We Blog CRM

A bit of mysterious information in the reporting of a story of out Nigeria this week. Houston, Texas-based PassportUSA is making moves to facilitate the introduction of the Nigerian e-commerce market. The conflict of information begins with just how far along this implementation is. According to TMCnet, citing wire African News Dimension, PassportUSA is in an “advanced stage of completion” in their credit card project. A Business Day online piece of early in the week made it sound as though the PassportUSA / Nigeria agreement was a done deal. This source wrote that all that remains is for PassportUSA to choose one or two banks which will distribute debit cards. Under the scheme, PassportUSA would act as the processor of the debit card while local banks would issue them, and DHL USA would provide the shipping services.

Should the project see completion, it will “open the US market to the Nigerian consumers who at the touch of a button in their computer or lap top would be able to access about 3,000 merchants in the US to place order for their products,” according to press material. Nigerian resident have not, to this point, been allowed to have products ordered online delivered to their door (or indeed, into the country most of the time). Theft and fraud appear to be major concerned, but PassportUSA representatives have promised that the product will get “real-time customer support and care” along with “first class security,” fraud protection and all the advantages of CRM.

Another concern currently being ironed out among PassportUSA, the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Nigerian ministry of finance, is questions of banned goods. Again, PassportUSA believes that their CRM (now here’s a big contract in the making for a proper solution) will assist in the needed diligence. The system is scheduled for a July launch. PassportUSA also seeks to target burgeoning consumer markets in Brazil, Ecuador, Ghana, Peru and South Africa.

Well, everybody who’s even remotely interested in CRM and specifically SAP AG’s version of the service is in Orlando, Fla. this week for SAPPHIRE ’06 and the 2006 Americas SAP Users Group Annual Conference. Having already grabbed media and industry attention for its product launch - an interesting new hybrid of on-demand and on-premise CRM product known as SAP CRM 2006 – earlier in the conference, company heavy hitters CEO Henning Kagermann, executive board member Leo Apotheker and executive board member Shai Agassi broke out the philosophical ammo yesterday with the express purpose of describing “how the company will transform the business landscape during the next decade.”

Kagermann kicked things off early in the day at SAPPHIRE, speaking of how IT should be designed to support growth, a stand Kagermann sees as a departure from the “formerly prevalent view” which had IT merely as a driver of cost efficiency. The CEO imagines that his company can take things one step forward, as “the enabler of accelerated business innovation and operational excellence.” Kagermann went on to promise that SAP would address his three keys: the need to automate processes for speed and flexibility; the need to enable collaboration by integrating automated processes beyond the firewall with those of customers, partners and suppliers; and the need to “harness and amplify” the value of the knowledge worker. “In a new era,” said CEO Kagermann, “…enterprise software vendors must provide an evolutionary path to new technology adoption, not ‘rip and replace.’” Apotheker delivered a keynote address in which he hoped to demonstrate why companies must embrace enterprise service-oriented architecture (i.e. enterprise SOA) immediately. Thanks to globalization of markets (and in some cases, continued privatization), the consolidation and specialization of companies across industries, combined with the rise of business model innovation, are forcing companies to adapt their business models. “This,” Apotheker declared, “is a matter of being a best-run business versus an ‘also-ran’ business.” Soon thereafter, Aphotheker began pushing his company’s solutions.

Board member Agassi, doing double duty as president of the Product and Technology Group, gave a talk focusing on highlighting the move toward IT’s imminent embedding in business today. Again, SAP reps spoke of “the need to harness IT” and the importance of adaptation in the competitive sphere. In Agassi’s view, SAP is delivering simplified business processes. To back this all up, he demonstrated before a few thousands on stage a alternative graphic user interface for SAP software that promises to “extend core business functionality to greater numbers of end users.” Agassi also announced that SAP will migrate its entire CRM offering to their hybrid model by 2007. Aside from the obligatory product placement, Agassi’s keynote was to be considered fourth in his ongoing series of lectures regarding the future of the enterprise software industry.

The well-traveled Agassi has done episodes of his series in San Francisco, Santa Clara and Germany; later this month, he’ll be going to the City de l’Amour, Paris, to continue the talks. Again has SAP publicly delivered evidence of their bid to invest in all areas of the web-based service-oriented market. SAP representatives and high rankers have consistently spoken of fast-moving, revolutionary, evolutionary CRM systems and appear to be gambling on their unique philosophy. The SAP braintrust envisions a business world in which clients seeking to introduce CRM would start with an on-demand model and move to an on-premise model after CRM operations are built up.

