Salesforce.com Exposed -
Products & Pricing
Salesforce.com only provides their service as a hosted application – there is no option for on-premise software. Salesforce.com also uses a multi-tenant hosting configuration with regard to database sharing between customers. This means that although your data is logically separate from other Salesforce.com clients it is also part of a shared multi-tenant data store. While not a significant issue for most small business customers, larger enterprises often reject a shared data technology strategy for a variety of reasons, but not limited to security and ease of customization.
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Salesforce.com offer their services packaged in a series of “editions”. Each edition has varying prices but all editions follow Salesforce.com’s “per user per month” subscription pricing model. As one would expect with a multi-tiered pricing structure, the more expensive the edition, the broader the set of functionality combined with greater customization opportunities and the wider the access to the broader Salesforce.com Force and third party solution offerings. Salesforce.com is often criticized for the inherent “up-sell” that exists in this model. When evaluating Salesforce.com, it is important to visualize the total scope of your requirements (both current and future) before making a decision on which edition is appropriate. The Salesforce.com multitiered structure is in contrast to other leading SaaS vendors such as NetSuite or Aplicor who tend to price their products in a manner that is more inclusive of all functions.
Salesforce.com Group Edition:
Salesforce.com’s entry-level offering is the Group Edition (formerly Team Edition) which is priced at approximately $99 per user per year. This base level solution provides fundamental sales functionality for contact management and opportunity tracking. The solution also includes Salesforce.com’s partnership with Google for AdWords and a “web-to-lead” tool to facilitate the creation of web site leads directly in Salesforce.com. Integration and other ‘Force’ functionality are not available with this edition.
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Salesforce.com Professional Edition:
Salesforce.com’s most popular offering is the Professional Edition and is priced at approximately $65 per user per month. A significant step up from the Group Edition, Professional Edition provides functionality for lead management, account and contact management, activity management, opportunity tracking and forecasting. In addition to the basic sales force automation functions there is also the addition of a fundamental Case Management (help desk or customer support) solution which includes tracking of customer requests and a “solutions” knowledgebase. It’s interesting to note that this version offers no Marketing functionality. As is typical with the Salesforce.com pricing model, marketing capabilities can be added for an additional per user per month fee. Other notable absences from this edition are workflow, self service customer portal and integration support through the Force.com web services API.
Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition:
Salesforce.com’s Enterprise Edition is priced at approximately $125 per user per month. This edition includes considerably more functionality which bridges most of the critical gaps found in the professional edition. The marketing solution is included and supports basic campaign management. The ability to send email based campaigns is still very limited without the addition of one of Salesforce.com’s email partners such as Elouqa and can add a significant expense to the overall cost per user. Some of the notable features added in this edition are territory management, workflows, self service portal and web services API for integration. There are however still some significant gaps such as Mobile access (PDA / Blackberry), which again is available for an additional fee of $50 per user per month.
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Salesforce.com Unlimited Edition:
Salesforce.com’s Unlimited Edition is priced at approximately $199 per user per month. This edition includes nearly all that Salesforce.com has to offer plus full access to the Force.com solution from the AppExchange. The primary items missing from the “unlimited” edition are Partner Relationship Management (PRM), Customer Portal and Content Management.
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