Enteprises including, Dell, Cisco and Dolby, have been migrating call center, salesforce automation and lead to quote applications to the cloud. With cost-effective rates, fast user adoption, real-time updates and access anytime, from anywhere cloud computing is attractive for enterprises. However, if your organization has lived and breathed Siebel’s on premise solutions for the past 10 years, we realize it is hard to imagine migrating to a cloud solution.

Typical concerns.

• Is it scalable?
• Is it secure?
• Will it give you the same functionality?

We are here to set the record straight.

We are hosting  a webinar with our partner, Salesforce.com, the leading cloud CRM provider, to uncover the truth about the migraition from Siebel to Salesforce.

8 Myths About Moving from Siebel to Salesforce

We will talk about:

1. Security
2. Scalability
3. Functionality Gap
4. All or Nothing/Integration Options
5. Creating Custom Applications
6. Change Management
7. Time to Deployment
8. System Integrator Expertise

If you are interested in registering for our webinar on Tuesday, September 14th, register here.

• Webinar Session: 8 Myths About Moving from Siebel to Salesforce
• Date: Tuesday, September 14, 2010
• Time: 10am PST

• how it works
• how to use it
• using it effectively

Marketing automation has been a hot topic for companies in all industries.  As more an more marketing efforts move online through your company’s website, natural search, paid search and social media, your prospects and customers are more knowledgeable about your products than ever.  As a result, most prospects interact with your company before actively “raising their hands” for information — without assistance of involvement from your sales and marketing teams.  You need to deliver timely content across multiple channels: online, in-person, at industry events and everywhere else.  Marketing automation steps in to help you to track the effectiveness of all of your interactions with your prospects and customers, online and off.

We’re hosting a 3-part webinar series with our partner, Eloqua, marketing automation pioneer, and Barbara Anguis Saxby, Founder and Managing Director at Accelent Consulting – a strategic marketing firm that has worked with companies like Peoplesoft and Salesforce.com.

This 3-part series covers the basics of marketing automation, practical applications for marketing automation and how marketing teams can measure success.

The first session answers the most critical question:

What is Marketing Automation?

We’ll talk about:

• Measuring results across the entire customer lifecycle
• Building a better marketing funnel
• Improving trust between sales and marketing

If you are interested in registering for the first session on May 18, register here.

• Webinar Session: What’s Marketing Automation
• Date: May 18, 2010
• Time: 10A PST

Are you interested in more content like this?  Join our marketing automation email list.

We’re looking forward to joining forces with hiSoft’s global team and we’re happy to note hiSoft’s clients are excited as we are.

“Over the past eight years of working together, hiSoft has become AIG Edison Life’s essential business partner in the areas of application system development and business process outsourcing.  We welcome hiSoft’s acquisition of Echo Lane, as we expect that it will bring great value and benefits to both hiSoft and AIG Edison Life.  The combined companies will contribute greatly to our strategic cloud computing initiatives.”

-  Tohru Futami
Managing Director and CIO
AIG Edison Life Insurance Company

As a part of hiSoft’s new Cloud Services group, we’re scaling up our capabilities and resources to better serve you. The entire Echo Lane team combines hiSoft’s existing consulting practice to form seasoned global team of CRM consulting professionals to focus solely on the Cloud.  Our new 100-strong team has 10+ years of CRM and Cloud solution expertise a larger pool of technical resources and a global reach.

• Read the full release on our blog, and on the wire
• Learn more about hiSoft’s services
• Update your email subscription to learn about our services: cloud consulting, marketing automation, complex quoting and configuration and more
• Learn more about hiSoft
• Apply: we’re looking for project managers, technical architects and salesforce.com experts

Acquired by hiSoft, China’s Leading IT Outsourcing Company

hiSoft leads China’s further expansion into global ITO services market; creates ‘best-of-all-worlds’ cloud services consulting practice through Echo Lane purchase

San Francisco, CA – April 15, 2010 — Echo Lane, one of the top U.S. solution providers for Salesforce.com and other cloud applications, announced it has been acquired by hiSoft, the leading global information technology outsourcing company headquartered in China. This is the most aggressive push yet into the U.S. cloud computing market for a major China-based IT Outsourcing company.

Under the terms of the agreement, Echo Lane will remain a wholly owned subsidiary of hiSoft, and the firms will join forces to expand their dominance in the cloud computing market, serving Global 2000 customers in the United States, Asia and Europe.

“Over the past eight years of working together, hiSoft has become AIG Edison Life’s essential business partner in the areas of application system development and business process outsourcing,” said Tohru Futami, Managing Director and CIO, AIG Edison Life Insurance Company.  “We welcome hiSoft’s acquisition of Echo Lane, as we expect that it will bring great value and benefits to both hiSoft and AIG Edison Life.  The combined companies will contribute greatly to our strategic cloud computing initiatives.”

Echo Lane was founded by Salesforce.com alumni in 2004 with an exclusive focus on cloud computing solutions.  The firm has since earned a solid reputation executing strategic cloud-based initiatives for customers in the manufacturing, high-tech and financial services industries.  In addition, Echo Lane provides a full set of business process and information technology consulting services around the software-as-a-service model.  Two deep specialties are: the migration of custom, legacy, and traditional on-premise applications to cloud computing solutions, and the implementation of fully integrated, end-to-end CRM solutions using leading cloud computing applications including Salesforce.com, BigMachines, and Eloqua.

