Salesforce.com launches Site.com

Salesforce.com, launched Site.com, a platform designed to give marketers an easy way to update their websites, said Andrew Leigh, director of product marketing at Salesforce.com. Site.com's functionality includes integration with a CRM database in order to quickly upload information from the database to the website, he said.

Several companies, including Haagen Dazs, Hewlett Packard and financial services company FICO currently use Site.com.

“What marketers want to do is deliver fresh content at a much faster pace than ever before,” Leigh said. “It's extremely powerful for companies that are trying to engage consumers in fresh, new ways.”

Site.com is particularly useful for franchises, he said, because each site can be easily customized to meet local needs. The platform is also designed to make it easy to integrate social media platforms in order to increase consumer engagement, he said.

Rebecca Wetteman, VP of research at consultancy Nucleus Research, said she thought Site.com could be just as innovative as the Social Marketing Cloud was when Salesforce.com first launched the platform in November of last year.

“If you think about a lot of the corporate websites out there, they were built five or 10 years ago,” she said, adding that the old sites simply weren't built for easy, daily updating or social media. “What Site.com does is bring easy usability to the website management field.”

The price of a site from Site.com is $1,500 per month.

Salesforce also acquired human resources platform Rypple, the company said March 15. Rypple is intended to replace the traditional, yearly HR performance review, said Nick Stein, director of content at Rypple. “It looks a lot more like Facebook,” he said of Rypple's interface. “It's very social and open and collaborative.”

“A lot of companies set goals,” he said. “It's just this static thing that gets put up on a wall and nobody really relates to it.” The latest version of Rypple, which will be available in April is intended to change that, he said.

Salesforce's Rypple begins at $5 per user each month.

“I think that what we see is this is part of a broader strategy from Salesforce to reach beyond sales, marketing, and customers service of traditional CRM,” Wetteman said of Site.com and Rypple's latest version. “This drives adoption of Salesforce as an application and HR and for content management, as well.”