Salesforce.com puts service in the cloud

Today, the trendiest part of business IT is in cloud computing so it’s logical that, as the trendiest company in business IT, Salesforce.com should have taken to branding itself as “the enterprise cloud computing company”. Even more interesting, Salesforce has come up with a cunning new scheme to bring together (a-cumulus-ate?) individual clouds in order to fix service glitches.

Salesforce’s Service Cloud grabs conversations from Amazon.com, Facebook, Google and other cloud environments to benefit from the “wisdom of crowds“, or in other words, community experts whose knowledge might otherwise end up stuck in a silo.

The confluence of search, web-based communities and social networks is quickly changing the nature of service. Already, when a domestic appliance goes wrong, many of us will hit Google to seek out a fix rather than call a contact centre rep who then consults a knowledge base.

File the service cloud as yet another example of how the internet is changing and refining the way we live and work.