Because customers today no longer pick up the phone and call your toll free number and call you as step one of a problem-resolution process. The first thing they do is go online, check Google, check their community on Facebook, check Twitter, check any number of other resources where they think they can find a credible, independent expert solution… and maybe, as the last resort, they call you.

We wanted to wrap around that process and built what we called the Service Cloud, where things like Tweet streams and Facebook conversations and other social media are directly incorporated and automatically mined for relevant conversations of which you need to be aware.  The solutions that your community is creating for you can be incorporated into your own frequently asked questions and tools. You can be affirmatively engaged with that community instead of being someone that they talk about, with you not in the room. And it’s a far stronger post-sale relationship with the customer.  This is of immense value to any business.

You can see this in what we’ve already done with Service Cloud, which was deployed recently - and obviously, as social media become more and more sophisticated and more and more embedded in our lives, it’s only to be expected that our Service Cloud will be evolving to stay abreast of that.

DMR: Will mobile be part of that ecosystem?

Peter: Yes, definitely. We had always conceived of the client as merely a thin interaction layer. We didn’t need to be able to write specific SDK code that ran on the iPhone. We have continued to track the emergence of new developer capabilities of the iPhone, certainly, but the amazing statement was that we ran on the iPhone on day one.

DMR: The easy-to-roll-out mobile experience of salesforce.com was a decisive factor for many enterprises to tap real-time information, especially for the brand management aspect of not only their direct customers, but also their users – which might be completely different, as you mentioned before with the application development opportunities…

Peter: … exactly. I believe the Service Cloud is probably the exemplar of turning that from a problem into an opportunity. You will hear us talk about the real time Cloud because now, with the necessity for rapid recognition and instantaneous response, you can’t have systems where time lags of hours or days or weeks or months are part of the way you do business.