CRM Companies 2009: Aplicor

I have had a secret love affair. Yes, I have - with Aplicor. They are a company that does SaaS smartly and well. They understand how SaaS works in the commercial realm, yet play strongly in the public sector with one of the largest SaaS user implementations in the federal government. They have power house feature sets in both sales and customer service applications though not much to speak of when it comes to marketing (but to their defense, no one is much to speak of beyond a few rising stars who concentrate on marketing). They are targeted at the midmarket so their typical seat count for a customer isn’t the usual SaaS 5-25 but 160. They have a solid management, with CEO Chuck Schaefer a clearly 2.0 knowledgeable guy who has a genuinely insightful blog to prove it. They get thought leadership. Another principal Pete Koltis is a longtime industry veteran who ran major practices at companies like Arthur Andersen (that would be the consulting side of AA and a PeopleSoft practice.). They have won countless awards ranging from the TMC.net Software Excellence awards (5 times) to the Computerworld Green IT company of the year in 2007. There are too many others to mention. On the technical side, they have not only delivered an amazing full service back office (accounting) and front office (CRM) product, but they’ve had, catch this, 100% server uptime for 4 years in a row. This is a seriously good company. Yet, they are not only making my list for the first time but they seem to be traveling under the radar - even with lots of press releases and awards. What gives? I don’t know exactly. Regardless, they really need to step up their public visibility and engage in more of the contemporary marketing vehicles like Twitter, Facebook, etc. - which I know they understand. But they don’t use much. They should do something to be more visible. Just don’t tell my wife. This is a company ready to explode - in a good way. Watch them very closely.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: Silverpop

Silverpop has already been a leader in the world of innovative email marketing which, needless to say, falls in the CRM space - especially because the marketing model that they’ve developed their applications and services for is built around customer engagement. But rather than rest on their laurels as a leader in this space, they’ve instead decided to take the next step to fall in lockstep with the empowered customers that businesses now face. What drives them to this list of companies to watch is a simple set of buttons to click. Its a new feature called Share-to-Social and it literally allows you to do just that. Take an HTML email that you’ve received and with Share-to-Social activated you can share the email to Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other social networks. Pretty nifty. What makes this smart is that it makes an email viral and the buttons are embedded into what can be hundreds of thousands of emails - a smart move if there ever was one. People love sharing these days in case you hadn’t noticed. What makes this a particularly valuable feature is that the results can be tracked. Yeppers. They can be tracked. This is a highly respected company that can handle high volumes of email that is more than share-to-social buttons. They have thousands of customers and their CEO, Bill Nussy is a technology industry influencer. In other words, they have chops. They are making some tentative steps in the social CRM right direction. Though tentative, they are well worth watching in 2009 - if they continue to take more steps.

CRM Companies 2009: Neighborhood America

Neighborhood America is smart, strategic, and has an evangelist, Kim Kobza, who thinks big at the helm. Their ELAvate platform is probably one of the best developed social networking platforms in the industry. It has a number of standout features - a highly attractive interface, a video chat function that can handle what is effectively private (or public) videoconferencing for up to six users - that in addition to all the standard stuff that you would expect of a social network platform - threaded discussions, communities of interest and practice; rich media; user generated content integration through uploading media plus commenting and ranking. They have a client list in the entertainment and media world to die for -ABC, CBS and Fox News among many others. They have a Board of Directors that is committed not just to the future profitability of Neighborhood America - though that too - but to the vision and they have an exciting, technology-forward, open corporate culture with an incredible number of hardworking, attractive, accomplished staff. To their credit, they’re working hard on CRM integration with at least 3 of the BB4 to begin with - which is more than I can say for most of the social network platforms. In fact, I think that the Lithium/RightNow integration is one of the few that are out there - and Lithium isn’t strictly a platform. In other words Neighborhood America has a lot going for it. Do they have flaws? Sure they do. They could change their marketing strategy a bit. They could improve some of their blogging and social media platforms a bit from the technology standpoint. And one or two other things. But this is a company poised for breakout. Watch ‘em do it in 2009 or 2010. Its gonna happen sooner than later.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: Jigsaw

Jigsaw not only has a really good product - but they have the “I’m going to seize the initiative” leadership smarts too. The latter first. In June 2008, they announced the Jigsaw Open Data Initiative which gave members of the initiative free access to integrate Jigsaw data, which includes over 10 million business contacts and over a million company records into their applications data stores. Members of the JODI are Landslide, salesforce.com, Maximizer, SugarCRM, Oracle, NetSuite and Sage. Jigsaw also released a Web Open API that could be used to integrate Jigsaw data with other CRM applications, not already partners. This was a brilliant move on Jigsaw’s part. But the question remained then, how is Jigsaw going to make $$$? Well, that was covered too. There are a lot of companies that don’t use the JODI partners nor are they members of the Open Data Initiative themselves. They still pay monthly subscription fees ranging from $25/mo. to a customized fee. The value of 10 million complete business records and the data for 1 million companies is pretty much incalculable. The way they got the data…different. They have a community of 450,000 members and many corporate clients who provide it in return for access to the data for free. That means that I can download my contact file to Jigsaw and get the data I want in return. Which of course, brings up the diciest part of their model. Not only don’t I think I have the right to treat someone else’s information as a commodity, I wouldn’t do it. It makes me uncomfortable to think about that. Does this means of collecting information work? Is it ethical? Apparently enough people think so to give them an astounding amount of data that they can provide for free or sell. That said, they are making some brilliant moves and while I have some doubts about their model’s long term success, I think they are poised to go up in 2009. And I think that their Open Data Initiative is a strategic artwork.

CRM Companies 2009: Really Simple Systems

This is one that jumped onto my radar in midyear and that I’ve been following ever since. This is tailored specifically for the small end of the small business market, and, as its name implies it is designed to be simple for small business. Not only is the interface an easy one to use, but the pricing model, business model and technology model (SaaS) are entirely coherent with simplicity and small business. Even CEO John Paterson’s attitude is coherent with the small business universe. He’s laid back, doesn’t sweat the large stuff - and believes that useful capabilities not feature/function overload drives customer benefit. Plus he’s got that extraordinarly droll British wit. When you buy Really Simple’s CRM service, you turn on the functionality you want (Oh, my god!) - and you can have as much or as little as you want. Of course, for those industry veterans out there, you know that this is shocking. Normally, you have to turn off functionality. The pricing is model is….different. It is $45/user - customization and installation cost included in that. If you have 1-4 users, you get the sales module. But they have all three of the usual suspect CRM modules in the portfolio. If you have 5-9 users, 2 of the modules; 10 or more - all three. If you fall short of the user criterion, you can have another module for your users at $45/mo - not per user - a blanket amount. The applications themselves have an easy to use interface and they have available the functionality inherent in any good SMB CRM suite. They are targeted at the 5-200 seat market and, at least according to themselves, they are the UK’s largest hosted SMB CRM provider - and they are coming to the U.S. in the very near future. Their future plans also include the provision of SOAP APIs and pre-built links to other hosted systems. I have to tell you, they may (though I need to hedge and say “may”) have the best SMB CRM application out there. It really is simple and yet fully capable. Big stuff for this company that numbers the British Library and Royal Academy of the Arts among its customers. I like them, I really like them.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft is hardcore marketing automation…so they say. They don’t have a lot of social bells and whistles. They do have a complete suite of marketing and sales tools in the realm of CRM, despite their best efforts to distance themselves from CRM earlier this year. They are absolutely solid when it comes to companies in the below 75 employees range. Probably no one better that I know in the market. What’s interesting to me about them is that they are also ambitious in a cautious kind of way and while not offering social tools to the 75 or less small businesss, they use them to engage the 75 person or less small business. They have an Infusionsoft customer community that is active and lively and engaged. They use the community to solicit feedback, to create opportunity for peer engagement and to create conversation or just let them occur. They use Twitter for customer outreach and to engage analysts and other influencers. In other words, a marketing automation company that actually drinks its own Kool Aid and does what it recommends to others to do. They have a young and solid management team and are poised to take off. One interesting aspect of their offering is that they see sales and marketing as extensions of each other - a unified duo. They might see it as marketing with sales subsumed. Others might see it the other way. Doesn’t matter at this point. I think they’re right about the integration of the two. In fact, in the new edition of CRM at the Speed of Light, I’ve combined the sales and marketing chapter into one after a suggestion from my dear friend and uberanalyst Denis Pombriant and a lot of reflection. Infusionsoft presents their SaaS applications that way. They have reasonable pricing and a substantial clientele to act as a foundation for their future growth. What I’m glad to see is that their earlier attempt to declare CRM “dead” is removed from their website. The reason I’m glad? ‘Cause CRM isn’t dead. They still claim they aren’t CRM but truth be told - they are. Once they clean up their message a little, they are going to go far - and that will come in 2009 because small businesses under 75 employees will like what they see.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

Masternaut adds satellite tracking to CRM software

By Bhavana Navuluri

How will the customers receive real-time information?

Mobile resource management company Masternaut Three X has integrated its satellite-tracking system with Microsoft Dynamics CRM software so that its clients can provide real-time information to their customers.

Claimed to be the first online CRM system with integrated satellite resource tracking, the hosted service is deployed as cloud-based service from Masternaut’s data centres. The service integrates with the entire range of Masternaut’s web-based services and Microsoft Dynamics GP ERP system.

