SunBridge: Serving Japanese Market with Salesforce Solutions

The foundation of business is a relationship of trust between people, and promoting innovation in business enables further human relationships.” With this belief, Allen Miner founded SunBridge in 1999. His long-term relationship with Marc Benioff, going back to the day they joined Oracle together in 1986, paved the way for Salesforce.com to enter Japan as a joint venture with SunBridge in 2000.

Miner was keen to lead the Japanese market transition from on-premise to Software as a Service by launching Salesforce and helping it succeed in Japan. Today, Japan is the largest international market for Salesforce and SunBridge has led successful implementations for over 500 Japanese customers including deployments in the Asian subsidiaries of several Japanese global giants. Miner elaborates, “We have a unique perspective for driving the transition from on-premise software to SaaS in Japan and we have the deepest roots and close connections with Salesforce Japan.” In the past several years, SunBridge has brought other top global enterprise SaaS products such as Concur, Marketo, Hirevue and Demandware to Japan as well.

SunBridge is one of the five gold partners of Salesforce in Japan and serves its clientele in the country with a trinity of Salesforce solutions—Sales Cloud (SFA) Implementation, Marketing Cloud (MA) integration and Smart Visca, SunBridge’s own business card Contact Management application.

Smart Visca accelerates the time to success for organizations deploying Salesforce. It lets them load up their Salesforce database with historical customer relationships by scanning business cards directly into Salesforce leads and contacts. It also helps customers with cleansing and enhancement of contact data for both SFA and MA. Smart Visca was the key driver for a Japanese megabank’s decision to deploy Salesforce that began with the simple goal of using the business cards collected by its sales people to improve coordination between bank branches.

SunBridge also offers innovative services to Pardot marketing automation customers. Through its marketing automation solutions team, SunBridge supports the design of marketing scenarios and smooth integration with Sales Cloud based on the knowledge gained over numerous marketing website designs and consulting projects. Extensive experience with both Salesforce and marketing automation is still very rare in Japan and when combined with the power of Smart Visca Contact Management, the SunBridge offering is unique.

The company’s service portfolio includes marketing automation products from other companies such as Marketo and local player Shanon Marketing too. It enables SunBridge to deliver best-in-class marketing solutions using whatever tool their clients prefer. Miner adds, “We are the only company in Japan that has experience implementing Marketo, Pardot, and Salesforce.”

SunBridge’s experience as a value added reseller of top global SaaS products and as creator of its own value-added products for Salesforce users has helped it come a long way in Japan. To further build on that, Miner plans to introduce new original products such as a highly improved online survey tool specifically designed for Salesforce customers and continue to increase its capability to serve the international needs of its Japanese clients.