Moxie Tightens Integration With Salesforce For Easier Mashups

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Moxie Software is tightening integration with Salesforce.com, making it easier for their mutual customers to create mashups of the two services.

Moxie Software enters the social software arena from a customer service perspective, positioning its enterprise social network as a supporting player in the service of customer-facing functions such as email, chat, and customer support knowledge bases.

Monday's announcement, which builds on the Spaces Connect integration framework Moxie announced in March, is focused on those customer-facing functions. It's the first in a series of packaged integrations Moxie will be delivering, said Nikhil Govindaraj, vice president of products at Moxie. "The first one we picked--no surprises--is Salesforce. Our customers ask for this a lot."

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Salesforce.com data such as customer interaction history now can be made available within the Moxie Desktop user interface, while the Spaces by Moxie knowledge base can be accessed from within the Salesforce.com Service Cloud, he said. The goal is "faster and much more efficient response back to the customer," he said.

Moxie also is making its email and chat products available on the Salesforce.com AppExchange.

Govindaraj said Moxie's new approach to integration is particularly important to midmarket customers. "The solution we had previously was too expensive for this market," he conceded. Moxie previously depended on a partnership with Cast Iron Systems, a maker of integration appliances that was acquired by IBM in 2010. Cast Iron specializes in connecting on premises applications and databases with cloud services and bridging between cloud services.

The internal collaboration components of Spaces by Moxie already integrate with Salesforce.com to the extent of allowing discussions to occur around an embedded record or report pulled from Salesforce, Govindaraj said. Although Moxie competes with Salesforce.com in social collaboration (Chatter) as well as online support, he said its more direct competitors are Jive Software and RightNow (recently acquired by Oracle). Salesforce.com probably will emerge as a bigger competitor in both realms, going forward, but Moxie wants to show customers the opportunities for peaceful coexistence, he said.

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