Masternaut’s users can make use of the service to provide instant information to their customers about their goods deliveries or location of their workforce.

Martin Port, MD of Masternaut Three X, said: “Our real-time solution is a cost-effective answer to CRM that enables easy access to essential client information combined with embedded tracking so that businesses can keep their customers informed of their delivery or when they can expect an engineer on site, and so on. There is no need to go in and out of various systems to find the information they need as it is all accessed via a single interface, which speeds up customer response."

Leeds-based Masternaut hosts IT services on the client’s premises or at its own data centres. A Microsoft gold partner, it integrates Microsoft Dynamics GP (Great Plains) and CRM into the client’s business. The existing customers of Masternaut can avail of the new service without any additional installations or costs.

In addition to hosted services, Masternaut also provides vehicle & asset tracking service, mobile workforce applications, VisuLive business intelligence and in-vehicle services to its customers in public and service sectors, construction, and transport & logistics.

Masternaut’s customers include Harrods, Siemens, British Airways, Coca Cola, Trafford Council, Nottingham and Leeds City Councils, The Scotsman, ABB, GE Equipment Services and more.

Source:itservices.cbronline.com

CRM Companies 2009: LucidEra

Founder Ken Rudin and CEO Rob Reid are both CRM industry veterans with combined Oracle, Siebel, Upshot and salesforce.com senior management experience. So when they developed the SaaS business intelligence product they provide, needless to say, CRM was never far from their minds. That’s why, if you see what they provide, they give you lead, pipeline and order insight - all CRM related analytics and have three versions - one of which is devoted to salesforce.com and the other to Oracle Order Management - which of course is right at the heart of many CRM applications functionality. The other version, if you happened to wonder, is “Enterprise” which includes ERP and Excel spreadsheet data with the CRM data. So, the CRM pedigree here is strong. Their outlook is to provide considerably less expensive BI services to small and medium companies. They understand that because they are competing with giants like Cognos (IBM), Hyperion (Oracle) and Business Objects (SAP), that they have to be “different” - in a nice way of course. That means not only providing a basic model that keeps it simple for the SMBs, but also providing some business leadership in the world of BI so that the SMBs can begin to understand the marketplace and the value of BI. In fact, Ken Rudin has his own forecast for the 2009 BI world here. What makes their model appealing is that they know their market, they focus on it, and they provide services of genuine value tailored to the market - which means basic services that are meaningful - not a lot of customization. But its what the SMB companies need. LucidEra provides it and in a time of transformation, getting what you need to either participate in that transformation or weather it, is comforting. Watch these guys.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: Zuora

Technically, this isn’t a CRM company. But it is a SaaS-based billing and payments service developed by Tien Tzuo, the former Chief Strategy Officer at salesforce.com. So, after consultation with a team of lawyers and engaging a research team of hundreds, I’ve concluded that its within my rights to focus on them as one of the companies to watch in 2009. What they do is something that has even more value in a recession than it did prior to that recession. They provide billing (Z-Billing) and payment (Z-Payment) services to companies that have recurring payments models, whether that company is large or small. Currently, they are integrated with salesforce.com. But they’ve allied with Boomi On Demand, which has a technology that provides a pre-integrated capability with CRM and financial services packages done with one click from the web. Needless to say, (so I’ll say it) that pre-integration simplifies things - which then increases the speed of Zuora product enablement in situations when integration is needed. A smart technology partnership, and reflecting multiple smart moves that Zuora is making. Zuora is also well funded - recently getting a second round of $15 million, bringing their total funding to $21.6 million - with both Marc Benioff and Benchmark Capital among the funders - great names to have in addition to the money. They have a solid model, priced to go, fill a market need, are as easily integrated with other SaaS apps as can be and a great CEO who knows how to be one. I hope that they become a little more active in figuring out how to integrate with some of the SMB CRM vendors SaaS apps and I even have a thought for a new service related to it, but that’s left to another day. This day, I’m saying watch Zuora in 2009.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: Connectbeam

Somehow, which I will explain, Connectbeam has been successful yet stayed under the radar and remained cutting edge at the same time - roughly akin to me trying to juggle even one ball. Since they’ve been under the radar more or less for their existence, I’ll bring out my sonar instead and enlighten you as to what they do and who they are and why they are so important to the CRM 2.0 space. They provide an enterprise strength social collaboration application that comes in two flavors - a software only version and, the thing that puts them on my list - an integrated hardware appliance that can handle up to 150,000 users. The services are what you are likely to come to have expected from social software - industrial strength social tagging and social bookmarking capabilities integrated with ranking, comments, and ratings. They have hooks to integrate with Google, Sharepoint, Confluence, Outlook and Jive Clearspace. That means, for example when you do a Google search, not only will you see the search results, but also the related tags, the related bookmarks and the importance of the related content according to the “collective intelligence” of the enterprise/users behind it. They do this in an elegant way too, with some customizable capabilities, such as limiting the tag cloud results to the content that created over the last, say, three weeks. You can expand or constrain it. Connectbeam management has a good management team and board of directors behind it. Led by CRM (Oracle and PeopleSoft to be exact) industry veteran Puneet Gupta, they have also had the input from Web 2.0 legend Thomas Vander Wal. This meant they have what is likely the best social tagging engine that exists today. One thing that perplexes me, given the CEO’s CRM background is the lack of integration with any CRM applications since this set of tools and the integrated appliance is made for companies using CRM who want to extend to CRM 2.0, or, at least, add social tools/networks to their CRM toolbox. Their pricing is reasonable $29/user per year (yes, per year). Remember, if you’re wondering why so inexpensive, they are aimed at the big boys - large enterprises. That’s why they scale to 150,000 - because they can and they target those kinds of companies. Watch them. They will start to radar up (I made the phrase up) in 2009 - and they should.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: Helpstream

This is my paradigm company for a CRM 2.0 feature set. Para-digm. They seem to have it all together. They are the ones that I use as the example of the difference between CRM 2.0 and Web 2.0. They are my numero uno for explaining the difference between CRM 2.0 and Web 2.0 Their focus is customer service. They incorporate the social functionality needed to involve the customer community in solving customer service issues and also to monitor and capture the feedback they get from the customers. But to make it truly a CRM 2.0 application, they incorporate analytics, business rules and workflow to make sure that customer service activity in the community is not only monitored and analyzed (in a left and right brained a.k.a. whole brained way), but that the responsible company staff members are notified when situations appear - those situational responses are triggered and then flagged due to a business rule, workflow routes the flagged occurrence to the selected authority and that person is notified to take action in some way. Perfecto. But besides their well executed apps, they have a smart strategy - they are currently allied with Oracle and I’m sure they aren’t going to stop there. They would be remiss if they did. Watch these guys. They are what CRM 2.0 is. Big time up and comer in 2009. If any practitioner company has a brain.

CRM Companies 2009: InsideView

This is a company that just figured out how the world of CRM and business knowledge (not BI) intermingle when it comes to traditional competitive intelligence and the social information needed to know the customer. They have this kick-butt product called SalesView in three editions (the basic one is free, the other two are $99.00 per month per user) that draws competitive and profile information from some 20,000 sources ranging from Reuters to Facebook. But it doesn’t just provide that information to you in some unstructured way. For example, it can do what the folks at InsideView call “Connection Analysis” so you can identify who the key influencers are at the companies that you are targeting. So what? Social Network Analysis does that? Yeah, but not from 20,000 places including the oft used Reuters and Hoovers but also Jigsaw, Facebook, LinkedIn and a myriad of other social networks. It then actually does the analysis and provides you with an extensive view of who’s who. Cool, salesguy, huh? But it goes so much further - best target market sales prospects, repeatable alerts for events of interest or importance to you. Oh, it just goes on. Their very bright management team comprised of industry veterans like Rand Schulman, realized that CRM was a natural integration for these extended social services so they partnered not just with the usual - salesforce.com, but with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SugarCRM, Oracle (in their on demand incarnation, and Landslide (see below for Landslide). They are deeply rooted and involved. Their service is invaluable - and most of all is cool without being there to be cool. They are an incredibly capable provider of intelligence that sales and marketing folks can use - with a business and pricing model that works. What do they need to do better? I’ll let you know. Right now, they need to just keep on keepin’ on.

