There are numerous tools out there that promise to help companies streamline their internal support operations, but many of them hail from a time when on-premises software still ruled the workplace. Samanage Inc. has taken it upon itself to bring the industry into the cloud era.

The North Carolina-based provider today secured a $20 million funding round from a group of investors led by Salesforce.com Inc. to fuel its efforts. As part of the investment, Samanage has teamed up with the cloud giant to bring its help desk tool to the latter’s widely-used support automation platform. Organizations can now handle requests from their employees in the same place where they interact with users.

According to Samanage, its service enables operations personnel to set up a customized web-based portal where end-users can ask for help when they encounter a problem. The tool lends itself to everything from assisting new employees with unfamiliar software to sorting out outages that affect large groups of workers. When a new request comes down the pipe, it’s prioritized based on the severity of the issue at hand and ends up in a centralized feed that enables the administrators on call to quickly start troubleshooting.

The Salesforce.com version that Samanage unveiled today expands upon the core feature set of the tool with capabilities from the latter firm’s platform. Among others, companies can now use its knowledge base service to provide workers with troubleshooting guides for common issues. The offering is designed to make the startup’s help desk tool more appealing for large multinational enterprises that already rely on Salesforce.com to manage other aspects of their operations.

Samanage has until now focused mainly on small and midsized companies. The startup claims more than 1,000 customers, including Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc., the organizers of the South by Southwest conference and Internet oversight body ICANN.

Image courtesy of Samanage