Dell to sell Salesforce software to U.S. customers

BEIJING, Oct. 12 (Xinhuanet) -- Dell agreed to promote Salesforce.com Inc software products to its U.S. customers in order to expand revenue from service business, according media reports Monday.

The tie-up will allow Salesforce.com's sales management software to reach Dell's small- and mid-sized U.S. corporate customers while Dell shores up its services offering.

Dell will sell Salesforce products and provide services integrating them with customers' existing software. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

Salesforce spokesman Bruce Francis would not say how many sales people Salesforce has in the United States, but said the company has 3,500 employees worldwide. Dell said it has 10 million small and medium business customers worldwide, but also declined to give U.S.-specific figures.

PC hardware is a low-margin business and PC sales accounts for roughly 60 percent of Dell's business. Dell is trying to grow its profits on services, typically higher-margin, but which currently only account for about one-tenth of sales.

The overall market for sales management software is worth 9 billion U.S. dollars a year and is among the fastest growing sectors in technology. Sales of Web-based sales management software will more than double from 1.9 billion dollars in 2008 to 4 billion dollars in 2013, according to research firm Gartner.

Dell is pushing aggressively into the services business and in September said it plans to buy technology services company Perot Systems Corp for 3.9 billion dollars, which will be the largest ever acquisition by the No. 2 PC maker.