CRM Companies 2009: Zoho

Zoho - I’ve been a long standing fan of Zoho and saw their potential back in 2006 when they were first coming on the market. Before I get into them a little, I need to myth bust. They are viewed constantly as this startup making good. In truth, they are part of Adventnet, a nothing-like-a-startup and there are 600 engineers devoted to Adventnet products. This is a highly skilled company with a smart contemporary culture and a transparent, honest and responsive CEO, Sridhar Vembu, who, while I have some disagreements with when it comes to his public pronouncements, is, all in all, a refreshing change in his willingness to be actually accessible beyond a press conference or formal call and genuinely transparent regardless of the heat it might generate. Zoho has always provided a widespread and nearly complete collaboration suite. Originally consumer-strength and mostly free of charge, at the end of 2007, they announced their first “Business Edition” applications. They are web-based, not on demand per se, though they have a subscription model. Germane to us in these here parts, they have a CRM application - in reality, a sales force automation application. I have to tell you, it is functionally pretty solid. Its weakness, as with most Zoho collaboration and operational tools also, is that they don’t integrate that well with each other or with any other applications. The lack of integration issue seems to have been an issue that I fanned the flames of - though actually that isn’t entirely true. It was actually re-ignited by a comment from a reader of my blog Phil Hodgin in the above linked blog entry of mine - though I agree with him wholeheartedly. In any case, their lack of integration is addressed by Sridhar in this Zoho blog entry if you want to read about it. Shortly after the not-very-controversial controversy, Zoho announced Zoho CloudSQL, a first step really. It is middleware for developers that allows the use of SQL to access Zoho data in the cloud and is compatible with MySQL and Oracle’s, IBM’s and Informix’ flavors of SQL. A start at least. They have a staggering array of applications - enough to take up several more “pages” of a blog entry like this. What is important is that they get the social customer’s thinking and are geared to a future of “social customer behavior. Their combination of collaboration tools and operational applications is broad enough and now functionally deep enough and organized enough (See Zoho Creator and Zoho Notebook), lack of thorough integration notwithstanding, to provide a genuinely useful set of apps that small and midsized businesses can understand. While they are an astonishing open company and an honest one, they are not the greatest marketers on the planet and that is painful because they are up against the best in the software world in some cases. Beyond Sridhar, they don’t have a lot of traction when it comes to thought leadership and they need to invest in doing that or they will lose some ground. That said, they’ve graduated from the new kid on the block to the young adult making their way in the world successfully early on. They are currently an SMB player, to be sure; not an enterprise threat, but I wouldn’t put that past them someday.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: RightNow

RightNow - This company is a company that’s there and yet…almost there and have been that way for several years. I think 2009 is their breakout year if certain initiatives they’ve undertaken fall into place and they make sure that they manage their positioning around these initiatives well. They have been long established as the go-to guys for on demand customer service for quite some time. In fact, two months ago, Gartner positioned them as leaders in the E-Services Magic Quadrant, rightfully so. Unlike many of their on demand brethren, with perhaps the exception of Aplicor, they’ve penetrated the public sector deeply, an incredibly smart move. They’ve spent a good deal of time trying to position themselves and direct and redirect strategy. Sometimes too much and with odd glitches. For example, they bought the highly functional SalesNet in 2006 for $9 million (see this Phil Wainewright ZDNET 2006 entry for some solid analysis of the deal) and then tried to call it something that “improved the customer experience.” Not one of their better moves. Yet, they’ve moved to keep a focus, one better directed on customer experience as a core requirement of customer service. More recently, they’ve wisely begun to integrate some social CRM thinking and a bit of the functionality into their offering. For example, they have a tight partnership with Lithium since 2006 - which gives them the capability to provide threaded discussions inside of company-produced forums and communities. No longer just operational, they are beginning to integrate some quasi-social functionality - especially with the August 08 release of their on demand service (Their November 08 release is more geared to large scale contact center improvements and consolidated services). They have a pro-active chat function that tracks customer activity and when a pre-determined threshold is reached, a chat window pops up for the customer’s use if they so choose - based on the conditions of the activity. Additionally, they have a co-browsing function that pretty much sounds like GotoMyPC for tech folks. They added a single sign on customer portal that is primarily built around creating highly personalized services offerings that can be sculpted by the user themselves. The access is classic single sign-on. All in all, quasi-social and a great start. But Its only a start. But with CEO Greg Gianforte, who knows how to operate lean and VERY smart in lean times at the helm, RightNow could be a strong established up and coming (odd juxtaposition there, eh wot?) leader this coming year but like NetSuite need another year to mount up.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: NetSuite

NetSuite has had a consistent strategy that is unlike any other of its ilk in the industry. Led by the charismatic and hip CEO Zach Nelson, and the uberbrilliant co-founder and CTO Evan Goldberg, NetSuite hasn’t attacked the market with social features or been focused around innovation as its core. Its basic hardcore strategy has been to improve functionality so that you can do enterprise related operational work anywhere in the world in an on demand environment. They have been particularly focused on the upper end of the midmarket and have succeeded there very well. They have developed their One World edition that handles globalization and localization in one fell swoop in a rather effective way with a single interface. They went public at at time they should and even though they are of course affected by the recession, they are still in a strong financial position. They’ve fallen in the business platform pot like all their competitors. Unlike their competitors, though, their platform, NS-BOS is narrowly focused around developing industry specific applications - not just anything. Their pragmatic strategy has been historically part of their CRM applications, NetSuite CRM+, since day one with a core focus that extends back to their early days as financial software company NetLedger. They build their CRM applications around order management at the center. They are aimed at the upper end of the midmarket and squarely at SAP. They’ve even recently announced a “BusinessbyNetSuite” program for SAP customers to capture those customers who are exposed by the SAP Business by Design glitch. SAP needs to be concerned about NetSuite in this market. NetSuite is pragmatic and sound in their approach, they’ve had steady growth over the years and they try to not overstep their planned strategic boundaries. They are solid as a rock when it comes to their functionality. Finally, this is a company that knows how to market and communicate with the analyst community and press exceptionally well. Zach is a terrific speaker and a marvelous spokesperson in general for NetSuite - and a very, very cool, good natured guy. Mei Li, their SVP of Corporate Communications is not only known throughout the industry but extraordinarily well liked throughout the industry - not easy when it comes to cynical analysts and press and keeps the press and analysts well informed. I like this company and have for a long, long time. Yet, this doesn’t exempt them from what I see as some things they they need to do to become the breakout company they could, and I think it will take them until 2010 to do it. They still have some known customer service issues, though, commendably, they are working to fix them, from everything I’ve seen and heard. Additionally, I’ve always considered their channel program far too lean. Even with the excellent win of HP as a strategic partner, I don’t see rapid enough improvement here. This is an area, especially since they have a strong industry-specific focus to their strategy, that is absolutely vital to their future and its something I’d be jumping on right away and spending (their) money on. That said, they have some interesting partners - like Apple, CastIron and of course, the aforementioned HP. Finally, I think that they are going to need to start adding 2.0 functionality and I know from the horse’s mouth, that this is going to be the case for 2009. I have only one real complaint with them on the marketing side which I’ve always had - and this might just be me. I wish that they would stop their competitor attacks and competitive “we just won customer x from vendor competitor y” press releases and emails. Personally, I couldn’t care less who they took from whom, since I’m just as sure that the same vendor who lost the customer to them has taken one from them too. Win on your merits, NetSuite, which are formidable. I really have high hopes for them, but the things they need to do will take some time. They are a solid choice already, and always will be, but to get to the next level, they’ve got a busy year plus worth of work to do. But they are worthy of watching right now.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: SugarCRM

I have to presume you know who SugarCRM is. But if you don’t, they are the most successful (by far) open source CRM platform. They have a lot going for them. They have a smart business model - one that engages a 30,000 plus developers community called the Sugar Network (which appropos of nothing, is also the name of a network of 16 entertainment and beauty properties for women) to develop on the core platform. They are open source but they are not free when it comes to licenses. There is a free basic edition, but if you want functionality and tools worth anything you will buy either their on premise or on demand versions - which are competitively priced, though not exceptionally so. In the past, I thought they were overpriced and in fact, with “The Cube,” their standalone server solution - they were - though it seems to be a little better now. They have a savvy CEO in John Roberts, who while he isn’t the best rock singer in the world (kidding, just kidding….) is a great CEO and very smart business dude. They’ve made some really great hires, for example, Martin Schneider, a former analyst for the 451 Group and a brilliant one at that, who ostensibly handles analyst relations for them but does so much more (and is a damn good rock guitar player). They have a rather fluid corporate culture that really lives the “open source” way and doesn’t hassle too much about things yet is still accountable for success in business. With their recent release of the SugarCRM 5.2 platform, they overcame their glaring lack of social features by adding a small set of social feeds and what they call Portal Dashlets, which is basically a treacly name for enterprise mashup widgets - something being offered by SAP, Microsoft and many other vendors too. What’s most interesting is that they are offering “cloud connectors” which are hooks to any feeds of a LinkedIn, Jigsaw or Hoovers nature - in other external data sources to provide what would be a richer look at competitive intelligence. These are the technical links, not the actual feeds to any one of them. Finally, they’ve added Sugar Feeds which is a Twitter like (really more Yammer-like or SAP ESME-ish) way of interacting inside SugarCRM applications - and provides status, alerts, and notifications. All in all, a good start, though, of course, a long way to go. These make SugarCRM a company to be watching with a more intense look in 2009 than you might have in 2008. Where I still have some concerns with SugarCRM are that they are competing now as much as a platform as they are a CRM application suite and which one is the focus they want to give is not entirely clear. Their market message gets mixed sometimes, though they seem to lean to flexible CRM suite. I think. Also they have a partner program, that while miles better than it was a year ago, is still not competitive with their competitors. They have a ways to go and they will have to expend a considerable effort in building that, now that they will be oh-so-much-more-appealing due to the economic downturn. Otherwise, I can’t complain. Open source gets really interesting in economic downturns but I have to put a caveat here - its really interesting as a possible option, but it not only isn’t free, its not that cheap either. Just reasonable. SugarCRM’s competition? Maybe VTiger and Concursive….there are several others but I don’t see them as all that competitive - at least not as of yet. VTiger comes to you from Zoho/Adventnet so they have some market smarts and reach. But no one outreaches SugarCRM in open source. This is a company that has made huge strides in the last two years and gone from me occasionally glancing at them during 2007 to, as 2009 begins, staring at them. Time to pay very, very serious attention.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: Sage

