Salesforce, Cisco bring call centre over cloud

BANGALORE, INDIA: Salesforce.com, an enterprise cloud computing company, announced five-minute upgrades and a new partnership with Cisco, to bring Service Cloud 2 to companies of all sizes.

Salesforce.com and Cisco today announced a combined solution to deliver a complete contact center in the cloud with a combined solution integrating telephony with CRM. The Cisco and salesforce.com Customer Interaction Cloud brings together salesforce.com's Service Cloud 2 with Cisco unified communications.

The solution empowers small and medium sized companies to run their customer service completely in the cloud. Salesforce.com and Cisco share a vision about moving technology into the cloud and leveraging social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google to deliver services to their customers where they are already collaborating.

The five-minute upgrade technology and new solution with Cisco are delivered with Service Cloud 2, Salesforce.com's next generation solution for customer service. The Service Cloud 2 exponentially increases the quality of service, while lowering the cost, by levearaging the expertise of the community.

Companies will be able to access the Service Cloud 2 even during planned maintenance windows with the new five-minute upgrade technology.

The five-minute upgrade feature is currently scheduled to be available in beta in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 and pilot starting in Q1 of fiscal year 2011.

The combined solution from salesforce.com and Cisco is currently scheduled to be generally available in the first quarter of calendar year 2010.

Salesforce Knowledge is currently scheduled to be available in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 for corporate sales customers. It is currently scheduled to become generally available in fiscal year 2011.

Salesforce Answers is currently scheduled to be available in pilot in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 and to become generally available in the first quarter of fiscal year 2011.

Salesforce for Twitter is available today at no additional charge on the Force.com AppExchange for Professional, Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers.