CRM TRENDS
AND NEWS
ANALYSIS
conference last May, Google sent out
100,000 “preview” releases in September
and began accepting individual requests
a few weeks later. “Part of the reason
we’re doing the preview is to understand
how people would like to use Wave,” says
Gregory D’Alesandre, a product manager
at Google. Outside of the cubicle, D’Ale-
sandre says, Google is seeing unique
efforts with Wave, such as coordinating
natural disaster cleanup and conducting
online therapy. Still, he adds, businesses
are finding Wave a natural fit from an
organizational and workflow perspective.
That potential has led to a rising tide
of CRM interest, as well. SAP, for one,
introduced Gravity, a prototype that
showed how partners might collaborate
on business process modeling. “It’s an
excellent example of [using Wave to col-
laborate on] something people already
do,” D’Alesandre says. Another CRM
Google Wave Makes vendor, Salesforce.com, demoed the use
of Wave with its Service Cloud to man-
age customer service interactions.
a Splash in CRM
Google Wave isn’t the first to wade into real-time collaboration,
According to Kraig Swensrud,
Salesforce.com’s senior vice president
of product marketing, the effort is still
a work in progress, even following the
but the tsunami of buzz may drown the competition November announcement of Chatter,
the company’s own collaboration plat-
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ight years passed before the verb the only noncolleague he’s managed to