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Salesforce.com has announced that Carlson, a travel, cruise, hotel, restaurant, and marketing firm with annual sales of $37 billion (including franchised operations), has adopted Salesforce’s SaaS CRM and Force.com Platform-as-a-Service.

 

Salesforce.com partner Ben Nevis helped Carlson deploy Salesforce across five of its operating groups, including Carlson Hotels Worldwide, Carlson Wagonlit Travel, Carlson Marketing Worldwide, Carlson Leisure Group, and Regent Luxury Group. The company also used the Force.com platform and AppExchange to develop a customized product for Carlson’s Salesforce users.

 

“We had built a global enterprise, but did not have the tools necessary to use all of our business account information and make it available to staff dispersed across 40 countries,” said Anthony Forbes-Roberts, enterprise CRM manager at Carlson.

 

Carlson used the Force.com platform to deploy Newmarket Commex, an event and meeting management application from Newmarket International, and CRMSurveyor, a customer survey tool from Vovici Corporation, among others.

 

A little over a week ago Salesforce.com got some love from Zacks Equity Research, which highlighted Salesforce.com as the Bull of the Day. “Our Bull of the Day recommendation is for Salesforce.com,” the Zackers said. “Salesforce.com is the market leader in the on-demand CRM space and continues to see substantial subscriber and customer growth.”

 

Although the stock has been “volatile,” as the report noted, Zacks officials “believe over the long term, CRM is the leader in a potentially huge market for on-demand software. Moreover, the company has had excellent traction into larger customers with thousands of subscribers, reflecting greater acceptance, and should continue to displace Siebel/Oracle.”

 

The research firm, therefore, reiterated its “buy” recommendation on CRM shares with a six-month price target of $83.00.

 

Salesforce.com is looking at rapid India expansion in 2008 through its subscription-based CRM software, and is hoping it’ll grow into a $160 million revenue market there by 2010.

 

“India is the fastest growing SaaS market in Asia Pacific. There are thousands of small and medium businesses that are underserved, which is our opportunity,” vice president, Operations, Asia Pacific Doug Farber said.

 

A recent study by research firm Springboard found the early adopters of SaaS in India are not small companies, but medium and large ones. In more mature markets, one would expect the opposite. The study found “ease of use” and “low cost of ownership” as frequently cited reasons for adoption.

 

India was found to be a cost sensitive market, with only 13 per cent users being not aware of savings accrued from SaaS, compared to an astounding 92 per cent in Australia and New Zealand and 80 per cent in Singapore.