In the beginning ...

I have to tell you, in the beginning, I really was not a very big proponent of Salesforce.com. In fact, I hated the very idea of it. Let me get this straight -- you want me to take all of our highly sensitive and confidential customer data and host it remotely? Give my employees access to this data over a web-browser? Pay for the service on a per-user monthly subscription basis? You, sir, are completely nuts!

But the high-priced consulting firm that my company had hired to help select our CRM platform had listed Salesforce.com, along with two other "top picks". To be fair, we gave all three vendors a chance to come in and do their dog-and-pony show. We talked with their customer references, and did a fair amount of digging ourselves. And, of course, we spun the numbers through some ROI models for the corporate management team, who would ultimately have to sign the check.

Something surprising happened along the way. Unavoidably, I became a believer in the SaaS model. SaaS -- it means "Software as a Service" -- and it's the business that Salesforce.com is in. What did it mean for me? No hardware to purchase. No requirements to build a redundant network architecture so that in case the system in Derry goes down, my remote support team will still be able to access the data. No server maintenance costs. No operating systems to manage, upgrade and maintain. No database (Oracle, SAP, GP) to buy. No integrated software to install. No 6-12 month CRM implementation lifecycle to worry about.

We were up and running within 2 weeks, and that includes the time it took to import two years of cases, solutions, accounts and contact data from our legacy CRM system. We spent the next few days and weeks optimizing the system, enhancing the user views -- adding customizations and features that were simply not options in our previous CRM tool.

I kept a development blog of our progress, but because a lot of it is proprietary and company confidential, I can't simply open it to the world. So instead, I'm going start a seperate blog on this site -- to bring any interested readers up to speed on how we implemented Salesforce.com, and what we learned along the way.

Salesforce Monkey is personal interest project, but I hope readers get some benefit from it, as well. Stay tuned!