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Another entrant into the CRM space. Agresso has been around for more than twenty years peddling its ERP wares to the mid-market services sector and it has decided that the time is ripe now for adding CRM capabilities to its product portfolio.

As befits its name Agresso has launched the product aggressively at a global level as a standard, on-site license or a SaaS offering.  The product is available as a standalone offering or as a part of the Agresso Business World enterprise resource planning suite. Agresso CRM is totally web-based and can be run on multiple databases, operating systems and mobile devices as well.

The new CRM released by Agresso is in line with the company objective to grow to a $700 million company by 2010. More products are to follow Agresso CRM as a part of the company’s BLINC offensive. BLINC stands for Business Living IN Change plug ins.

Looks like a likely partnership between two companies with catchy names. SugarCRM, which is one of the premier open source CRM developers out there has helped Geeks on the Way offer improved call center services. Geeks on the way, by the way, is a technology support firm based in Western Canada.

The self-proclaimed geeks provide technical support to residences and small offices and have had around 45,000 calls handled till date. When we consider that its 45,000 calls with 20,000 unique customers serviced then we know that these geeks are running a well-co-ordinated unit.

SugarCRM has helped the geeks to manage increasing call volumes more effectively by providing an integrated voice and CRM system. The open source technologies has made it easier for the geeks to integrate the call center environment with other technologies such as mapping technologies and the result is superior service and timely attendance to calls. Call handling time has been reduced drastically from 2-3 minutes to around 20 seconds. The open source SugarCRM
architecture also fits in nicely with the Geeks expansion and growth plans.

Clearly, Sugar has won over the geeks at Geeks on the Way and the company now plans to extend SugarCRM to other departments; it has already integrated Sugar with its accounting and e-commerce systems.

November 07 is the new version of RightNow Technologies’ enterprise class, on-demand customer relationship management solution. November 07 has several interesting features to help online retailers sell more and sell again. These include product catalogs and product information for customers, utilizing RSS feeds to tackle customer queries and propagating content simultaneously across multiple websites.

The most common customer questions are monitored and these are displayed as links to a knowledge base. The User Interface has been revamped. Features such as analytics, feedback, voice and workspace have been enhanced. The version is available in 33 languages. The CRM is also integrated with the Demandware e-commerce suite that offers product content management, promotion features such as click-to-chat, order tracking, and related functions.

Advances in communication have opened up endless possibilities and the increasing number of mobile devices offering browsing experience has caught the fancy of CRM vendors who are now exploring the many benefits that mobile CRM can offer. The most obvious benefit being that company employees can access CRM data on the move. So no more excuses for sales leads not being converted into sales. The mobile workforce is now in a position to access up-to-date data in real time and take decisions accordingly.

Compass Intelligence LLC carried out research to find out how mobile applications will fare in the coming years; its research suggests that in the U.S alone, spending on mobile applications will touch $9 billion by 2011, at present it’s around $ 4 billion. A fair amount of that money will likely be pumped into mobile CRM.

Go here to learn more about Chuck Dietrich’s thoughts on mobile CRM.

Amidst all the noise that SaaS is the only way to go a new report from Datamonitor, catchily titled ‘Decision Matrix: Selecting a CRM Vendor’ states that the worldwide spending on CRM licenses is set to touch $ 6.6 billion by the year end 2012. Datamonitor has developed a decision matrix to help businesses evaluate vendors on the basis of technology offered, reputation, and their impact of their products on the market.

Datamonitor’s top rankers are Oracle and SAP. The market research firm feels that these two giants provide the best solutions in terms of functionality, integration of CRM with upcoming communication technologies, flexible deployments, and a good mix of on-premise and on-demand solutions.

The chief competitors to the big two are Salesforce.com, Chordiant, and Infor. Waiting below this rung are vendors like RightNow Technologies and Consona. The space will get further crowded if Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 finds takers. So, basically these are interesting times for the CRM space.