Building on technologies it announced in November, Salesforce.com today released Service Cloud, its next-generation customer service solution.

The Service Cloud, built on Salesforce's (NYSE: CRM) Force.com application platform, benefits from the SaaS provider's partnerships with Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Facebook and Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN).

It will let Salesforce customers leverage all capabilities of the partnerships, Alex Dayon, Salesforce's senior vice president for CRM (customer relationship management) customer service and support, told InternetNews.com.

"This is the future of customer service, it lets customers build businesses in the cloud," Dayon said. Salesforce has a media event slated for Thursday where it's expected to discuss the announcement in more detail.

The Service Cloud will let users create an online customer community with unlimited usage for up to 250 customers, set up a contact center with up to five agents, connect with sites like Facebook and Google, and invite up to five partners to participate in the cloud, Salesforce.com said in a statement.

Also, Service Cloud will not be restricted to Salesforce's existing partners. "We will be working with other companies in the future, but for this particular announcement these are the three partners we are connecting to," Dayon said. "Others like Yahoo and LinkedIn are also important to us but, right now, we're leveraging the technology as it comes."

Business customers will be able to use Service Cloud to capture online conversations and leverage community experts.

The release follows statements by Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff at a news event in New York in December that the company would connect all the different cloud computing services.

LATEST NEWS

Microsoft's Reliability Update Triggers Crashes
Microsoft Denies Windows 7 Tied to Battery Issues
Google Wants Chinese Look-Alike to Knock It Off
Pip.io: Not Just Another Social Network?
Google Plans to Twitterize Gmail?

At the event, he also said customers will be able to create media-friendly packages that can be shared with groups, dragging and dropping slide presentations and adding videos and PDF documents into presentation packages.

Cloud of dreams

At its Salesforce Dreamforce 2008 conference in November, Benioff unveiled Force.com for Facebook, an application that lets its customers call in Facebook APIs (application programming interfaces), make Facebook Markup queries and create a new class of business applications that leverage social networking.

Salesforce customers building applications on Facebook will get immediate access to the social networking site's users, Sheryl Sandberg, the social networking site's chief operating officer, said at the conference.

At Dreamforce 2008, Benioff also announced a tie-in between Force.com and Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services. Installing Force.com for Amazon Web Services will link the Force.com files natively with Amazon S3 and EC2. In addition, Benioff said that Salesforce is moving into Web hosting and that the 85,000 custom applications then on Force.com, which were developed by customers, could instantly become Web applications.

As for Google, Salesforce in December further strengthened the already deep ties between the two companies by announcing the availability of Force.com for the Google App Engine application development platform.

This will give developers access to the capabilities of Force.com within the App Engine environment, letting them add consumer-oriented Web 2.0 applications built with App Engine to the enterprise oriented applications in Force.com.

"When we made our announcements at Dreamforce 2008, people said, 'That's really cool, but what do you do with it?'" Salesforce's Dayon said. "Service Cloud is the answer."

The Service Cloud is slated for immediate availability; pricing starts at $995 a month.