Salesforce Goes Vertical
Salesforce.com has been a successful CRM product, but has severely lacked one important aspect - focus on industry-specific solutions.
Other CRM products (Siebel in particular, MS CRM to an extent and others) have boasted about hyper industry-specific functionality. Although the "out of box" nature of such solutions is debatable, such industry-focused content -
- Provide a solid baseline for industries
- Give a good head start to the companies on implementation of features.
Siebel in particular has sold this as a trump card for many a year and continues to do so - with good reason. The width and depth that Siebel CRM offers does not have direct competition in the market.
With this background, it is certainly a welcome step for the most popular CRM product today to introduce the first industry-focused product - [Financial Services Cloud](http://www.salesforce.com/industries/financial-services/financialservices-cloud/) .
Although the details are sparse at this time, we know that Financial Services Cloud is focused on wealth management aspects of the financial world (to begin with). There are a few features outlined that will be of immediate interest to wealth managers, but nothing that seems to hit the home run. Technologists will note that Financial Services Cloud is based on the new Lightning experience. Watch this space for more details as they become available!
And remember - financial vertical is the first of other that will follow in an undisclosed timeline.
Also see -
- An [image heavy PDF](https://secure.sfdcstatic.com/assets/pdf/industries/finserv_3_core_advantages.pdf) that outlines the advantages of the Financial Services Cloud
- [Video demo](https://www.salesforce.com/form/industries/financialservices-demo.jsp) of the product