The new forecasting capabilities in the Salesforce.com Summer '04 release, due this month, will go a long way toward serving enterprises' divergent forecasting needs, sources close to the San Francisco company said.

Lack of customization can be an acute problem with forecasting, a key activity in which companies look for accurate views of deals in the sales pipeline. However, forecasting needs can differ dramatically from customer to customer based on such dynamics as the number of products they sell, the number of clients they have or the typical size of a deal.

Unlike Salesforce.com's existing hosted offering, the upgrade will enable companies with multiple product lines to forecast sales by product line. This will be a welcome improvement, according to Salesforce.com user Dave Janssen.

"We'll be able to quote sales forecasts down to the product level in our reports," said Janssen, director of sales strategy at Seattle-based F5 Networks Inc., which has three product lines. "Not being able to do that before kind of limits the business activities we can do."

Salesforce.com Summer '04 is also expected to support forecasting for products that ship on a scheduled basis, such as for a customer that orders a product but takes delivery only when inventory is low. By law, public companies can recognize the revenue only when the product ships and need to be able to match revenue forecasting to the shipping schedule.

The Salesforce.com upgrade also will address the forecasting needs for companies that have a low volume of sales opportunities—around 100 or fewer per quarter—but a wide range of large-deal values.

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Salesforce.com customer David Brooks said the company's existing forecasting engine is geared to companies with a high volume of low-cost deals that are fairly constant in price.

"The issue for us is not 'Will we close the deal?' but 'Will it be a $40 million deal or a $50 million deal?'" said Brooks, CIO of Magma Design Automation Inc., in Santa Clara, Calif. "The current version really doesn't anticipate that price-amount range."

Salesforce.com Summer '04 boasts more than 100 new features, sources said. Other new capabilities of note include a portal interface called My Salesforce.com, which will allow users to customize their Salesforce.com home pages with direct access to Salesforce.com applications, forecasting dashboards, WebEx meetings and Web content, sources said.

A Salesforce.com spokesperson declined to comment on Summer '04, saying the company is in a quiet period after its initial public stock offering last month.

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