When we first looked at Cloud Extend, it was an early product release designed to help people better utilize Salesforce as a tool.  Today brings the full launch for Cloud Extend, making it readily available to the public.  Cloud Extend specializes in sales guides to simplify the Salesforce product, making it easily customized and tailored to a company’s needs.  With no additional training or skills required, Cloud Extend is a Salesforce app that can enhance the base product and make SaaS more user-friendly, to scale.

“Salesforce can sometimes be intimidating to even the most seasoned sales and marketing professionals,” said Mark Taber, CEO of Active Endpoints, the company behind Cloud Extend.

“By enabling consumers to add process to Salesforce, Cloud Extend could easily be the single most important feature to drive adoption and the expected return on investment. Getting consistency on first call handling, automated sales call follow-up and automated reviews of deals in a pipeline are just a few examples.”

One area Cloud Extend is pushing with this release is the social integration, better leveraging things like Salesforce Chatter and LinkedIn as part of the guidance tree for end users.  It’s a great way to segue users into social media use, which is a process easily lost when you’re talking about brands, sales or marketing companies.  It’s an important focus for Cloud Extend as it nears its official debut at the Dreamforce conference next week, hinting at the many ways the company can develop its verticals around its base product.

From the social enterprise perspective, Cloud Extend is really looking to develop a tool, and encompass a growing network from there.  So far the company’s seen great build up to a commercial product launch, with an eye for new products that improve the processes it’s set out to simplify on Salesforce’s platform.  One area of interest in this regard is business consulting, where Cloud Extend has experts on hand to help Salesforce users optimize the product for their purpose.  It’s an added perk to help think through the right processes around Cloud Extend implementation, and outlines another area of growth for the company.

To this end, Cloud Extend is building an extensive partnership network with companies that have their own consulting firms, some of which benefit greatly in using Cloud Extend for their own purposes.  The networked approach to Cloud Extend’s growth also enables the company to spread accessibility of its product, while opening a gateway for learning even more about its users.

This could easily spawn off an exchange program for guidance trees that consultants may have developed, highlighting commonly used ones that may be of benefit to others.  During an early talk with Cloud Extend we learned that the company hopes to envelop an ecosystem surrounding its tool, finding more ways of reaching out to users and giving them the resources they need to customize Cloud Extend for themselves.  It’s an early vision of an “app store” of sorts, which is a growing concept in the social enterprise space, and could prove a useful tactic for startups in particular.