Now here’s a claim for the ages: Lingo today released press material announcing themselves the first Voice over Internet Protocol provider offering unlimited calling in Mexico. It is certain that few VoIP offer such convenient plans to the land south of the American border, as the newly introduced Lingo Unlimited Mexico VoIP plan charges just under thirty dollars per month and an introductory month free of charge. And, in fact, the plan is not merely limited to Mexico, but provides free calls through a broadband internet connection to the Canada, Puerto Rico, the United States and the Virgin Islands as well.

Rockville, Md.-based CRM / 311 solutions supplier Lagan today announced it will provide its Frontlink solution to no small a company than the 122,000-strong city of Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford is the fourth American city to implement Lagan’s CRM software platform, after Hampton, Va., Minneapolis, Minn. and Yonkers, New York. (Lagan, too, makes specific use of a different meaning of “CRM.” When selling to a city, the company’s services are geared slightly differently and become “citizen relationship management.”) Specifically, the city purchased Frontlink software in the hope of providing easy access to all local government departments and services. The Lagan CRM solution supports a city’s existing call center by offering support in the form of a database. When a citizen phones in a complaint, the complaint is logged into the system. As in a business CRM, the complaint is tracked, with the citizen subsequently contacted when the issue has been resolved. Reportedly, 311 call centers are currently de rigueur, as public servants seek to provide their citizens with assistance in non-emergency issues.

Having a 311 numbers also eases 911 of the burden of many non-emergency calls. A few little tidbits about Hartford are provided in press material from Lagan: the state capital is also known as “New England’s Rising Star” and was once the home of Mark Twain. The city was also once the home of professional hockey, with a team known as the Whalers. Lagan was established in 1994 as a spin-off from Queen’s University Belfast, with backing from QUBIS Ltd. Lagan specializes in CRM solutions, principally for government. Lagan’s award-winning Frontlink solution promises a full range of functionality required by government. The firm has recently received kudos with its This appearance in the Deloitte Fast 50 for four successive years and a listing in the Sunday Times ARM Tech Track 100 as one of the UK’s fastest growing technology companies. Financially speaking, the firm has also been looking well.

To the surprise of few, Lagan was short-listed for the UK government’s Commuting BT Awards for Innovation 2006. In competition with over 150 entries form ninety-eight different organizations on the islands, Lagan is already large enough a presence in the UK industry – in April, company representatives were able to pop the corks on some champagne with the announcement of their ten millionth UK citizen served — to be recognized as top of their class in the nominations. Naturally, they were more than notable at the Belfast Telegraph Northern Ireland Business Award as well. And what else can we say to that but “cheers!”

Okay, so it doesn’t hold a torch to the infamous McDonald’s claim, but SugarCRM Inc. public relations representatives were as happy as a hamburglar with a handful of Big Mac to announce a doubling of its commercial customer base in the past half-year. The list of SugarCRM customers accumulated since the first release of Sugar CRM in September 2004 passed six hundred members in May. Public relations at the Cupertino, Calif.-based SugarCRM Inc. proudly proclaims that such attainment of customers so quickly “demonstrates a rapidly accelerating adoption rate” while providing SugarCRM with “a larger customer base than many proprietary CRM vendors” and that their customer base in itself no less than “marks a new milestone in the acceptance of open source enterprise applications by the business community.”

All grandiose claims and modesty aside, however, the SugarCRM record is impressive. Sugar Professional has made its presence well felt in the small- and mid-sized business market with their Sugar Professional and in the large market with Sugar Enterprise. Licenses for their software are available in packages of five to nine thousand seats. SugarCRM application deployment can be via installation, host or appliance. Some 500,000-plus users have downloaded Sugar Open Source, the core SugarCRM (and free!) application. Over two hundred extensions and other enhancements have been contributed by the development community and have been downloaded more than one million times in forty languages from Sugar Open Source online development forum SugarForge.org. And, along the way to SugarCRM’s Sugar Suite’s fourth generation, Sugar gained a reputation as the world’s leading provider of commercial open source CRM software for companies of all sizes.

As a demonstration of both its wide-reaching share of the market and adaptable applicability of its forum, company PR touts partner firms on its website such as international industrial product manufacturer The 3Sixty Group, which centralized CRM activity in linking fifty countries’, five offices’ and two continents’ worth of business with SugarCRM’s web-based architecture; information security consulting firm Prevalent Networks, which integrated the Sugar CRM application and added critical capabilities such as tracking of maintenance contracts; and public safety systems provider InterAct Public Safety Systems, who recently added key ERP and customer service system integrations that automatically push hardware purchases, service histories and other information to the SugarCRM database.

