Government Agency: North Carolina Department of Commerce

Solution or Platform Selected: Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition

1. The Government agency's challenge that led to the Cloud or SaaS adoption.
   A project team with representatives from key Commerce divisions established a vision for new CRM solution that would provide a robust, dependable and intuitive system that provided an integrated system for working economic development projects, creating a positive change to our culture, with a greater emphasis on sales process, communication and teamwork; a system that was better aligned with DOC business processes, with the ability to update and change as needed; and the capability to manage marketing programs designed to nurture leads through the entire lifecycle. The team was looking for a solution to replace a custom-developed application, CAP (Commerce Application Portfolio) system, an application developed in 1999 using outdated technology and suffering from functional gaps and issues.



2. The solution that was chosen and why that particular solution was selected.
   After an extensive vendor selection and procurement process, Salesforce.com Enterprise Edition was selected as the application of choice. Salesforce ranks #1 in on-demand CRM market share and includes well known customers such as Merrill Lynch, Cicso, Dell, ADP, Spring, AON, Symantec, SunTrust, Honeywell and Staples. In all, more than 51,000 customers and more than 1.1 million subscribers – including numerous state and local economic development agencies – use Salesforce.com. The robust and easily customizable application has provided over 22 releases in 8 years with an average of over 100 new features per release.



3. Results of the implementation. How did the vendor meet the agency's needs?
   With nearly 100 Commerce users, the system provides greatly improved communications, reporting metrics and most importantly, the capability to develop a more complete understanding of the department’s interactions with existing NC companies, prospects and allies. Contact For North Carolina Department of Commerce Susan Fleetwood Director of Strategic Projects North Carolina Department of Commerce 919.733.9304 sfleetwood@nccommerce.com