Everyone who has invested any money in deploying CRM applications (like salesforce.com) understands that their ROI will be heavily impacted by the actual quality of the data in the system. "Garbage in, garbage out" is an expression we all can identify with, yet many of you are still struggling to solve this problem. Why is it that it's easy to find good third party data sources but it's really challenging to make that data work seamlessly within your applications and business process flows.

Guess what?
It is not you - it's the model that's broken.

I've actually lived through the hassle of this throughout my career and first hand here at Salesforce. I joined Salesforce eight years ago as the VP of Operations. We were not a very large company at that time and determining where to apply our small pool of resources, where we should hire our next rep, etc were key to our long term success. We needed great data to guide us. After evaluating all the vendors, I chose the market leader, Dun & Bradstreet. 

Looking back, the big challenge wasn't the data itself - it was quite good - it was the fact that the data was delivered offline and not only was it not built around our systems and processes but it was also very hard to integrate. The data wasn't in the cloud and it changed rapidly, meaning the file we bought became stale quickly. And, in a few cases where we recognized our data was more accurate - because sales people always have the best data :) - there was no easy way to reconcile or give this input back to the vendor. The benefit of bringing in data quickly started to become outweighed by the cost of maintaining and integrating it. 

In talking with our customers over the past 8 years, I've realized the problem isn't isolated to just us. It's crystal clear to me that while the cloud has really revolutionized the way in which companies now can truly succeed with applications and platforms like salesforce.com that match their business processes (not the other way around like the past), the data industry has evolved very little if at all.  The last decade has also experienced a massive explosion in brand new types of business data, especially those from the social networks. As a result, our customers actually feel like they are struggling more on not only acquiring and managing their data but also piecing these pieces of different data together to make them relevant and valuable as part of their core CRM flows of prospecting, acquiring, and retaining customers.

We here at salesforce.com don't lack for big ambition - we are committed to solving this problem. I am so excited about the future for Data.com and what it means for all of our customers.  Data.com is built to deliver the data you need, exactly where you need it and in a way that fits your business process - and it goes beyond delivery to automated hygiene to allow you to keep your data up-to-date on a regular basis. As a Salesforce customer, that means real-time data managed in the cloud and accessible directly in the applications you rely on each and every day.

One of our customers Clairmail, the leading provider of mobile banking solutions in NA, saw immediate benefit from the real-time availability of data delivered by Data.com. The Director of Marketing Operations told us, "we were able to beat out competitors with up-to-the minute updates," something that was never possible when relying on offline data or simply struggling to integrate data into Salesforce.

In the coming year you'll be hearing more from us and our customers about how Data.com has removed the burden of gathering, maintaining and delivering great data so you can focus on what matters-- growing your business.  We are just at the beginning of this joint journey and we'd love to hear from you - what challenges have you faced managing data?  .. comment below or email me at bqueener@salesforce.com.

PS - And to come full circle, the first third party data provider we are bringing into Data.com is...D&B. Love that data, just hated the model :)