Nikon Instruments Drives Significant Additional Business With Salesforce CRM and Chatter

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing (http://www.salesforce.com/cloudcomputing/) company, today announced Nikon Instruments' deployment of Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Chatter.

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Before deploying Salesforce, Nikon, a market leader in optical instrumentation, desired a system that would enable it to build a closer relationship with its customers while providing real-time business intelligence regarding new opportunities and sales. Nikon CRM manager and project leader, John Bivona, recalled Nikon had small islands of unique customer data around the company that did not present the complete picture. Nikon sought a way to bring all customer data together to share while maintaining the highest level of control and security over the data. Following a comprehensive review, Nikon selected Salesforce CRM with Chatter over Microsoft Dynamics CRM and SAP CRM OnDemand for its mobile, social, real-time cloud computing model, comprehensive technology, clearly defined costs, and ability to run with few IT resources.

Cloud 2 technologies unify sales, marketing, and service; lead to significant new business

• Sales Cloud 2 is currently rolled out across Nikon's sales and marketing organizations. Nikon is deploying Service Cloud 2, salesforce.com's application for modern customer service, for customer support.
• Use of Chatter is growing organically across the company, particularly in product marketing and product management. Employees use it daily to provide real-time updates to the sales organization on new resources such as product brochures or links to articles that can accelerate their sales.
• Nikon saved internal resources and costs by automating quote requests from its website into Salesforce that are then automatically routed according to product and geography without any human intervention or processing.
• Mobile access to Salesforce on iPhones and BlackBerries enables Nikon agents to have access anytime, anywhere.
• The new system enables collaboration and unification between Nikon's marketing and sales organizations by providing data on the success of trade shows and outbound e-mail campaigns.
• Nikon expects to save hundreds of thousands of dollars on time and efficiencies through integration with its SAP back-office system which will convert a quote in Salesforce to an order in SAP and then back through Salesforce to communicate order status to the customer.

Comments on the news:

• "We have seen seamless improvements to our direct selling model with Salesforce CRM and Chatter," said John Bivona, CRM manager and project leader, Nikon Instruments. "Not only are we quickly and efficiently supporting our customers and business, but we are improving business processes for the future, collaborating internally in real-time, and lowering costs with salesforce.com's Cloud 2 technologies."

Salesforce.com Continues to Establish Market Leadership in CRM

• Salesforce.com was recently recognized by Gartner as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation (July 2010). According to Gartner, "Leaders demonstrate a market-defining vision of how technology can help the top sales executives achieve business objectives. Leaders have the ability to execute against that vision through products, services and demonstrated solid business results in the form of revenue and earnings. Leaders have significant successful customer deployments in North America, EMEA and Asia/Pacific in a wide variety of vertical industries with multiple proof points above 500 users."
• Salesforce CRM was recently placed as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites for Mid-Sized Organizations, Q2 2010 (June 16, 2010), The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites for Large Organizations, Q2 2010 (June 16, 2010) and The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites Customer Service Solutions, Q3 2010 (July, 2010).
• Salesforce CRM's leadership was also recognized in the recently announced 2010 CRM Market Awards, where salesforce.com swept the CRM Suite categories for the second straight year, winning the Enterprise Suite CRM, Midmarket Suite CRM and Small-Business Suite CRM Awards.  
• Adding to the honors at the 2010 CRM Market Awards, salesforce.com garnered the Sales Force Automation Market Award for the fourth year in a row.  

Additional resources:

• For more information on Nikon Instruments' success with salesforce.com, visit: http://www.salesforce.com/customers/pharmaceuticals-life-science/nikon.jsp
• To see a demo of Sales Cloud 2 with Chatter, visit: http://www.youtube.com/salesforce#p/c/1740F3D66C7B50A3/3/YDKZ0SO3O7E
• To see a demo of Service Cloud 2 with Chatter, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wARWWw_UN_E
• More information on Chatter is available at http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/
• Follow @salesforce on Twitter

About salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. Based on salesforce.com's real-time, multitenant architecture, the company's platform and CRM applications (http://www.salesforce.com/crm) have revolutionized the way companies collaborate and communicate with their customers, including:

• The Sales Cloud, for sales force automation and contact management
• The Service Cloud, for customer service and support solutions
• Chatter, for social collaboration
• The Force.com platform, for custom application development
• The AppExchange, the world's leading marketplace for enterprise cloud computing applications

Salesforce.com offers the fastest path to customer success with cloud computing. As of July 31, 2010, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 82,400 customers including Allianz Commercial, Dell, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and SunTrust Banks. 

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