We Blog CRM

Open source has significantly altered the tech landscape in that the space is now more open to new ideas and collaborative effort. The spread of open source has also made it easier for smaller companies to deploy technology for boosting business. The CRM business application space has also benefited from the competition that open source vendors are providing to the established behemoths. Open source CRM products like those from Daffodil and SugarCRM are capable of matching established proprietary software in terms of functionality and integration. Commercial open source has developed an excellent support system for its customers.

The CRM space is divided into three main spaces, designated by the size of customers. Enterprises are serviced by the larger players that cater to several industry verticals and provide domain-specific features. Their drawback has been the high costs of licensing and the surfeit of features of which only a selected few are used regularly. SMBs are catered to by another set of CRM vendors that promote their focused set of features as their strong point but vendor lock-in is an issue here. The third category is of businesses that prefer the SaaS route to CRM to escape licensing fees. However, factors such as an increase in the TCO with time and external data ownership are issues with SaaS.

In such a scenario, open source CRM is an attractive option as they offer a broad range of core functionalities and cover several verticals. Open source CRM is particularly well-suited for SMBs that wish to test the CRM waters before taking any major policy decisions regarding the deployment of a CRM solution.

An excellent piece here on the open source angle to CRM.

Corporates are discovering that wikis make handy tools for sharing information and for collaborating during internal projects. According to the Society for Information Management’s Advanced Practices Council (APC), these editable websites are fast becoming a part of mainstream corporate IT infrastructure.

Companies that intend to make use of wikis should consider the following aspects so that the communication and information exchange occurs in an open and responsible manner within the framework laid down to ensure that sensitive company information does not fall into the wrong hands.

• How are the wikis being used at present across the corporate world?

•  What are the best practices that have evolved? Are they business-specific?

•   What are the hurdles?

• What do you plan to achieve by deploying wikis?

• Consider integration with other company communication and collaboration tools

Go here to learn about strategies that can help you derive maximum benefit from deploying wikis.

A new report, this time from Forrester Research, has found that companies that companies that have implemented CRM need to do a rethink on their strategy processes if they are to realize more benefits from the solution implemented. Factors necessitating a change in strategy include the growth of SaaS and a consolidation of vendors. Basically, the report says that companies need to continue investing in CRM in a selective manner and at the same time focus on optimizing their front-end customer-facing processes.

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Apparently, it is an effort by Boomi to integrate SaaS and on-premise software such that companies can extract maximum convergence from diverse applications and generate a healthy ROI. Integration is the key and an essential element in today’s application driven world where different technologies running on different platforms offer the same services. They may also lead in specific niches and have significant market shares. This forces companies to look out for devices that can enable disparate applications to communicate with one another. This in turn enables people to access data and information from anywhere using a range of devices. So, basically what companies like Boomi do is to enable businesses to execute their operations without being constrained by disparity in storage devices and assorted software; in doing so enterprising vendors are doing their bit to shrink the world and we are increasingly becoming inhabitants of a global village.

Where Boomi differs from the rest is in its efforts to integrate via the on-demand route. Boomi hopes that companies will appreciate the salient features of on-demand integration. The Boomi product is now available globally after an exhaustive beta testing that involved more than a 100 small and big companies. With Boomi, you can link almost any SaaS package with an on-premise application without investing in expensive software or hardware appliances that demand both space and financial resources. Boomi is in collaboration with established SaaS players such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite. It’s a win-win situation for Boomi and SaaS vendors such as Revionics, Intacct, SmartTurn, and OpSource who hope to make use of the Boomi product to facilitate better communication and data transfer between their product and other on-premise software.

A report commissioned by Royal Mail has found that a staggering 90% of the companies in the UK are not making the best use of customer data at their disposal and in the process they are collectively losing out on millions of pounds in sales. A little more effort on part of the companies in understanding the customer data at their disposal could lead to a 30% increase in value.

