Against the backdrop of today’s news that Oracle plans to acquire Siebel, OneSource has announced a new partnership with the customer relationship management (CRM) company whose star has risen even as Siebel’s has slipped: Salesforce.com. The new piece is an integration module called Account Intelligence for Salesforce, which embeds OneSource’s company and people information directly in Salesforce.com’s on-demand CRM system. The degree of integration provided under this collaboration is right in line with the characteristics of sales performance solutions, which we began covering in depth with our recent HotTopics, “Follow The Money: Sales Performance Solutions Are CRM’s Missing Link.” In that piece, we described the characteristic of next-generation products in this space as a new level of convergence between content and technology, combining internal content, external content, content services, and CRM and sales force automation (SFA) software applications.

This OneSource offering pushes the envelope on all those factors by deeply integrating internal content with turnkey addition of external content, an easy data load, additional services available from OneSource’s professional services staff, and flexible pricing that allows customers to buy the content sets that best meet their needs. Users can choose to include premium content such as analyst reports. Current OneSource clients can switch from the OneSource Business Browser to the Salesforce.com interface at no charge, but the real goal here is new clients for OneSource. Outsell’s Chuck Richard notes that Outsell advises partnering with players with a strong presence in the target market. This deal does exactly that for OneSource, which joins other Salesforce.com partners such as TrueAdvantage to allow customers, consultants, and developers to create third-party Web applications and sales force service add-ons that are becoming true examples of sales performance solutions.