“The acquisition of Echo Lane is an important step in hiSoft’s strategy to strengthen our global cloud service capabilities, as well as our CRM consulting practice,” said Tiak Koon Loh, CEO of hiSoft. “As one of Salesforce.com’s elite partners, with more than 1,000 completed projects in the past six years, Echo Lane brings an impressive portfolio of cloud computing knowledge and experience.  This, combined with hiSoft’s deep engineering expertise, extensive delivery capabilities in China, and broad CRM expertise within enterprise customers in the financial services, technology, and manufacturing sectors, we will allow us to provide our global customer base a whole new level of innovative and cost-effective cloud deployment services.”

With more than 4,500 employees across 16 global business offices and eight Asia delivery centers, hiSoft is a trusted outsourcing partner to its clients, leveraging a ‘flexshoring’ service delivery model via mostly China-based development centers. With an even mix of research and development services for those clients that build and sell technology products, and information technology services for those clients that leverage technology to run their companies, hiSoft is well known for both its engineering depth and industry breadth.  hiSoft is a private company backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, ePlanet Ventures, GE Capital, Granite Global Ventures, Intel Capital, Mitsubishi UFJ Securities (HK) Capital Limited and Sumitomo Corporation.

“We are very excited to join forces with hiSoft, because together, we now have the flexibility to offer clients an extensive array of end-to-end cloud and other technology solutions delivered by either onshore or offshore teams, depending on the client needs and requirements.” said Alana Kaselitz, Principal of Echo Lane.  “The power of our cultures working together will allow Echo Lane to leverage hiSoft’s reach, technology prowess and resources, and offer our hands-on-expertise to a wider global market.”

For more information, please visit Echo Lane at www.Echo-Lane.com and hiSoft at www.hisoft.com.

In this issue we cover:  using Salesforce.com campaigns more effectively with campaign members, record types and custom member statuses.

Happy Holidays all!

Last week Eloqua announced a new social media toolkit and the SmartXchange community.

Here’s the scoop on these new marketing tools.

SmartXchange
This is the new best practices community from Eloqua (currently in beta).  It holds templates, and gives marketers a space to exchange ideas.  It is also a sneak peak of the new UI concepts.  SmartXchange preview:

Screenshot of the "Coverflow" in the SmartXchange

Social Media Toolkit
You can create “share this” style links in your Eloqua emails, giving your readers a shortcut way to share your content:

Social Sharing Screenshot

Social Media Reports
By building a Social Media campaign, it is much easier to attribute any traffic spikes, or new visitors to your social media outlets.  Here’s a sample:

Social Media Reporting

Learn more in the press release:

Eloqua Clears Path to Social Web

New Social Sharing and Reporting Tools Help Marketers Integrate Social Media into Marketing Mix

December 09, 2009
Vienna, VA, — Eloqua, the category-defining leader in marketing automation, today announced the worldwide availability of its new Social Sharing and Reporting toolset. The easy-to-use product allows marketers to harness the power of the social Web by pulling online conversations into their promotions, empowering fans to share marketing content with social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and track inbound traffic from blogs and social networks.

“We want to make social media marketing simple for our customers,” said Brian Kardon, CMO of Eloqua. “Our Social Sharing and Reporting tools are integrated into the same system marketers use every day, and they don’t require any special training. The social Web has become a huge influence on buying decisions. With just a few clicks, our marketing clients can trigger and leverage dialogues for their company, products and services.”

Eloqua’s Social Sharing and Reporting tools integrate with existing outbound marketing campaigns to enhance lead generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring and overall marketing effectiveness. Simply, the product allows marketers to go from zero to social in three steps:

Make campaigns shareable. Prospects can share marketing content and promotions with members of their social networks while marketers can embed third-party content, such as blog posts, directly into their email pushes and landing pages.

Track inbound traffic from social media sites/blogs. Capturing prospects’ relevant social media activities gives sales personnel immediate and unequaled insight into the interests and preferences of their potential customers.

Measure social media impact. Marketers can track which blogs and social networks are driving the most traffic to their Web site to better inform future media-buying decisions.

“Our new social media tools put our clients – the best marketers in the world – in the center of the conversation,” concluded Kardon.

Winning Spring '10 Logo

The next release of Salesforce.com, Spring ‘10 is coming soon.  Salesforce previewed a few features at Dreamforce, and ideas from the community have been selected.  Here is a quick summary of what we know now.

• Chatter: social collaboration (or internal, enterprise grade twitter)
• New, refreshed UI.  Here’s a sneak peak (Thanks ZDNET)
• Updates Sales Cloud (more details to follow)
• Multiple master-detail relationships
• Rich text editing for all long text areas
• Send a test email, from an email template
• Customize the default event template (I have been waiting for this for 5 years!)
• URL rewrites for sites.  (Better for SEO, and more user friendly)

Check out the Ideas page for more ideas coming in Spring ‘10.

What’s your favorite feature? Respond in the comments.

If you missed the event, Salesforce has posted videos and slides from the sessions on the Dreamforce page.   For the video only, check here.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get to save any of our signature cocktail  “Fire in Cloud,” but we promise they’ll make an appearance at a future event!

Did you have a favorite session?  Comment below,  and tell us about your Dreamforce experience.

• Using Salesforce.com effectively
• Managing your customer lifecycle
• Q&A: sales cloud, service cloud and the custom cloud
• How to use marketing automation to measue ROI and increase your revenues
• Best practices
• News and events for Echo Lane

We’ll be updating this space about once per week, so stay tuned for more posts soon.

> Learn more about Echo Lane
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> Learn about our services offerings
> Read our customer stories
> Contact our team

Thank you for stopping by, we look forward to connecting with you!