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The Contact Center Side of DreamforceThe Contact Center Side of Dreamforce

If Siebel was the go-to partner in the last decade, salesforce.com is the bright and shiny CRM vendor of this one.

Sheila McGee-Smith

December 10, 2010

1 Min Read
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If Siebel was the go-to partner in the last decade, salesforce.com is the bright and shiny CRM vendor of this one.

When most people think of salesforce.com, what comes to mind is, duh, the sales force application. But over the years, the company has spread its wings successfully into CRM and other areas as well as becoming the poster child for software-as-a-service.

For a lot of contact centers, a CRM desktop is the de facto agent desktop. Contact center infrastructure players have long partnered with CRM companies to telephony-enable those desktops with call control buttons and screen-pops based on caller data.

If Siebel was the go-to partner in the last decade, salesforce.com is the bright and shiny CRM vendor of this one. Several contact center companies, partners of salesforce.com, were exhibitors at Dreamforce and I spoke to some of them asking a single question, “Why are you here at Dreamforce?” Paul Jarman, CEO of inContact, is shown in the first video, Paul Weber of Interactive Intelligence in the second and Tina Valez of TeleTech (partnering with Cisco to deliver hosted contact center with salesforce.com) in the last.

About the Author

Sheila McGee-Smith

Sheila McGee-Smith, who founded McGee-Smith Analytics in 2001, is a leading communications industry analyst and strategic consultant focused on the contact center and enterprise communications markets. She has a proven track record of accomplishment in new product development, competitive assessment, market research, and sales strategies for communications solutions and services.

McGee-Smith Analytics works with companies ranging in size from the Fortune 100 to start-ups, examining the competitive environment for communications products and services. Sheila's expertise includes product assessment, sales force training, and content creation for white papers, eBooks, and webinars. Her professional accomplishments include authoring multi-client market research studies in the areas of contact centers, enterprise telephony, data networking, and the wireless market. She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, user group and sales meetings, as well as an oft-quoted authority on news and trends in the communications market.

Sheila has spent 30 years in the communications industry, including 12 years as an industry analyst with The Pelorus Group. Early in her career, she held sales management, market research and product management positions at AT&T, Timeplex, and Dun & Bradstreet. Sheila serves as the Contact Center Track Chair for Enterprise Connect.