we do is really to elevate our core product lines,” said Jazayeri.
No pricing information was available as of this afternoon.
