Buan Consulting Launches Destination Management Module for Saleforce.com Platform

Helping cities and counties use software to more efficiently interact with the travel and meetings industry, Buan Consulting has developed a destination management add-on to the popular salesforce.com offering for customer relationship management (CRM).

Annapolis, Md. (PRWEB) April 18, 2008 -- Helping cities and counties use software to more efficiently interact with the travel and meetings industry, Buan Consulting has developed a destination management add-on to the popular salesforce.com offering for customer relationship management (CRM). Available through the Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery method, the module has already been deployed in Arlington County, Virginia.

The module helps officials with economic development agencies and convention and visitor bureaus to court and manage their audience of meeting planners, co-op partners, hotels and restaurants, and special attractions. Users can track leads, produce bid proposals, monitor membership status, assign a value to relationships, measure performance by the return on investment, and issue reports that include economic impact. It integrates with common desktop programs such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook.

"While customizing Arlington County's saleforce.com implementation, we saw an opening in the market for municipalities to simplify the way they connect with destination management professionals," says Dan Buan, CEO of Buan Consulting. "Using SaaS, these organizations get significantly improved functionality for a much lower cost than traditional software deployments, so they don't have to go through the capital budgeting process or worry about maintenance issues."

According to software industry analyst Gartner Group, on-demand SaaS with its monthly subscription fees and 4-6 week implementation period offers a lower total cost of ownership over a five-year period than traditional client-server deployments that can take on average 12-months to implement.

A strategic partner with salesforce.com, Buan Consulting has integrated, optimized, and conducted training for multiple deployments of the industry-leading CRM software. Its strategic methodology includes taking into account the organization's value proposition and target audience to build customer-centric processes that lead to effective creation, location, delivery, and application of information. As demonstrated in the new module in use in Arlington County, this results in improved customer loyalty, satisfaction, and revenue.

"We looked at many different economic development software packages and never felt comfortable with them, and the salesforce.com solution that Buan Consulting implemented comes closest to what we need," said Cynthia Richmond, Deputy Director for Arlington Economic Development. "Most economic development work is focused on partnerships and long-term relationships. We can now manage all the players in a business recruitment opportunity and track follow-up obligations essential to these complex relationships. We will be making significant process enhancements based on real information rather than anecdotal data or guesswork."

About Buan Consulting   
Buan Consulting (www.buanconsulting.com) delivers customized technology solutions that help organizations maximize their customer and stakeholder relationships. Specializing in the on-demand, Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery method, Buan Consulting has created its own suite of offerings based on applications from strategic partners including salesforce.com and Autonomy. A 30-day free trial of the solution is available through www.buanconsulting.com.

About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). The company's portfolio of SaaS applications, including its award-winning CRM, available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that customers manage and share business information over the Internet. The company's Force.com PaaS enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful on-demand applications that deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy across the enterprise. Applications built on the Force.com platform, available at http://www.force.com/, can be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com's AppExchange marketplace available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.
   
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