Esker Implements Salesforce.com in 90 days After Failed Three Year Siebel Initiative (December 08, 2003) – Salesforce.com, the world leader in delivering on-demand applications, today announced that Esker, a leading provider of intelligent document delivery solutions, has switched from Siebel to salesforce.com’s Winter ’04 on-demand CRM service. Esker implemented salesforce.com globally for 180 users in eight languages in 90 days. The initiative included complete integration with Esker’s SAP implementation.
Previously, Esker had spent three years implementing Siebel, but decided to move to salesforce.com Winter ’04 after Siebel announced it would withdraw support for the version Esker was using. Esker was convinced it would be more cost-effective to implement salesforce.com for on-demand CRM, given the heavy financial investment needed to upgrade with Siebel.
Salesforce.com was selected following a rigorous three-way product evaluation. Esker performed a two-month trial to evaluate salesforce.com’s on-demand application delivery versus competitors, and selected the company on the basis of its zero-risk, low-cost alternative to traditional enterprise CRM software.
“Esker is a successful global organization, but we’re not in the business of over-paying for services or solutions if we’re not receiving value for our money,” said Jean-Michel Bérard, CEO of Esker. “It’s not ideal to have to change CRM partners mid-stream, but the cost of upgrading Siebel was prohibitive. We have been delighted with our decision to move to salesforce.com. For the first time, we have access to a cost-effective, low-risk global solution that was up and running within 90 days. The product is far superior to the Siebel solution and our users benefit from an easy-to-use, intuitive interface.”
Esker has three million users and markets its products in 50 countries via a network of 60 distributors. A number of different departments within the organization — marketing, sales and research and development among others — rely on the on-demand CRM system to interact with customers.
“Salesforce.com now manages our upgrades to the service automatically and with no charge,” Bérard continued. “We have been amazed at the seamless, pain-free upgrade to the Winter ’04 release. Salesforce.com gives us everything that Siebel provided and much more, at a fraction of the cost, risk and complexity. Furthermore, configuring and customizing Siebel was like a complex science project. Salesforce.com is so easy to modify our sales managers change the screens themselves.”
Commenting on Esker’s integration of salesforce.com with their SAP back office systems, Bérard continues. “After three years, integrating Siebel with SAP was still something we dreamed about — we just couldn’t make it work. With salesforce.com, we managed to complete our integration project in 90 days.”
“We frequently come across companies frustrated by the technological, financial and commercial constraints of enterprise CRM software,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “Esker is a great example of a business with a clear vision of how on-demand CRM can positively impact a company’s performance without incurring an enormous cost. Esker’s use of salesforce.com will generate significant financial rewards, with minimum outlay in terms of time and money.”
With more than 8,400 customers and 120,000 subscribers worldwide, salesforce.com is the world’s most successful on-demand application utility and the first profitable software-as-service provider. Salesforce.com allows for the scalable, secure management of sales force automation, customer service and support, marketing automation, and documents, files and contracts. Salesforce.com also recently announced sforce 2.0, the next generation of the salesforce.com on-demand application server. Open, secure and reliable, the sforce 2.0 on-demand application server is the world’s first platform for customizing, integrating and extending salesforce.com to meet specific business needs.
Source: salesforce.com