"Our CRM platform continues to be the most successful commercial open source enterprise application in the industry,” proudly says CEO / chairman / co-founder John Roberts, “and it is paving the way for a fundamental shift in the way that business software is developed and sold.” Backing up the seemingly audacious statements and thereby putting the company’s proverbial money where his mouth is, SugarCRM co-founder Clint Oram will be offering his perspective on a webcast entitled “Commercial Open Source CRM: Transforming the Enterprise.” The webcast will be taking place on Thursday, 25 May. Oram will be appearing with Evolved Media Network CTO / Publisher Bob Gatewood and athenahealth CTO Dan Woods. The theme of Oram’s comments will focus on how open source applications are “driving results in the marketplace.” A Q&A session will be included in the webcast. With all hyperbole and boasting aside for a moment, SugarCRM is not yet a McDonald’s in this business sphere. But they continue to roll, gathering no sesame seeds.

Non-profit and government Software as a Service provider Kintera Inc. announced financial results for the first quarter of 2006. Total revenue for the quarter was $10.7 million, up from $9.1 million of one year ago and $9.3 million in the first quarter of 2005. This revenue is greater than Kintera financial consultants had predicted at the end of last year. Before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and stock-based compensation, Kintera showed a loss of $6.5 million (eighteen cents per share) in the quarter. Though still a decrease, this represents a serious improvement over fourth quarter 2005, which saw a loss of no less than $9.4 million, or twenty-nine cents per share. Kintera’s net loss for the first quarter of 2006 was $9.3 million, or twenty-six cents per share. Operating expenses for the first quarter 2006 totaled $17.1 million, a decrease of $1.2 million from the fourth quarter 2005 and $1.4 million from the first quarter 2005. In spite of the negative news, Kintera brass attempted to put an optimistic spin on the result.

“Kintera’s first quarter 2006 earnings results reflect the company’s increased focus on market penetration and improving operating results,” Kintera CEO Dr. Harry E. Gruber said, a bit illogically, continuing with the claim / promise that “Kintera expects to have positive cash flow from operations for the fourth quarter 2006.” Perhaps to boost stockholder morale a bit, Kintera representatives also provided a rundown of some of the major moves made by the company in the quarter, including the launching of the firm’s new social CRM system, Kintera Sphere v.8, at the Association of Fundraising Professionals Conference; twenty-one contracts signed for social CRM, most in response to the new release; and three hundred new client organizations added to the Kintera clientele list. Kintera Sphere v. 8 is a particular feather in the Kintera cap, an enterprise-grade software platform that promises to provide a secure, scaleable and reliable CRM system, enabling organizations to drive all interactions based on comprehensive knowledge of constituents. Additionally, a new personnel addition was announced.

Rene Pharisien was named to the position of senior vice president of sales; he’ll be heading up Kintera sales organization in general. Pharisien’s résumé includes stints at 3Com, Epiphany Software, Niku Corporation and Siebel Systems. The Kintera forecast has the firm turning $11 million to $12 million in revenue for the second quarter, representing an anticipated loss of between twelve and fourteen cents per share. The firm can now claim over 15,000 accounts in the nonprofit, government and corporate sectors.

The Sapphire Customer Conference (now underway in Orlando, Fla.) is known for its product launches, and yesterday SAP entered the fray with an interesting new hybrid of on-demand and on-premise CRM product; a new version of SAP’s core ERP product was also releases. These programs and the concomitant publicity represent yet another bid in SAP’s attempt to invest in all areas of the web-based service-orientated market. SAP CRM 2006, to be available in the coming weeks, promises to allow businesses a choice between an on-demand subscription-based pricing model, an on-premise license model or even a combination of both.

“The whole idea is to give customers choice,” said SAP board member / customer solutions and operations president Leo Apotheker, sounding like a populist. According to press material, Apotheker envisions a business world in which clients seeking to introduce CRM would start with an on-demand model and move to an on-premise model after CRM operations are built up. Alternatively, Apotheker suggests, a business may prefer to run a single CRM application on an on-demand model and others on-premise; the SAPer also noted that the software’s single code base allows users to move back and forth, “which is an industry first.”

The new CRM suite, includes SAP’s new sales and marketing on-demand applications in addition to enhancements including financial services leasing and account origination, public sector grants management and life-sciences contract management. SAP also announced the global availability of mySAP ERP 2005 at the conference. This is the latest version of the company’s core enterprise resource planning software, which runs on the NetWeaver integration middleware. The application suite offers more than 300 product enhancements including improved management dashboards and new credit-management capabilities.