For years, Sage former Sage Software formerly Best Software formerly SalesLogix was perplexing. They had a good product in SalesLogix for the small and midsized world - especially the lower to mid -end of that. No one doubted its functionality. They had a strong partner program - in fact as far back as 2000, their partners drove 86% of their SalesLogix revenue. They were attempting to provide some thought leadership in the SMB world, though I can’t say a lot. But some. All in all, they had been a player since the late 90s in CRM - and they’ve always been to some extent since. But there was something…off…. about them. It was never that hard to figure out what was wrong. Their strategies in the past had been somewhat pedestrian. They suffered an occasional serious misstep. They even attempted to play in the enterprise world at one point, though they dropped that and its architects within about a year of the idea. But at the high level, this ordinary strategies and a lack of vision - or at least, even an obvious vision - led them astray. For one, it kept them pitching ACT! as a CRM application. For another, it hurt their channel strategies because partners began to compete against themselves, actually pitting SalesLogix against their other CRM product, SageCRM in demos. Not only did I hear about this from others several times, but I actually saw it. It also kept their technology architectures a generation behind pretty much all the time. Not a good formula for success in a world where CRM was both rapidly maturing and then rapidly changing. As an example, when the world was moving to SaaS, they hung in there with client/server and threw up a sort-of on demand product that was clearly half-hearted. But something changed dramatically in the last two years or so with the emergence of innovators and visionaries like CRM General Manager Dave Van Toor. First, they made an really good architectural choice, that while different from the contemporary standard choice, a service oriented architecture, was still on the money for SMBs. That would be REST or what is now called WOA - Web Oriented Architecture. Their line of argument for that stinks - SOA is bad, use REST (see their otherwise very interesting Sage CRM 2010 Strategy doc) - but their choice is good. REST is the same architecture that its being used as you’re viewing this web page. Its simple and familiar and standardized - and perfect for the SMBs. For a good detailed definition of REST, see this one. But just a good architectural choice is not the only reason I have them in this list. They’ve also seen the CRM 2.0 world and embraced it at multiple levels. In SalesLogix 7.5, they’ve built in significant wizards for handling multiple tasks such as the import of leads to make life easy; they’ve got the means to create and use mashups, and an interesting timeline visualization that can be customized to view both internal data/events and external events, among many other improved and Web 2.0 features. They’ve developed an attractive mobile SalesLogix for the Blackberry application that uses location in an interesting way, with “who’s nearby” feature that allows you to find out which clients are in the same vicinity as you, in case you want to go visit them, I presume. I’m not sure of the actual value of that particular feature, which, while cool, doesn’t really account for the fact that unplanned client visits of the “sure, drop by because you just called me up” nature, don’t often happen, but the application as a whole is very good. Additionally, when they released the new versions of their CRM products earlier this year, they were able to offer something that is becoming increasingly important in the business world - anytime, anywhere connectedness - even if you’re disconnected. This is is easily the best part of their current CRM applications strategy. The customer gets a choice of on premise or on demand (their other CRM product, SageCRM, has a hosted version SageCRM.com) The experience can be hybrid (on premise mixed with on demand) and can be connected, disconnected or mobile. What distinguishes this particular part of the strategy is their idea of Context Aware Services - which lead to their anytime, anywhere workforce awareness which when you break it down is device awareness, user awareness, network awareness. Finally, in a move to clarify vision and strategy, they’ve shed the idea that ACT! is CRM. That is LONG overdue. Dave Van Toor announced on his blog that he is no longer going to have ACT! as part of his portfolio - “just” SalesLogix and SageCRM. Rightfully. This is what I mean. No longer a generation behind, this is going to make the formidable Sage, with a total (including its accounting packages) of 5.5 million customers and 15,000 employees and $2.3 billion in revenue - even more formidable in 2009 in the CRM market space they’ve carved out. Finally, Sage is talking ’bout my generation. Its about time.

CRM Companies 2009: Cisco

This is the company that’s the biggest surprise and the least surprise. For the last two years, the company positioning itself as “the human network” - and using one of my favorite songs in the world - Baba O’Riley by The Who (also used on CSI:NY) for the marketing - has been placing itself into position of being an all purpose end to end set of applications, hardware, software and process engines for engaging the social customer. Not only did they link up with Oracle CRM on demand via their WebEx organization in 2007, but they’ve been building and modifying a “Unified Call Connectors” for integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM or salesforce.com since 2006. But it goes so much further than that. Oh so much further. In 2007, Cisco purchases two social networking properties - FiveAcross, a socnet platform and tribes.net - more of a community aggregation site. These acquisitions led to their announcement at the end of 2007 of Eos - an entertainment operating system - that’s designed to deliver rich media experiences across communities. In February this year, The Sports Museum of America announced their use of Eos. Even better, the Yankees are using Cisco as the technology backbone to power the fan experience at their new stadium using some remarkable innovative future-looking fan friendly mobile, high def and interactive capabilities - which for me would be enough to declare them “king of the hill, top of the heap.” (who can guess what this refers to? Be Yankees specific please. The first one to leave it as a comment will get a free copy of the 4th edition of CRM at the Speed of Light when it comes out in August) But of course, sigh, that isn’t enough. But there is so much more to Cisco’s play. They have succeeded quickly with Cisco Telepresence - a phenomenally well done holographic sort of technology that allows meetings between any groups in the world from any locations in what seems to be projection a la holodeck. It has been wildly successful. Check out this video for a mindblowing look at it. But Telepresence and the Yankees, while incredibly cool, isn’t the reason they’re included. Under the aegis of John Chambers, they’ve organized their company culture and structure to make sure that each employee not only has access to management but are empowered to present ideas and follow through on problem solving both internally and externally. They have a democratic culture that actually is organized around innovation. They emphasize organic leadership for that innovation and encourage the use of social media and social networking tools to facilitate that leadership. They understand their internal customer - the employee - as well as they understand their external customer. Their number 1 ranked internal blog is about collaboration. The combination of this open and democratic culture, the positioning as a leader in the “human network,” the integration of Oracle CRM on on demand into their portfolio and their obvious interest in CRM via the Unified Call Connectors, their social networking acquisitions and how they’ve integrated them both into their portfolio and into their day to day corporate culture, and of course, we can never forget their dominance of the enterprise router business, position these guys as a company we could see emerge in 2009-2010 as a significant leader in social CRM. My only concerns in that regard are that as of now, these don’t seem to be part of a coherent strategy to be a leader in world of the “customer engagement” infrastructure. They are just pieces of a puzzle that happen to fit. So perhaps, Cisco is content with doing all this to be the #1 player in the $50 billion router business - and that wouldn’t be a bad thing. But if they seecan se how thewhole puzzle fits together (not just the pieces) and can present the vision - they could be a major surprise for the likes of SAP, Oracle, salesforce.com, Microsoft, etc. We’ll see, but watch what they do in 2009. If not what I think, the ride will be really, really cool anyway.

CRM Companies 2009: SAS

As large as the privately-held SAS is ($2.15 billion in revenue in 2007) and as great a place as they are to work (always among the lowest turnover rates in any industry and voted among best places to work by everyone), I had to hesitate before including them here - which might seem a little churlish. This is a company whose revenue went up 15% last year, more driven by partners than ever before. They increased their customer base by 1,100 - a great number. They consistently hit the quadrants in the Business Intelligence and in the Multichannel Campaign Management category as a leader, according to Gartner. So that would seem to be amazing right? But I still had to hesitate - though here they are. They To get into this list, I have to think that a company is going to play big time in 2009, and as much as I like these guys, I’m not 100% sure of that. But I am convinced enough to make them a tenuous choice. To their credit, They have three distinguished CRMish applications that are clearly excellent - their Marketing Automation application, which, while headlined by Campaign Management, is much larger than that. It additionally includes Marketing Mix Management (this is the former Veridiem, which had an office in an old warehouse with amazingly high ceilings in the Boston area, many moons ago) Marketing Performance Management, Web Analytics and a host of others; their Customer Experience Analytics are smart and capable While not terribly pretty, the interface is more than serviceable. They even have a whole series of products including marketing automation, marketing mix management and business intelligence that they offer on demand. They have staff members who are both incredibly smart and incredibly personable. Some of the more “radical” among them are making prodigious and good use of social tools like Twitter & Facebook for more than personal reasons - and doing their company a service. They have Better Management.com, a well organized highly practical site with “what to do’s” everywhere including a Web TV show called Better Management Today that I’ve happily appeared on twice. But I have this nagging problem that I’ve had for years with them. I have heard for years that they are changing their marketing approach and positioning to suit the actual marketplace and not the imagined one they have - which seems to be one left over from William H. Whyte’s “Organization Man” of the 1950s and maybe the early 60s. Watch Madmen on AMC if you’re not old enough to remember the era. I just don’t see the necessary changes in their marketing strategy or even creative work. About two years ago, I was in a meeting at SAS where I saw a highly original & creative product of planned changes to their marketing which only got crushed up the chain somewhere. This year I didn’t see anything that told me that they’re fully adopting to contemporary marketing requirements - which, when it comes to a technology company riding a wave that the customers control, can become a serious problem. That said, they still are a company that operates on the strength of its products and the viability of its environment - and for that alone, they make the list - this year.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: IBM

