At the end of October this year, we received the email we had been waiting for – ‘Welcome to the Salesforce.com Partner Program.’ It had been a while coming. Desynit have been working with salesforce.com for over 2 years now, delivered a customised enterprise-scale solution on the technology platform, been to conferences in the US and the UK, passed our developer certificate, and even pioneered a networking group for Salesforce.com professionals in the South West.
In short, pre-partnership, we were already fully committed to this cloud provider.
So in light of this, what does the partnership programme mean to us and more importantly our customers? Well from our point of view, so far it is business as usual. Force.com developer environments are already free. Salesforce.com did a pretty good job of making us feel part of their technology revolution (see California Dreamforcing), with or without the partnership badge. We continue to work with our existing Salesforce customers in exactly the same way, at exactly the same rate. And the conversations that we were already in with a number of organizations regarding the Salesforce requirements have not changed.
Looking ahead though, we do believe that being a Salesforce.com partner is a great way for us to get a first look at what is coming up. With a platform as fast paced as this (three releases a year..!) we need to stay current, and pass that on to our customers. Being a partner means access to events, webinars and perhaps most importantly, training that may not be immediately available beyond the partnership program. All of which are great reasons to be part of the program and we are looking forward to Desynit’s future with Salesforce.com.