The twelve-month collaboration between SAG AG and Microsoft Corporation has entered a new phase with the official confirmation of Duet, a product that is promised to allow used to link SAP business processes with Microsoft Office desktop programs. The product is currently being beta tested in slightly fewer than one hundred joint sites. Originally dubbed “Project Mendocino,” Duet seeks to capture an audience of untold size just waiting to be appealed to with a simple-to-use product. The target audience is clear: Many millions use Microsoft Office; relatively few have access to CRM. However, duet should bring that all home to Joe User, once Duet is hooked in to enable access to ERP and CRM functions through Office. “Duet is a business mashup,” explained Duet tester and IDC collaboration and enterprise workplace research vice president Mark Levitt, using an odd choice of wording, “of Microsoft Office applications with SAP enterprise information and processes that can improve the quality and speed of decision making and workforce productivity.”

SAP and Microsoft are expected to offer Duet “value packs” before the end of 2006 for use in analytics, purchasing management, travel management and sales activity management. Also planned are frequent releases of what the companies are calling “scenarios,” which involves addressing a concrete area of company operations. Two value packs are planned for Duet. These value packs will expose five additional scenarios in Office coming from SAP applications for CRM and supplier relationship management. With the value packs, Microsoft and SAG AG promise to exploit the capabilities of Duet beyond self-service for employees and managers to enable operational efficiencies and cost savings. The packs are designed for compatibility with the next release of mySAP ERP and the 2007 release of Microsoft Office System, and will expand language support to include English, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. Olé, indeed.

Cognos Inc., known as the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced the launch of the Cognos Store Development Blueprint, a retail performance solution designed to assist retailers in effectively planning, managing and measuring the financial impact of store development initiatives, including new store construction, remodeling, refurbishments and upgrades.

The Store Development Blueprint includes features such as top-down planning to integrate finance, store development and store operations; analysis for development scenarios; consolidation features; forecasting and re-forecasting options; embedded workflow functionality; and, naturally, complete integration with the Cognos Store Operations Planning Blueprint. The software is designed to reduce time and risk associated with new performance management implementation, and promises to enabling businesses synchronization and coordination of financial and operational plans. The Cognos Store Development Blueprint comes on the heels on Cognos’ other industry-specific performance solution, Cognos Store Operation Planning Blueprint, which was released in January, and represents yet another feather in the cap of this heavily producing company.

In early May, Cognos introduced a pair of new products designed to assist pharmaceutical companies in improving clinical trials management and sample distribution for sales reps. The Cognos Clinical Trial Forecasting Blueprint is promised to help “pharmaceutical companies better anticipate clinical trial resource requirements and accompanying expenses in order to comply with FDA filing requirements.” And early in the year, Cognos announced a deal with business data quality product company Similarity Systems, in which Cognos and Similarity would work together to provide “enterprise customers with a range of products for analyzing, managing, monitoring and improving the quality of data within the Cognos platforms.”

Getting down to brass tacks, this means that Similarity Systems data quality metrics will be employed within Cognos 8 Business Intelligence; the latest upgrade to this product was released in March, thereby encouraging the addition of Del Monte Produce and Mueller, Inc. to Cognos’ impressive catalogue of customers. The firm now boasts a clientele which reportedly includes over sixty of the top 250 retailers in the world (including 7-Eleven, amazon.com and American Eagle Outfitters) and over 300 retail chains worldwide. Cognos customers can get the Cognos Store Development Blueprint as of the release date (today, 17 May 2006) is available immediately to Cognos customers, and the program will be on display for demos at the 2006 Retail Systems Conference and Exposition in Chicago next week.

On the human resources front, Cognos representatives announced on Monday that Les Rechan had been hired to fill the position of chief operating officer; Rechan will be responsible for international sales, services and marketing operations. He brings twenty years’ worth of experience from a virtual “Who’s Who” of CRM: IBM, Oracle and Siebel Systems.

PR representatives from Indianapolis, Ind.-based data infrastructure software producer Pervasive Software Inc. announced that digitalKnowledge Inc. has selected Pervasive integration solutions to tie in with its suite of service offerings. Using Pervasive data integration software that includes more than 150 application and data resource connectors, the professional services firm can now help clients view and connect disparate data sets, including architecture by Salesforce.com, or of COBOL, ESB and SOA formats. digitalKnowledge sales and marketing vice president Rob Cochrane used an interesting metaphor for his new brother in arms: “We view Pervasive as a weapon in our arsenal, our Swiss army knife that gives us the last mile of connectivity and enables our clients to continue to rely on us as their one source for all of their needs.”

Founded in 2003, Indianapolis, Ind.-based digitalKnowledge is a leading professional services firm that seeks to assist clients in achieving “an enhanced level of certainty in their business” through their CRM, business intelligence, knowledge management and web solution products. Perhaps most notable about the firm is its “pay for performance” guarantee, proving that the firm is willing to put its money where its mouth is.