Salesforce announced the launch of its Government Cloud Wednesday, a version of the company’s sales, customer service and collaboration platform for business, but tailored to the government market.
Salesforce Executive Vice President and former Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra unveiled the product at Salesforce’s Cloudforce Social Enterprise Conference at the Washington Convention Center on Wednesday.
“We want to help the government adapt to the social revolution that is taking place in the public sector by using the social enterprise to streamline its customer service,” Kundra said.
Government Cloud will include a dedicated, multi-tenant instance of Salesforce.com’s cloud infrastructure that will allow federal, state and local agencies to rapidly deploy the latest social and mobile technologies in compliance with Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) requirements.
One part of Salesforce’s Government Cloud will be an “AppExchange” for government that will mirror Apple’s iTunes Store and will offer apps to help users navigate government infrastructure.
AppExchange for Government will be made available Wednesday while other aspects of the government software are scheduled to be available later this year, most likely in the third quarter.
AppExchange for Government includes:
- BasicGov: BasicGov is a reliable, secure application built on Force.com that allows cities, counties, state governments and government agencies to streamline permitting and inspections, code enforcement, planning, licensing and citizen access.
- DocuSign: DocuSign is a leading eSignature application built on Force.com that helps organizations streamline workflows to accelerate transactions, reduce costs, and delight constituents with the fastest way to send, sign, track, and store documents in the cloud.
- SchoolForce: SchoolForce includes essential Student Information System (SIS) modules such as attendance, behavior, homework, student records and grade book, as well as collaboration and document management – all of which can all be shared with parents and students via a Web portal. SchoolForce powers data driven improvements in student outcomes and represents a significant advancement in the measurement of K-12 student, teacher and school performance by tapping the power of cloud technologies and advanced analytics.
Kundra also announced a Salesforce Government Partner Accelerator Program which would train 1,000 programmers by the end of 2012 to rapidly transform government information technology. The goal of the program is to allow companies to bring solutions to the government instead of losing to competitors who have a better knowledge of the federal procurement process.
Salesforce already has a strong foothold in the government market, including more than two-thirds of Cabinet-level agencies.
“Today what we see is a social revolution and that social revolution is all about the social enterprise,” said Dan Burton, Salesforce senior vice president for global public policy. “Our whole focus today is to lead the way to the social enterprise.”
