I’m a huge Open Source fan and as much as I like using my SugarCRM, SalesForce has some great stuff (and obviously their software extends well beyond just CRM). SalesForce is arguably the driver behind the SaaS bandwagon and I really like what they’re doing…. even though it’s all proprietary. I recently got to demo what SalesForce is calling their “Dream Call Center Desktop”. What I really liked was the native telephony integration which includes an integrated browser based softphone with call control capabilities, screen pops, and integration with all the modules which come as part of SalesForce Service&Support.

I probably wouldn’t go so far as to say this is the right contact center solution for a large contact center because the telephony capabilities are rather basic…. think regular softphone simplicity. A large contact center is probably using something like Aspect or Genesys contact center solutions or Aheeva which is the growing Asterisk contact center solution. What I like about the SalesForce Call Center Desktop is that it provides a rather simple integration of telephony in with the functionality of the SalesForce software.

It looks like the only standard telephony integration is with Cisco. What I would like to see is for someone to integrate an Asterisk softphone into this SalesForce Service&Support module just like the Cisco softphone. This would be a major step for Asterisk since SalesForce is such a universally adopted business service. I know lots of mid sized businesses who use SalesForce but can’t afford Cisco so if Asterisk was able to integrate it would be a very nice out-of-the-box capability and very compelling for a company already using SalesForce.

So…. I wonder who’s going to figure out how to get Asterisk integrated with SalesForce Service&Support? Anyone? Anyone?