The future of contact centre - Google, Salesforce, Skype & Microsoft

A lot of interesting announcements in the last two weeks.

Firstly, Google announced a link up with Salesforce.com. I can see the logic, as explained by both companies, that this way embedded google apps in salesforce.com would allow users to switch data between (say) a google spreadsheet and a salesforce customer application.

What I find interesting about this is if Google and Salesforce were to integrate Google's emerging communication offerings, as that would start to be a contact centre on a wholly SAAS basis.

Microsoft seemed to respond to this by announcing that Microsoft Dynamics CRM would be available in as an online offering. It is priced more aggressively than Salesforce.com ($44 per user for Microsoft vs. $65 per user at Salesforce.com) but otherwise it seemed to me to have no clear advantages over Saleforce.com and both were less functional than the offerings from Siebel and SAP.

All of which was very interesting and shows that where Salesforce.com lead, the rest of the CRM industry is following rapidly.

I mentioned in the first paragraph that if Google and Salesforce were to integrate Google's emerging communication offerings, as that would start to be a contact centre on a wholly SAAS basis. The google communication applications are an interesting collection of functions, there's Google Talk for instant messging and voice, and Google Mail for e-mail . Helpfully, if peer to peer voice isn't quite enough for you, then Google Pack for your computer includes the option to have Skype. In other words the raw functionality to build a web based contact centre is there in Google and if the idea's occurred to me, then you can bet it has occurred to Google.

It will be interesting to see when we start to see contact centre telephony as a SAAS offering, as this may be closer than many people assume.