Salesforce.com Rolls Out New Mobility Solutions For Government

Salesforce.com has rolled out a set of new solutions aimed at helping governmental agencies use mobile devices to support their constituents in the same way the private sector uses mobility to serve its customers.

Claiming that governments have not kept pace with the mobile revolution, the company's four new solutions are intended to tighten integration with partners, accelerate projects and generally improve the level of connection between the government and its citizens, using virtually any mobile device.

"Governments are typically saddled with legacy software that is not mobile, so there is a chasm between the mobile solutions that citizens insist upon and the mobile solutions that government can offer," said Dan Burton, senior vice president of government transformation at Salesforce. "We will work with our partners to deploy the solution. We work with some large integrators, but we also work with a lot of smaller government partners who are hungry, lean, social, agile and quick to respond."

[Related: Cloud Gaining Traction In Government, Education Markets ]

The firs service, "Rapid Response 311," which is based on the Salesforce Service Cloud Offering, allows agencies to access data over the phone, email, Web and social media. The system can also run a query through a knowledge base that helps determine the appropriate response as well as function as a mechanism for collaboration with other agencies.

"Mobile Communities for Government" helps agencies create their own social communities to connect with other governmental organizations and business partners. Like most social networking tools, the platform supports the development of profiles, news feeds and trending topics.

The "Government Social Command Center" is based on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and intended to deliver monitoring capabilities that can connect with citizens via social networks, websites or mobile devices.

"Platform Mobile Services for Government" is designed to help IT professionals and channel partners develop and deploy various applications that can be delivered across mobile devices.

"This is really an epic transformation for government, providing the opportunity to become a connected agency that connects with citizens, employees [and] partners in a whole new way, leveraging cloud and mobile devices," added Burton. "It's across social media, it's across one-on-one service requests, it's across communities with security, and it's across platforms that enable government to build custom mobile apps to create a whole new generation of services for their citizens."

Salesforce.com claims a governmental customer list of more than 500 agencies at the federal, state and local levels, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the Food and Drug Administration, and the City and County of San Francisco. "I think the most important piece is the access to information," said Bob Capuano, director of federal customer solutions for Deloitte Consulting of Rosslyn, Va. "These types of capabilities are already present in the private sector, and we need to equip our government agencies with the same kinds of technologies. We're seeing the demand for this across the federal space, and there has been a lot of movement in this direction."

Deloitte on Wednesday also announced that its Federal Innovation Center, also located in Rosslyn, Va., will now demonstrate a variety of Salesforce offerings for the government sector.

"It's a highly visual and interactive lab that enables us to bring in our clients and show them prototypes and demos of the types of solutions that can help them transform their business," said Capuano. "So we're making an investment to expand that capability and to showcase Salesforce capabilities to our government customers."

PUBLISHED MAY 22, 2013