Today Salesforce.com announced its Summer'09 release. Of particular interest is a new capability that allows customer service agents to collaborate, in real-time, with third-party service providers on one version of acase with all given access to the same information.
While it may be technically possible for two disparate companies to integrate their on-premise service platforms to deliver similar functionality, the reality is that it would be so challenging as to make it impractical. Conversly, a multi-tenant Cloud Computing platform such as Salesforce.com allows separate CRM instances to share information seamlessly through configuration and a few mouse clicks.
While this is a compelling scenario from the customer-support space, similar benefits can be achieved in other application verticals limited only by the imagination of those leveraging this technology. Expect to see supplies and buyers in a supply-chain leverage a similar technique to seamlessly integrate their ERP systems in the Cloud. Imagine how simplified a company's B2B infrastructure can become if all companies operate their ERPs on the same Cloud Computing platform. Security concerns would greatly diminish as data would be shared at the API level within the same address space.
The benefits of running an On-Demand Enterprise become more and more compelling as the drawbacks of on-premise software become more evident. B2B data sharing within the Cloud is compelling indeed.
