Salesforce and the service cloud

The announcement is in line with many of the business initiatives that the company has made over the last decade in that it is a leapfrog event. The service and support niche is pretty well populated with traditional companies that deliver major league call centres as well as smaller companies that provide most call centre functionality over the Web, and some that do both. Whatever the case - but especially at the enterprise level - introducing another vanilla call centre solution would not have generated the excitement or revenue that Salesforce needs.

You could say with a lot of justification that the call centre market is mature. However, this is not to say that it is in decline or that there is no real money to be made there any longer. Maturity in this circumstance simply means that adding another vendor would be like bringing coals to Newcastle. The major vendors have the territory pretty well carved up and what they don't want forms the basis of a very nice market in the under 200-seat, on-demand space. So what was Salesforce to do?

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