Dell, Salesforce shake hands on cloud

ROUND ROCK, TEXAS: Dell and salesforce.com, the enterprise cloud computing company, on Monday announced the availability of new certified Dell-salesforce.com solutions, joint offerings for small and medium businesses (SMBs), that deliver customer relationship management (CRM) applications via the cloud.

These solutions would allow small and medium businesses in the United States to manage their people and processes more efficiently by deploying sales force automation and CRM across their businesses.

The joint offerings require no incremental hardware or software to install or maintain, and customers would be able to manage all their customer information, activities, and conversations, with subscription based pricing starting from $9 per user per month, said a press release.

“Dell and salesforce.com are providing customers with an integrated and proven solution that we have been testing extensively in our own organizations,” said Steve Felice, president of Dell's global small and medium-sized business operations.

“Today, salesforce.com runs its datacenters and PCs on Dell equipment and Dell has integrated Salesforce CRM with our on-premise applications using Dell’s PowerEdge servers and Dell Integration Services,” he added.

For growing businesses with more complex IT environments, the Dell–salesforce.com solutions also offer the expertise of Dell Integration Services, which provide fixed low cost, quick migration and integration for businesses with the salesforce.com Sales Cloud.

This integration solution for SMBs was born and road-tested by Dell’s SMB team within the company, and helps SMBs easily and painlessly integrating cloud technology into their IT environments without disrupting their business processes, the release said.

George Hu, executive vice president, marketing and alliances, salesforce.com said, "Our work with Dell opens up a whole new world for small and mid-sized businesses, empowering them to harness the power of cloud computing without the cost and complexity of managing infrastructure.”

He further said that working with Dell will help accelerate the adoption of cloud computing by SMBs worldwide.