It is Salesforce's largest acquisition since the developer of computer programs that customers can only access using Web browsers and the Internet was founded a decade ago.
Salesforce spokesman Bruce Francis said the purchase, which closed Aug. 4, had no impact on results for the fiscal second quarter ended July 31.
He declined to comment on how the purchase would affect results in the third quarter, saying company executives would address that issue in an earnings conference call Wednesday afternoon.
Salesforce is scheduled to report fiscal second-quarter results after the close of U.S. stock markets on Wednesday.
InStranet had $4.2 million in cash and no debt on its balance sheet at the time of its sale to Salesforce, Francis said. He declined to disclose the privately held company's earnings.
Chicago-based Instranet has most of its operations in France. (Reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing by Andre Grenon)
What does InStranet bring to Salesforce? Manage creation, delivery and effectiveness of information across multiple customer channels
The knowledge you deliver across channels, contact centers, sales channels, brokers and dealers or Web self help, has huge impact on customer service quality, costs and revenues.
InStranet's Multi-Channel Knowledge Applications make it easy to turn information from across your organization into something agents and representatives can act on so that they can easily solve and sell.
Global 2000 companies in many industries such as telecommunications and financial services, have put Contact Centers In-Line to work for them, measuring dramatic results on key metrics such as:
Improved first-contact resolution
Lowered cost per call
Increased revenues
Contacts centers inLine
Multi channel knowledge application
http://www.instranet.com/products/ccil.asp
- Empowers agents to solve and sell with the information they need, in the form that best suits their working style
- Devotes desktops to back office functions and content administration, so you can deliver knowledge from across your organization directly to customer touchpoints
- Helps managers and marketing teams minimize costs and maximize revenues. Raise agent productivity, produce and deploy customized promotional offers, and measure and analyze content for continual improvement
- Helps you support the entire information lifecycle and address the key business processes that support customer interactions
InStranet also offers a technology foundation that enables IT to quickly build and deploy Content-Based applications:
Content Application Foundation
Accelerating the deployment of content based applications
- Accelerates the deployment of content-based applications
- Leverages open standards to make content-based applications easy to administer
- Provides complete toolkit for content management, personalization, search, application integration, and user management
- Features out-of-the-box capabilities in metadata framework, content security, content publishing, workflow, syndication, file system agent, and built-in application exchange
- Provides pre-packaged J2EE content-management and metadata capability, and scalable JavaBeans to leverage existing Web sites
Is your IT budget under attack? Tired of complex, million-dollar content and document projects that take months, even years, to roll-out?
The Content Application Foundation takes years of research and development, along with experience in the field with enterprise customers around the world, and offers it pre-packaged, out-of-the-box to the IT organization. A unique blend of openness, power, and customizability, it affords all of the capability, but without the headache and cost of traditional approaches.
Content Application Foundation
FOUNDATION DOWNLOADS
InStranet CAF Success Story - Business Objects uses CAF to Align Professional Services Worldwide
InStranet's Content Application Foundation (CAF) infrastructure blends common metadata framework with XML capabilities, providing an easy way to build customer specific content solutions.Within the metadata layer, the developer sets content and user dimensions which automatically trigger the tracking and monitoring features. Security is achieved using the dimensions to filter all interactions between users and documents.
Through the XML engine, the common features of content publishing, workflow, syndication and customization are accessed. In addition, InStranet provides a powerful set of tools, called Application Exchange, which enables straightforward integration between InStranet and other enterprise applications.
Application Integration
InStranet can exchange content or metadata with legacy applications through Application Exchange. Application Exchange (AppEx) is InStranet’s ETL (extract, transform and load) integration framework into which any number of out of-the-box or custom components can be inserted to provide seamless connectivity to virtually any existing application.
With Application Exchange, InStranet can share users, dimensions and documents with existing enterprise applications, such as Business Intelligence (BI) or Customer Resource Management (CRM).
Configuring Application Exchange consists of three steps: 1) Configuring the Extractor (for outgoing content) or Loader (for incoming content) to interact directly with InStranet repository.
2) Selecting any number of out-of-the-box or custom Content Transformers as needed to change the format of the content (e.g. from a Java object to XML, from one XML DTD to another, to change XML to XSL or flat-file format, etc.).
3) Choosing the appropriate Connector for exchanging the data with the legacy application (i.e. HTTP, sockets, filesystem-based, etc.).
Application Exchange is 100% Java, and the out-of-the-box Java classes can be customized and extended to support additional types of content transformation, such as content encryption or connectivity to another platform using a custom protocol.
Application Exchange also provides a syndication capability, enabling an instance of InStranet to share content with other installations. For example, a secure internal InStranet server can share a subset of its content with an extranet server in a firewall-protected DMZ. This enables an enterprise to keep its critical content totally secure, yet at the same time, share a subset of the content with trusted partners and customers.
The InStranet File System Agent (FSA), a component of the Application Exchange, enables the automatic upload of content from a file system or static Web site. FSA can be configured to scan a given location in a file system for new or updated content, either periodically or on demand, and upload and store that content in the repository with pre-defined navigationand security parameters.
SDK Customization
The InStranet SDK provides transparent access to all the application’s Java objects, enabling developers to extend the application’s core functionality with their own Java classes. With this open access, developers can manipulate any object in the InStranet repository, including dimensions, documents, users, workflow and document definitions, as well as the associations between them.
Customization of the end-user experience is equally straightforward, with a complete set of JavaBeans and custom HTML tags that make even the most complex Webpage a relatively simple task.
InStranet leverages the power of XML throughout its application architecture. All workflow and document definitions are created using XML, and the tagging of documents and users with dimension items is accomplished using XML. The InStranet Application Exchange is based entirely on industry standards such as XML, XSL, HTTP and sockets.
Among other standards, InStranet supports:
JavaBeans and Java Server Pages (JSP) 1.1
Java Servlets 2.2
JAXP 1.1
As with the traditional Content Management platforms, InStranet separates the content from the presentation. When a document is published, the Web content is stored in its native format, which could include MS Office files, images, text, audio/video o rHTML. Before being presented to the end user, the content is re-assembled using any number of customized "renderers"constructed using the InStranet SDK.
Since the InStranet repository and SDK provide access to individual document fields, developers can construct a range of renderers to meet a wide variety of requirements. For example, an "overview" renderer could be created that contains only the title, a short description, and an associated image, along with a link to view the full document. Or, different renderers could be used to display content to different user groups, depending on their preferred look-and-feel or native language.
Security and Segmentation
InStranet’s multi-dimensional Web engine also simplifies the administration of site security and user security profiles. When managing users, an administrator will assign a user to one or more "communities" that are defined using the dimensions. These communities correspond to the level of access that the user should have. For example, the user may be an internal employee belonging to the marketing department of the eastern region, or a user may be an external user belonging to the technical team of partner A. Or, if necessary, the user can belong to multiple user communities.
These same dimensional concepts are used when publishing documents, enabling a publisher to target a document to one or more specific segments or communities of users without requiring assistance from administrators. For example, a document could be published for any marketing employee in the western region, as well as any salesperson from partner A. Since the dimensions are the common metadata that drive the security, they provide an intuitive way to segment communities of users, such as sales channels or business partners, and then target those user communities when publishing documents. The dimensions serve as the common link between users and documents, and all access to documents is filtered through these dimensions, ensuring that the security is airtight.
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