According to Colin Bradshaw, head of data strategy at Royal Mail, hardly 15% of the companies that they investigated considered their data to be a valuable intangible asset. But not everyone is in favor of assigning a value to data; the question raised by some people is that how does one assign a value to something as intangible as data. Yet all agree that data needs to be managed better if it is to be of more use as information. Most companies err in using overly simple statistical methods to understand data and they do not use data for running most of their applications.

LogicBright, the latest player in the CRM market for SMBs, has stated that in its very first quarter of existence it has notched up more than 200 users. The company feels that its success is due to the software which helps SMBs execute tasks in a simple manner and faster. LogicBright CRM fills in where contact managers such as ACT! fall short. The company president Steve Schmidt swears by the mantra of keeping it simple and believes that SMB employees are loath to grapple with complex CRM systems. An easy to use CRM with an intuitive web interface is what they are looking at. LogicBright also offers a fast implementation that does not require a highly trained IT staff. Importing data is also a breeze with LogicBright CRM.

This is an aspect of CRM that is indeed worth a thought by industry worthies – how to align CRM and manufacturing. CRM focuses on the customers and aims to make the entire process customer-centric whereas most manufacturers belong to the school of thought that extols lean manufacturing where emphasis is placed on productivity and performance. CRM projects succeed only when the CRM philosophy is embraced across the organization and measurable customer-centric process are in place across the value chain.

The difficulty is in balancing lean manufacturing where the emphasis is on cutting costs with a customer-centric approach. CRM companies are finding it difficult to sell the concept of CRM to manufacturing companies. One of the issues that CRM vendors find discouraging is the trend of treating CRM as a desktop application with no strategic backing or accompanying changes in the thought processes of the company. Commence which provides on-premise as well as hosted CRM, has come up with a detailed list of forty best practices for industrial marketers that will help them to sell more effectively and obtain ROI more quickly.

Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), a self-styled “vendor-neutral consortium”, is based in San Francisco and its avowed mission is to generate awareness about and further the cause of interoperability between open products and their adoption. According to the findings of its 2007 Customer Forum Series, the key concern for customers and channel partners who are placing their faith in open source is interoperability between open source products.

The consortium intends to “out-Microsoft Microsoft” by strengthening collaboration between its member customers and channel partners and help them overcome interoperability issues.
Open Source CRM and ERP applications are increasing in popularity and so are applications such as the application server Jboss, the commercial databases MySQL and Postgres, and the Eclipse development platform.

OSA also announced an interoperability prototype called Common Customer View (CCV), probably the first of its kind, which ambitiously aims to integrate diverse front-office, back-office and planning applications so that company employees can view a well-rounded image of the customer and base their selling and marketing plans on it. CCV was built and tested with products from companies such as Adaptive Planning, Centric CRM, JasperSoft, Openbravo, Talend and Unisys.

The NetSuite IPO struck a big blow on behalf of the SaaS market. It heralds a new beginning for SaaS which has till now largely focused on SMBs. The smashing success of the IPO, which saw the NetSuite stock price go up twice in two days, has not only pleased the investors but also large companies notwithstanding issues regarding integration, customization, and an environment where mixed applications may have to exist.

Moving to SaaS from licensed software involves integration on an enterprise scale and raises several issues for the IT department. NetSuite and other SaaS vendors can however make inroads in the enterprise markets where they will have to slug it out on a product-by-product basis. This means that SaaS vendors offering suites will have to do a rethink and position their products differently.

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Ad Authority has launched a CRM service that enables you to get in touch with customers who are no longer on your radar and rekindle relationship with them. This would hopefully get them back into your sales net. This is perhaps a one-of-a-kind facility provided by Ad Authority in conjunction with Cast Release Ltd.

The program is a collaborative effort between Randall Steinmeyer (Chairman - Cast Release Ltd.) and Jake Vale (COO - Ad Authority Inc.). Jake said, “Randall’s unique vision combined with Ad Authority’s message delivery system made this program a no-brainer.” Ad Authority is the first marketing company to capitalize on this emerging trend (SMS messaging) and is proud to provide one of the best CRM tools to hit the market since the telephone.

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