IBM has always been a player in CRM - but through IBM Global Business Services, their consulting arm, not their software or applications groups. Their CRM applications built on Lotus Notes, were, to be charitable, so-so. That’s really charitable. But, I think we’ve pretty well established that CRM has changed dramatically - at least in my Hollywood-stricken eyes. We’ve moved from customer management to customer engagement as the means to provide the experiences that customers are now looking for from companies. That means when it comes to the supporting technology, IBM is in good position, because social software becomes increasingly important to the software schema that CRM applications should be providing. This is where IBM does itself pretty proud. They’ve innovated with the only social software full suite on the market - Lotus Connections and, with the release of version 2.0, got it right - notwithstanding an odd design decision or two (like for example, why they’ve chosen what I have to call a truncated wiki like collaboration space called activities when a wiki service would probably do what activities do and allow for more. Just because they used activities in their own work environment doesn’t make it the commercially correct thing to do). But, honestly, a feature quibble isn’t that big a deal - given how far IBM has come over the past two years as super-player in what is the new Social CRM/CRM 2.0 space. One of their greatest strengths has been a long standing one. A powerful global CRM consulting group stretching from the U.S. to India to Colombia to pretty much everywhere else on the planet. Their CRM practice is not only among the best in the consulting world, but has a voracious appetite to stay on top of trends and practices and on top of the market. Plus, IBM HQ has a number of corollary organizations devoted to innovation, change and thought leadership that make it a highly visible, outspoken institution. For example, they have the IBM Institute for Business Value or the Institute for Electronic Government. More germane to CRM and further proof that that IBM GBS gets it, in September 2008, IBM launched a CRM Center of Excellence for SaaS. Around the same time they launched the Center for Social Software. All of this is part of their Tomorrow at Work initiative - a brilliantly conceived look at how the future of business and work is going to look. A month later a Cloud Services Initiative was launched. Internally they use hundreds, maybe thousands, of blogs and wikis, communities and rich media to carry out their daily business on a collaborative basis. There is no stopping the institutionalization of thought leadership and innovation at IBM. But the development of a solid though a wee bit flawed social software suite in combination with their CRM consulting expertise, is what starts IBM catapulting to the top of the CRM pantheon. Is this a perfect scenario? No. The integration of CRM and social software at IBM is still in the hands of IBM partner iEnterprise who announced the integration between Connections and iEnterprise’s CRM software in September. That has to be corrected. For them to lead the way in the concrete world of CRM 2.0, their internal integration of the social apps with the CRM offerings of their global consulting group - be it Siebel or SAP or Oracle or some new and better Lotus Notes-based CRM application - is a necessity. The theoretical foundation will be there in the new releases of Notes and Domino expected to be out in the near future which is supposedly will be fully integrated with Connections 2.0. But CRM will be the kicker for them, not the social tools. For IBM to play at the level they normally do elsewhere and be mentioned in the CRM-smelling breath with Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and salesforce.com, they have to take their usual lead and make sure they have those integrated tools to offer and to use. They have everything else.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: Microsoft

Case #1: Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 was a major, important and smart step forward for Microsoft. When they announced it at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver in 2007, they also announced their software + services initiative and their “single code base” approach for the on premise and on demand version of Dynamics CRM. Additionally, at the same time, they announced aggressive pricing for the on demand version that was so aggressive that it could catapult them into competition with salesforce.com. It was exciting. Very exciting. Brad Wilson, a 4-time winner of CRM Magazine’s award for one of the most influential in CRM, drove the initiative and remains one of the smarter leaders in the field. The momentum was there. Then it died. Case #2: I sit/sat on the Board of Advisors of Microsoft Surface, the multi-touch technology platform and device that Microsoft announced at the end of 2007. This was innovative, valuable technology and at the time they were planning it, Apple, via the iPhone and a couple of others were in the arena, but not many else. They had some real possibilities of momentum here. Then it died. Case #3: The push around Social CRM/CRM 2.0 is in full swing. Microsoft was positioned well with 1. their cash 2. their entry into cloud computing with Microsoft Azure(see ZDNET blogger par excellence Mary Jo Foley on this) 3. the software plus services on initiative; 4. a very strong CRM ISV program - with some remarkably cool and useful 2.0 applications built on the Dynamics platform from their ISVs. They had a great chance to seize some serious market momentum around CRM 2.0. They didn’t. Case #5: At the 2007 Copenhagen Microsoft Convergence last year, they announced an aggressive focus on industry specific applications for their Dynamics CRM efforts with aggressive support for their partners. Unlike anyone else in the industry that I’ve found, any partner that developed an industry specific on demand CRM application and hosted it, would be able to keep most of the revenue from that. No one else does that. NO ONE. What’s happened to that? I don’t know. What I hear about innovation at Microsoft, for example, is either through conversations I initiate or by reading a Fast Company article on the iconoclastic Gary Flakenstein, from Microsoft Live Labs. Or something on Ray Ozzie leading Microsoft into the promised land. That’s about it. This is a company who could be at the top. They have a solid application with Dynamics CRM 4.0 - aimed at the small and mid-sized business market - with SFA and customer service as functionally good as you can get. Marketing functionality is average but is as good as anyone else’s - marketing automation 1.0 or 2.0 is weak for the most part when part of a CRM suite. They have a terrific operations guy with some strategic smarts in Brad Wilson. They have a great staff. Their PR agency is good. The strength of their partner ecosystem and ability to manage the most complex and largest partner ecosystem (not a channel in their eyes) in the world - over 600,000 partners of varying stripes and hues is superb. They are the best at this bar none.But they seem to lack two things - and they are severe lacks. They have NO apparent coherent vision whatever. My complaints about SAP in that regard pale by comparison here. If you can give me a clear CRM vision, - a semblance of any CRM vision, please comment somewhere on it. I scratch my head to baldness on this one. Not only that, they have no real CRM 2.0 strategy that I can see. They claim collaborative “stuff” with Sharepoint. Let me say this. Big installed base or not, Sharepoint is NOT, I repeat is NOT, a very good product and lacks the elegance and flexibility that is needed in the collaborative platforms of this era. No more on that now. The second problem is their constant long standing one - one arm has no idea what the other is doing. I always hear “oh, well, they’re a very big company.” Nonsense. So is Oracle and SAP and that isn’t the universal complaint about those companies. This is something that needs to be addressed.They have a great foundation to succeed and as a person who has been a supporter of theirs always, I hope that 2009 is the year they get it together. They’ve made themselves a player in CRM over the last few years. They’ve even started to catch up in the on demand side and made a firm commitment, rightfully to the cloud. Now is the time for them to step up with a vision - and make sure that other parts of the company, the industry and the general public knows about it. I’m presuming that there will be a Microsoft Dynamics CRM 5.0 this year with some social features integrated and community-based functionality. Just don’t claim that Sharepoint integration is the answer to that. They’re better than that.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: SAP

