Feature
Some people get freaked out by the thought of going to the cloud. We heard that last month at the SharePoint Technology Conference, for sure.
It's not the case in Salesforce's CRM world, at least according to a survey of 1,000 Salesforce users conducted by a Salesforce partner.
New York City-based Bluewolf, a global business consulting firm, today released its third annual State of Salesforce report. It found that 70 percent of Salesforce CRM users are diverting budget from on-premise to cloud-based solutions, down slightly from about 75 percent last year.
"In my view the security debate should have been retired years ago," said Eric Berridge, CEO of Bluewolf, which claims to be “born in the cloud” and was Salesforce.com’s first consulting partner more than 14 years ago. "The cloud and Salesforce.com specifically are serving some of the largest and most demanding global organizations on the planet, with tens of thousands of users, complex regulatory and compliance issues and multiple layers of both security and redundancy."
Cloudy Days for CRM?
The Bluewolf findings corroborate predictions made by Gartner Research about the CRM market a year and a half ago. Gartner said then that the CRM market will become increasingly more mobile, and it will also see companies going more toward the cloud.
Berridge told CMSWire there is a "business cost to not innovating." In other words, not going to the cloud will hurt bottom lines.
"Even if a company tried and remain unchanged, its partners, customers, and business environment are all constantly shifting," he told CMSWire. "Systems that remain the same in fact fall steadily out of sync with the business."
He called cloud technologies more flexible and more seamlessly providing upgrades and new functionality. Companies in a CRM cloud have the "ability to provide all employees a single view of the customer, within a vastly superior and more collaborative interface."
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What the Numbers Say
Respondents in the Bluewolf survey reported making investments in into multi-cloud, mobile and intelligent data.
"All of these areas support a digital customer experience," Berridge said, "and we anticipate the largest share of new investments to focus here."
Specifically:
- 54 percent of companies are using two or more Salesforce clouds
- 18 percent and 22 percent of companies are invested in Marketing Cloud and Community Cloud, respectively
- 46 percent are invested in Service Cloud, making it the second most adopted cloud
- 89 percent of customers already use Salesforce.com’s mobile offerings, up from 52 percent from last year's report
"Data is at the heart of digital transformation," Berridge said. "More data is being captured about customers than ever before. Salesforce.com is investing in this area, with acquisitions like RelateIQ and EdgeSpring. We see the ability to integrate and transform data into consumable insights as a critical growth area within the market. Our report shows that companies are also in-line with this, as 71 percent will increase their investments in data and analytics in the coming year."
Title image by Thomas Huang (Flickr) via a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.
