Chip designer rolls out salesforce.com to 400 employees to allow remote access to customer relationship management solution
San Francisco — January 14, 2004 — Magma Design Automation, a provider of chip design solutions, has tapped salesforce.com for a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, implementing sales force automation and customer service and support for 400 employees worldwide under a new three-year deal.
Based in Santa Clara, Calif., with offices spread throughout the world, Magma needed a browser-based CRM solution that the company's employees could access anytime, from any location. Magma sales and support employees spend a significant amount of time on-site at their prospects' and customers' offices and need quick access to the most current data and information available.
Prior to implementing salesforce.com, sales reps had to access CRM software behind a firewall, necessitating the use of a virtual private network (VPN) from the client site. However, because many companies are not comfortable with the idea of a VPN connection from behind their firewall into Magma's corporate network, Magma's CRM remained largely unused.
By switching to salesforce.com's Web-based, "on demand" service, Magma's reps can now have direct access to the most up-to-date customer, product and service information from any location. As a result, they are better able to provide the most current chip design and performance information to their customers and prospects, according to salesforce.com.
"Because our business is built on ensuring the success of our customers' designs, it is critical that we closely monitor the progress of our field personnel and respond quickly to ensure that potential customers receive the highest level of support," said David Brooks, director of CRM for Magma. "We needed a new, cost-effective sales force automation system that integrated marketing and sales with customer service and support. We selected salesforce.com because it offered the functionality and integration we needed and enabled us to deploy a complete enterprise CRM system for our large company for under one million dollars."
In addition, Magma used sforce, the salesforce.com application server, to customize and extend salesforce.com to meet their customer sales and support needs. Sforce's custom objects enabled Magma to customize the data structures to match their business, and sforce's Web Services APIs made it possible for Magma to create new forms and data entry screens for their users, according to salesforce.com.
For more information regarding "on demand" and other emerging computing models, see the article "Cutting Through the 'On Demand' Hype," the Net Best Thing column in the December/January 2004 issue of Supply & Demand Chain Executive.