For very different reasons, this was another company that 1.5 years ago, I would never have included in a CRM leadership category despite their announced sales of CRM applications software. The application was kludgy, an afterthought to SAP ERP R/3 iterations of one form or another and it was ugly as sin. But I always liked the company, despite some notable tightness in their approach to business and life. I had seen it make some significant changes in its culture over the years to its benefit. Though Shai Agassi left, his contemporary thinking was still alive in larger pockets of the company. SAP Labs was doing some incredibly cool, though not very public things, such as combining structured and unstructured search and building some eminently readable reports. They limited it, at the time, for internal use (now part of their product engines) and all in all, they had a shot to be sumpin’, sumpin’. But SAP CRM was just so….bad. But then, (crank up the music, turn on the lights, set off the fireworks, start cheering) along came SAP CRM 2007 with a new Google-like very clean and attractive interface, the ability to develop and use enterprise mashups as widgets, improved useful functionality. The strength of this interface was so apparent to SAP that they announced that it would be universally applied to all SAP products across the board. And, wowzer, there is the promise of changes that are considerably more substantial than just CRM products. As great as the transformation of the CRM product has been, the fast-moving cultural shift across significant parts of the company - though not all of it - is even more remarkable - and is not temporary. This cultural transformation is tipped off by a couple of things. First, SAP’s unique approach to thought leadership, which is unparalleled in the industry. Second, the penetration through at least some of SAP’s pores of a collaborative culture - one that other 21st century businesses can learn from. As far as thought leadership goes, SAP has invested in creating a “Business Influencers Group” that has some 60 employees or so that has the sole job of finding, reaching out to and engaging in some way, business influencers in the analyst community, academic world, etc. This group is astounding in scope and capability and I think unique in the world of enterprise applications - perhaps IT in general. It is ably run by VP Don Bulmer. To add to this, they have a VP, Mike Prosceno, devoted to reaching into the blogging community for similar purposes. SAP’s commitment to mind share, not just market share, is genuinely staggering and entirely commendable. One example of how intelligent their approach is - they have initiated a series of webinars and forums on business leadership for the recession - what to do. This is not a “Buy SAP” thing. This is a “listen to business leaders on how to approach this downturn” thing. This is being done through their external facilitated social site, MyVenturePad, run by Social Media Today’s amazing Robin Carey. The other indicator of culture change - beginning in and around their CRM and mobile apps groups - was the development of their the mobile SFA application for the Blackberry. Not only were they collaborating with business partners, in this case RIM, and customers to develop products, but were willing to cede some control to those business partners and customers in order for all the participants to benefit from the value creation. Would that others would emulate this…sigh. The result was one very strong mobile CRM product (soon to be released). This is the best CRM application I’ve seen for the Blackberry to date. They don’t just talk a good Web 2.0 game either. They live it. They have two communities, SDN for developers and BPX for business analysts (in the process sense). They use all the social media tools. Are there problems with these social sites. Sure. But the scale is mindblowing. BPX is 350,000 and that’s the smaller of the two. SDN has 1.3 million developers engaging in collaboration and discussion. Innovation has been on their agenda too with both an internal industrial-strength Twitter-like product called ESME (enterprise social messaging experiment) something that ZDNET enterprise app guru Dennis Howlett was very involved with - and with a customer service 2.0 application that combines SAP, Business Objects application Insight and Twitter to come up with a customer service Twitter chatter monitoring tool. It not only locates the Twitter complaint or discussion about a flagged product or issue but also qualifies its emotional level (from love to hate or 1 to 5, so to speak) that, depending on the seriousness of the problem, will trigger specific workflow to alert the appropriate customer service “authority.” These are huge leaps forward, which I presume, will be eclipsed in a good way by the upcoming SAP CRM 7.0 when it’s released in 2009. But there are several things that could stand in SAP’s way in 2009 too. Their CRM vision remains murky at best - murky enough that if I ask you what that vision is, you wouldn’t be able to tell me, would you? That needs to be fixed now. But that’s not my primary concern. What is most disturbing to me - and their greatest impediment - is their falling further and further behind with the Business By Design business - whether they are falling behind by design or not. When they announced what would amount to an 18 month lag to this SaaS based offering back at 2008 Sapphire, I thought that was a serious mistake. I still do, but the way they are dealing with that is almost worse. Now they are saying that they’re concerned that BBD would be too expensive to them - via the loss of on premise revenue and according to Prashanth Rai, reporting on the late November Leo Aptheker attended SAP NY Roundtable, are almost pooh-poohing the importance of SaaS . Thing is they need to release it as soon as possible because in a recession, SaaS is going to rule the delivery roost and SAP will suffer if they don’t release a SaaS product. Their hiring of John Wookey, formerly of Oracle to run their SaaS enterprise offerings is a good start - but that’s what it is. A start. For another take on Business by Design, see Josh Greenbaum’s posting last May. Despite these issues, I expect that that SAP will be among the 2009 CRM 2.0 and CRM leaders with a brand new look and their remarkable thought leadership power.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: Salesforce.com

They have been genre-benders, innovators, and a marketing machine par excellence for the past eight or so years. They’ve planned on being the “Business Web for all your application needs” since 2003 and they have rigorously followed that path with their recent emphasis on Force.com a.k.a Platform as a Service and their drive around cloud computing. They win awards for what they do with incredible frequency including my 2007 Steppin’ Out Award as the company in CRM that made the most impact in 2007 - out of a total field of 82 companies and a finalist group of 6. They even have an excellent core sales force automation product with the AppExchange ecosystem, which they call “the ebay of business software” (pretty accurate) to support their platform in the style its accustomed to - especially when it comes to fililng out the traditional and not-so-traditional pillars of CRM. They have proven to be, as Denis Pombriant identified them back in the beginning, a “disruptive innovation” with their on demand subscription model. They have proven the scalability of SaaS with the first real large enterprise deployments at SunTrust, Merrill Lynch and multiple other multi-thousand seat deployments. They are truly an industry giant, even though they have by far the smallest revenue of the Industry Giants listed here. This year, salesforce interwove Web 2.0 functionality into their applications with their Facebook and Amazon services integration. Since 2007, they productized their community, IdeaExchange, and its now being used by successful UGC-driven sites like MyStarbucksIdea.com. Their vision (not their CRM vision per se) and road map has been as clear as can be. They want to be the the leader of the platform as a service market, and unlike Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff has embraced the cloud. This past Monday, they announced, among other things, their integration with the Google Apps Engine. They are a force (not .com) to be reckoned with. They’ve even made force.com, at least as of Monday, cross-platform compatible beyond just Google. As my colleague, buddy and leading industry analyst Denis Pombriant says, “this is cool stuff.” But even with all this love, I’m concerned about two things. With their growth, their apparent rate of innovation, something they have been known for since their inception, seems to have fallen off. Just to stop some of you right there, I don’t call cross-platform compatibility innovative. I call it shrewd, necessary and smart. But not innovative. I say apparently fallen off, because I’m assured by several senior management folks at salesforce.com that this isn’t the case - but I have to see that before I change what I write. If they are innovating and its not obvious to people like me, then the tree falling in the forest becomes the problem. Who knows they are innovating if there is no way to tell. That said, this isn’t my major concern. They have had one significant weakness for a couple of years now that they seem to have made no effort to correct and, in a world where the customer demand exceeds the grasp of any one company, it is a serious, short-sighted mistake. I’ll explain. As you know, it is remarkably difficult for a contemporary company to fulfill the complete and voracious needs of the social customer that is so empowered now. Consequently, it is more and more the case that partner ecosystems, not just a channel, need to be created to manufacture the appropriate environment that customers need to complete their personal agendas with a given company. No longer are just products and services provided sufficient to satisfy customers. What that means for the partner channel is that needs to morph into something far more complex than it has been in the past. It needs to go from a channel to an ecosystem. Microsoft, for example, with some holes, gets that. There is no one kind of partner anymore. Salesforce.com, of course, has its partner ecosystem in the AppExchange - which is both its strength and its weakness. The value of AppExchange is undeniable. A partner ecosystem that allows the partners who create applications on the salesforce.com platform to benefit from salesforce.com’s industry presence. The partners for the most part operate as ISVs who develop the apps and then sell them on the AppExchange market for a subscription fee on top of the salesforce standard pricing. That’s great. But where there is a weakness is something that I’ve heard complaints about and seen in action personally. Salesforce.com, for the most part, seems unable to distinguish between a strategic partner and an AppExchange ISV partner. They try to reduce ALL relationships to AppExchange applications. Want to partner with SFDC? AppExchange app. I’ve witnessed this approach personally twice - when two companies that clearly would have been strategic partners were told to “build an AppExchange app”, instead of what should have been a more substantial (and, at least from what I could see in the case of one of them, a highly beneficial strategic partnership) discussion. I’m not only a witness to it but have heard it from put-off potential partners too often to dismiss this. This is something that needs to be fixed and asap. I don’t doubt salesforce.com pre-eminence at all. I love the company for the most part and have enjoyed knowing the senior management and staff there I know. I think they are innovators and industry leaders. But they are running into competition now in areas that they owned and they have to step it up this coming year. There are things there that I’m hearing that make me think they will. I’m betting on it.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

CRM Companies 2009: Oracle

One of my new years resolutions is not to start everything on Oracle with “I never would have thought I’d be saying this but Oracle….” and then saying something good about them. They’ve now been good for a long time and don’t really (at least when it comes to CRM) need the qualifer. But, then this is still 2008, so… if this were a year and a half ago, I wouldn’t have made Oracle one of my top “companies to watch for 2009″ because I had nothing but contempt for them, but I have to tell you, despite some remaining weaknesses, Oracle might turn into the company to beat in 2009 when it comes to CRM 2.0 or as they insist on calling it, Social CRM. They have the clearest vision in the industry, thanks to the leadership of Anthony Lye, an underestimated industry intellectual and have an extraordinary CRM team to back that vision up ( n.b. FYI, I’m not saying this about any other division of the company at this juncture. We are speaking strictly CRM here. I still have serious problems with Oracle’s overall culture, though there are some signs it’s changing.). Their crystalline vision is built around a mix of Enterprise 2.0/Social CRM. That means it’s driven by “the company’s response to the customer controlling the conversation” and the impact of consumer thinking as it penetrates the business environment. They have a road map that adheres to the vision. They understand the value of thought leadership, not just market share. Their Social CRM applications are well thought out and they’ve made some serious progress with them. As of now, they have 3 that are at least maturing, if not fully mature. Sales Prospector, a social sales analysis that takes internal and external factors into account to determine the probable success chances of a deal based on both past customer success and external events and information pulled in. This is their highest risk application, because it depends on actual results with specific numbers that can be easily seen for being accurate or not. Sales Library, my personal favorite, uses social tools and user generated content like comments and ratings to pick out the best guess presentations and documents that a sales person would need to take to a prospect or client to close a sale. They also have another slightly more amorphous application called Sales Campaign. In addition, they are making huge progress in conjunction with L’Oreal on a more consumer focused social CRM product. It would allow mobile sales and mobile “someone like me” rankings, ratings and reviews of products that a customer might have an interest in. This is an iPhone application, a mobile platform that Oracle has a surprising and strong commitment to and that they nearly stand alone in terms of depth. At this stage, their Blackberry commitment isn’t that much to speak of. Finally, the undeniable. Siebel is just simply a flagship product for CRM and always has been and with their acquisition of Siebel, the flagship becomes Oracle’s. The recently announced Siebel 8.1.1 takes Siebel a magnitude forward. If you want to read more about that, and Oracle Social CRM for Sales “gadgets, read here. Oracle is one of the three contenders for next year’s top spot - if a “top spot” exists - and might even be the favorite at this point. Their announced going forward efforts will be in the mobile and on demand realms, so we’ll see how they deliver on that in 2009. The weaknesses? They have two. Their customer service applications from the social side are nothing to speak of at this point, though they have a commitment to changing that. Its just a matter of time before we see customer service apps that are meaningful from them. In the interim, they have a relationship to Helpstream, another company to watch, that probably has the paradigm customer service 2.0 social CRM application (to throw all the cliches into one line), which is at least an interim until they get their own or whatever Oracle does there. Their biggest detriment is the bigger company’s sales driven culture. I’ve seen little evidence of a universal customer driven corporate culture there, though the CRM group’s singular culture is highly customer driven. If the company wins out - well…I’ll have to break my 2009 resolution. But there are signs that the CRM group, especially now that we are in a recession, will influence the company more than it will be influenced. I hope so, because the commitment, passion and production of Oracle’s CRM applications promises nothing but goodness in the year ahead.

