Salesforce extends the definition of CRM

Just today it was announced that Salesforce.com acquired the French content integration solution EntropySoft. First reported on VentureBeat, this story shows how CRM continues to be an expand from its initial boundaries as a way to manage one enterprise’s sales funnel and forecast.

EntropySoft brings Salesforce.com an ability to normalize access to content repositories with connectors that are built for very specific purposes, like search, data loss prevention and e-discovery.

This is great for finding specific content but it also gives Salesforce.com an ability to ‘see’ content repository changes as they happen in real time, even across the firewall. With this acquisition, Salesforce.com is able to sell their platform as a way to manage customer relationships while tracking content across multiple, disparate nodes of a supply chain.

Virtual supply chains

In a globalizing world and extended supply chains, consider the benefit of viewing contract, technical and other information without the typical enterprise barriers presented by SharePoint and other solutions. Cloud storage of content repositories makes produces like EntropySoft a critical tool for cloud-to-cloud and cloud-on-premise integration.

Salesforce.com clearly understand the value of the virtual supply chain that has transparency across multiple organizations that are cooperatively sharing information that makes customer relationship management that much stronger.

We can expect to see more cloud-to-enterprise and cloud-to-cloud integration pair ups like this one going forward.