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