Source:blogs.zdnet.com/crm

Five questions to ask before launching a new BI system

No one would call business intelligence (BI) a new star in the technology lineup like, say, cloud computing. But technical advancements that let users build their own reports without the mediation of IT experts, an explosion in data and, yes, an economy in recession, have conferred a-list status on BI systems. In fact, Gartner Inc. put BI on its list of "Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009." BI also made the top 10 list of IT management imperatives for 2009 in the annual Society for Information Management survey of CIOs.

The BI solution of tomorrow, however, is not the disparate tools and dysfunctional processes that have torpedoed many a BI effort of the past. A BI system should give users new capabilities and help build an "information-centric" enterprise.

BI done right is expensive and complex. Two analysts who chew on BI issues for a living offer up suggestions as to what CIOs need to keep in mind as they plot their BI agenda for 2009. Here are Bill Hostmann of Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc. and Chris Howard of Midvale, Utah-based Burton Group on five questions to ask about your current strategy before you take on a new BI initiative.

How good is the data?

Unfortunately, data management strategies, unlike fancy interfaces or distributed computing, have gotten the short end of the stick for the last 10 years, Howard said.

"Data management is complicated because data in most large enterprises is such a mess. It is easy enough to generate reports, but data without effective data management is rarely information in the larger sense," he said. "If the intention with BI is to drive business decisions, then the data exposed by BI must be of high integrity." He said in his view, the aim should be to get as much data exposed to XML as possible and run XQuery on top of it.

But, he added, you don't have to perfect data management to start on BI. "It's not like you have to eat all the peas on your plate before you move to the turkey."

Poor data quality will lead to poor decisions, Hostmann agreed. Organizations must establish a process or set of automated controls to identify data quality issues in incoming data and block low-quality data from entering the data warehouse. Implement the process using custom code, data quality technology, paged data integration tools or a combination of these.

Remember, data quality cannot be solved by the IT department with a tool. Hostmann said business users must be engaged to determine what is "good enough" in terms of data quality. And don't mistake data accuracy for relevance. That leads to the next big uh-oh.

Is the data transparent?
Whipping data into shape means having expert data modelers who also double as "great ambassadors," Howard said. "They're going to spend most of their time working with the business guys who understand how the data is intended to be used."

You need strong executive leadership to drive the business lines. "The biggest problem with BI has always been getting the business lines to agree on what can be made common," Howard said. Private wealth bankers tend not to want to share with the company's retail bankers, for example. From an infrastructure perspective, it is important to try to normalize that relationship.

Hostmann called the phenomenon "managers dancing with the numbers," flaw No. 2 on his list of BI mistakes.

"Managers don't want other people to look at their numbers. They talk about compliance and governance, valid reasons. But generally they like the opportunity to spin the numbers themselves. They don't want to have transparency by a dashboard or scorecard or report. They want to go into the monthly executive-level meeting with slides and dance their numbers."

Do your company a favor. Transparency correlates with better business performance. It's up to the business to say those monthly review meetings will be based on the following sets of questions and the following sets of data. Find strong business sponsors who believe in a fact-based approach to management and IT people who can map agreed-upon metrics to the data, Hostmann said. Managers who don't agree that is the right data should get the opportunity to fix it. "And that is the best way to get to data quality."

How many platforms do you have?

Many of the big vendor packages -- Oracle Corp. or SAP AG -- come with a BI solution. As a result, "you unwittingly end up with multiple BI solutions in your infrastructure that don't work well together," Howard said. "The issue becomes how do you create an uber-BI that gives you a consolidated view of all your processes and transactions."

Hostmann said enterprises often mistakenly assume that the best option is to buy a BI system from their standard ERP vendor. Indeed the error is one of the "nine fatal flaws" Hostmann and colleagues urged clients to avoid in their research report on BI published earlier this year. ("The first fatal flaw: believing there are only nine fatal flaws," Hostmann joked.)

There is plenty of pressure to go with the standard vendor. The CFO who authorized millions of dollars for ERP may balk at spending more for BI and corporate performance management tools. But "one-stop shopping" doesn't necessarily lower the total cost of ownership, Hostmann said, or deliver the best fit for your enterprise's needs. Determine which BI functions are delivered by your enterprise application vendor and compare these functions with those offered by other BI system vendors.

Who's gonna pay?

After you've shelled out for your BI software, expect to pay three to five times that in implementing it. Business intelligence is expensive, another reason for taking full measure of the political implications tied to this business initiative. Implementing BI involves multiple IT initiatives, as mentioned, and more than a dozen business and IT managers. Gartner strongly recommends that organizations form a BI "competency center" that brings together the business user, analysts, data specialists, executives and business sponsors to build a coordinated BI program and a set of projects that deliver on complex workflows across a lot of undefined economics.

"Here's IT building out this thing. Is it just peanut-buttered into the IT costs? Who's going to pay for these efforts that are not typically defined on any type of budget," Hostmann said. BI has not been widely accepted as the cost of doing business, on par, say, with the preparation of a departmental-level budget.

Hostmann said the most successful organizations he has seen typically have someone at the CFO level who decides that answering the dozen or so questions about the operational side of the business is as important as analyzing the financial side of the business and signs off on the money.

Why invest in BI now?

Budget constraints make it likely that your project load for next year will decrease. Use the free time to tidy up the infrastructure and harden up your environment to prepare for the upturn, as well as what many believe will be a more stringent regulatory environment. Good BI is critical for not only helping companies understand what they are doing, but also for providing accurate information to auditors, Howard said. BI is also related to data center consolidation and virtualization, two cost-saving measures that many companies will continue to pursue next year. And that comes back to the data.

"In order to be effective with that, you again have to have data management to go along with it, and BI is a good way to inform that effect, to tell you where redundancies are and study the state of your data," Howard said.

Hostmann agreed that BI is critical to any number of business scenarios in this recession. "Let's step back for a minute. If you look at the business factors like emerging markets, liquidity of capital, risk appetite -- all of those things have dramatically changed in the last year. That means most companies' business models have changed on multiple dimensions, and that means that the information and the rules that they make decisions by have changed dramatically since last year," Hostmann said.

How important is BI? "We even go as far as to predict that a good 30% of the Fortune 1,000 are going to miss major changes in their markets and their business because they haven't made the right investments in their information infrastructure."

Source:SearchCIO.com

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How Microsoft plans to make its mark in CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM has become a key product for the company, according to CRM division general manager Brad Wilson--and it's an area the software maker plans to invest in further.

According to Wilson, when Microsoft earlier this year committed itself to investing $1 billion annually in the construction of new data centers to support the Microsoft Live portfolio of on-demand software, some of that sum--he declined to specify how much--was earmarked for customer relationship management.

Earlier this month, CNET News sister site ZDNet UK spoke to Wilson to find out how he intends to make that CRM investment and whether he thinks it will be sufficient to beat on-demand CRM leader Salesforce.com on its own turf. Wilson made it plain that, despite the SME (small and medium enterprise) bias that Microsoft CRM may have acquired, it is equally aimed at the enterprise.

Q: Microsoft has been in CRM for some time, but just how long?
Wilson: We've been in the CRM market for five and a half years, and have more than 16,000 CRM customers and more than 750,000 users.

Microsoft is investing more annually on data centers than the complete revenue of all the on-demand players--$1 billion annually. As a company, we are investing heavily.

How is that customer base made up?
Wilson: More than half of the business is international--outside the U.S.--and, although we started out as an organization focused mainly on the small and medium-sized businesses, more than half of our revenue now comes from large enterprises.

Salesforce.com is very popular, so how do you compete with it?
Wilson: We do and we have people who switch from Salesforce.com fairly routinely. But there are a number of companies that compete in this space and everyone wins some and everyone loses some.

