Oct. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Cisco Systems Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc. are teaming up to sell a service for call centers that would connect callers over the Internet and help agents solve customers’ problems online.

The partners each plan to offer the service, called the Customer Interaction Cloud, using technology from Cisco and Salesforce.com. The companies will sell subscriptions to the service for a monthly fee of $250 per user. Cisco is the top maker of networking gear, while Salesforce.com provides the most popular online system for managing customer relationships.

The service, scheduled for release by the end of January, may give Cisco a way to reach small and mid-sized business customers that don’t want to buy their own call-center equipment. Salesforce.com offers its programs over the Internet. That approach, known as cloud computing, lets customers run software without having to manage their own servers.

“It’s an incremental opportunity for us,” John Hernandez, general manager of the contact-center business unit at San Jose, California-based Cisco, said in an interview. “We haven’t played much in the small-to-midsize business market.”

The new product will use Cisco’s Unified Contact Center products to handle tasks such as recognizing voice commands over the phone, directing calls to appropriate agents, and using caller ID or phone numbers to display information about the person seeking help.

Twitter, Facebook

The service also relies on Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud, a system that manages customer support. The software can create Web sites that contain user-contributed know-how, analyze comments and complaints on Twitter or Facebook, and help customers find information over the Web.

Salesforce.com Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff aims to deliver a wider range of applications online. His goal is to make Salesforce.com the Internet platform for business programs, much the way personal-computer applications run on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows.

“We are saying to customers they can buy from Cisco and Salesforce a bundled offering that lets them run a call center in the cloud,” Kraig Swensrud, Salesforce.com’s vice president of product marketing, said in an interview.

Users won’t be able to tell that portions of the service are provided by Cisco and others by Salesforce.com, he said. “To the customer, it looks like one service that routes the call, helps the agent understand the question and bring resolution.”

Salesforce.com, based in San Francisco, gained $1.88, or 3.5 percent, to $56.39 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have climbed 76 percent this year. Cisco, up 41 percent this year, added 27 cents to $22.94 on the Nasdaq.

To contact the reporter on this story: Rochelle Garner in San Francisco at rgarner4@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 5, 2009 16:05 EDT