What I like about our strategy is that Salesforce.com has a single operating model, which is that you rent it from them forever. Our software comes with a choice of either having an on-demand subscription offering or buying the software. If you talk to analysts today, they will tell you that, of all the CRM in use throughout the world, probably about 90 percent is deployed on the premises.

We want to give our customers the choice. Whether you want to go on-premises or to a cloud-based offering, the choice is yours.

Does this mean you don't find the cloud particularly valid?
Wilson: It is not so much that--and this is a somewhat controversial view--but I don't really care. I have an agnostic model: if you want to buy the CRM software, great; if you want to go ahead with on-demand, that's also great.

For us, it is a single codebase. It's literally the same software running.

There is no difference between on-premise or on the network. The only difference is how long your network cable is. I think sometimes people get too caught up in it. The world is not really binary.

What new products are coming up?
Wilson: About 11 months ago, we shipped our CRM 4.0, which is a fully multi-tenanted system that you can deploy from outside the cloud.

What we announced (earlier this month) is a new set of accelerators for CRM 4.0 (on sale December 1). These are extensions to the core system so that, when you add them to CRM 4.0, they offer capabilities such as e-service for handling Web cases. This lets customers submit cases online and check things such as status very easily.

What do you mean exactly by "cases"?
Wilson: Well, if you have a broken fridge and you want to contact the retailer or manufacturer, then you can go to the Web site and that will submit information that will flow into the CRM system and then trigger a workflow.

So e-service is really that Web interface to customer services, as opposed to the call center. What we provide is the data and the workflow to support e-service scenarios.

Another one is extended sales forecasting, which is a way to lock and manage forecasts that goes deeper than the usual sales-automation facilities.

There are new analytics in business intelligence; sales methodologies. And then there is enterprise search integration through SharePoint.

But are these new?
Wilson: We talked about them at our partner conference back in July in Houston but...we haven't had a customer launch before (this month).

So presumably these are intended to deal with the view that Microsoft has not been in the CRM market very long and that, to understand and execute sophisticated CRM, you need a specialist supplier?
Wilson: The wildly less popular ones? The ones that have had staggering adoption problems over the past 10 years? I think there is really a philosophical difference (between Microsoft and those suppliers). We are not going to give you a gigantic list of features. You know how you want to run your business.

So, for us, user adoption is key. If they (the users) are not going to use the system, you are pretty much guaranteed a failed deployment.

We give you enough flexibility so that you can run the system how you want to. So I find we will beat a classic offering from your CRM vendors on end-user adoption and platform flexibility. Those factors will far outweigh the fact that other people have more prebuilt stuff.

We went into a sales opportunity against a classic CRM vendor and measured its software. Out of the box, its software had only a 7 percent fit (only 7 percent of the software could be run without modification).

When you think about it, it is very difficult to sit in Palo Alto...and design something that is going to fit any business--a system that will work with every business in the world, whether it is in Turkey or South Africa. So the key now is flexibility. How easy is it to add the stuff we need?

I think the old model of 10 years ago, where you built a system that had a big slab of stuff that you had to adopt, has gone.

At the same time, we will still bring out our accelerators with pre-packaged software, and more and more of them. But we release them as open source. The idea is that we just put this stuff out there and let people use it. And, if our partners use it, all the better.

So are these products free?
Wilson: Yes.

But you are charging people for the software.
Wilson: You have to buy the core license but, once you have bought it, we are not going to try and nickel and dime people for bits of process and functionality. We don't believe in that.

We are taking the approach of wanting to make CRM much more affordable. Affordable in terms of TCO (total cost of ownership).

Part of that is in the core. We think we've done a pretty good job there and we keep adding pieces of incremental value through the accelerators. Even in the on-demand space, we want to go in and make it more affordable. CRM in on-demand tends to be relatively overpriced. So we want to make that price come down.

How do you charge? It is on a license basis?
Wilson: We have a server price and a user price--what we call a server license and a client-access license. The server price is nominal, relatively low and doesn't tend to go up. The primary driver of price is how many people use it.

Colin Barker of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Energizer says Microsoft's a great host

One might think that as a CIO, it would be tough to have someone else running all of your desktops and many of your servers.

Not so, says Randy Benz, CIO of Energizer. For more than three years, Energizer has handed off much of those duties to Microsoft. And he'd be fine with Microsoft running just about everything, save perhaps for the company's iconic battery-powered bunny.

"If I never run another server in there for the rest of my life, I'm as happy as can be," Benz said over lunch last week following the launch of Microsoft Online, essentially the company's effort to turn the Energizer experiment into a business.

Initially, Microsoft is offering to host only a few of its server products--Exchange and SharePoint, although over time businesses will gain the option to run most of Microsoft server products as a service running from inside the software maker's data centers.

So, one might reasonably ask what Benz and his team are doing if they aren't running all the servers and managing desktops?

For one thing, his group now offers a much broader range of computer training for Energizer workers. Beyond just teaching how to use specific products, Benz said Energizer now has classes for different types of workers focused on their particular role. One recent creation is a specific program just for road warriors.

"It cuts across products," Benz said.

Of course, businesses that don't want to handle the more mundane IT tasks have had other options for a while, such as more conventional outsourcing in which a third-party company comes in and handles things like help desk and server management.

The problem, Benz said, is it typically doesn't save much money. Any efficiencies the outsourcer gets because of its expertise are offset by its profit margins.

By having Microsoft run its software from its own data centers, though, Benz figures that it will have enough scale to actually be more cost effective.

Not everything that Microsoft has been doing with Energizer is going to be offered broadly. But, Benz said, that has more to do with the fact that some of the things aren't good businesses for Microsoft, as opposed to the fact they didn't work out for Energizer.

"There's nothing we've done that I'm disappointed in," he said. Rather, he is looking to what he can hand over next. The two companies recently added a hosted business intelligence offering, something that isn't yet part of the services Microsoft is offering broadly.

Benz also knows the managed service route isn't for all customers. Even though it resembles outsourcing, he said it is actually more suited to customers that want to be on the cutting edge. Having Microsoft manage their software means that Energizer is always running the latest versions, for better or worse.
,p> "This has to be targeted at people that want to keep up," he said. "The reason we got into services arena is to avail (ourselves) of newer stuff."

One of the areas the company is looking at keenly, Benz said, is Microsoft's plan to offer Web-based versions of Office applications, the company licenses the full version of Office for every PC, but limits the number of PCs it gives out accordingly. Having a lower cost Web-only option for workers that only need light editing abilities might mean more workers get access to technology

"It may be a breakeven for us but we are reaching more of our people more appropriately," he said. "We'll revisit it when the products are out."

Microsoft has said it will have technology preview versions of the Office apps will be available later this year, but hasn't said when the product will be formally released or when the business version might be available. For consumers, the Office Web apps will be part of Office Live, while businesses will be able to provide access as part of Microsoft's SharePoint server software.

Source:news.cnet.com

Microsoft Readies Dynamics NAV 2009 Apps For Midmarket

Microsoft unveiled Dynamics NAV 2009 Wednesday, a long-awaited upgrade of one of the vendor's key midmarket ERP application suites, and will begin shipping the product on Dec. 1.

Kirill Tatarinov, who as corporate vice president of Microsoft Business Solutions manages the vendor's Dynamics application lines, made the announcement in a keynote speech this morning at the Convergence 2008 Copenhagen conference in Denmark.

Topping the list of enhancements in Dynamics NAV 2009 is a set of tools and data access capabilities called "personalized role centers" tailored toward workers and managers in 21 job functions such as finance, purchasing, sales and human resource management. Microsoft has been adding such capabilities to its other ERP application suites, including Dynamics AX that began shipping in June, and Dynamics CRM 4.0 that was released late last year.

One of the biggest challenges faced by customers using ERP systems is how to get started using the right functionality in the applications, said Scott Brennan, managing consultant with Sikich, an Aurora, Ill.-based solution provider and Dynamics NAV reseller. "With the release of NAV 2009 and its new role-tailored client, we finally have a great answer for that challenge," he said in an e-mail interview. Those capabilities allow users to focus on the 20 percent of the application's functionality that they need to do their job and push the rest into the background, he said.

For the first time, Dynamics NAV 2009 fully supports Microsoft's .Net Web services architecture, a move that will make it easier for partners to integrate the software with their own applications and install it into customer IT environments, said Chris Caren, general manager of Microsoft Dynamics marketing and product management.

The software is fully integrated with Microsoft's SQL Server database, allowing users to use the built-in reporting and analysis capabilities to drill deeper into the data. It also works with Microsoft's Office SharePoint Server and Office Communications Server.

"One of the big topics in our industry these days is business intelligence," Brennan said. "Our customers want to be able to see certain business metrics without spending hours digging through a database or ERP system for those answers. NAV 2009 delivers on this concept and can incorporate those kinds of metrics into [their] daily ERP user experience."

Dynamics NAV is targeted at midsize businesses with between 50 and 1,000 employees and Caren said the vendor is particularly focusing on customers in retail, manufacturing, distribution, public sector and professional services markets. The applications compete with ERP software fromOracle, Sage and SAP.

Microsoft positions the software as a horizontal platform, leaving it to the approximately 2,000 resellers and solution providers that work with Dynamics NAV to customize it and develop applications for vertical markets. "We see a big demand for this new release, along with a big change in the user experience," Brennan said.