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According to Verticals onDemand, as many as 15 life science companies have been added to its SaaS CRM user-base. The ProStrakan Group based in the UK has selected VBioPharma to market its products in the US.

“I already knew the pluses and minuses of most of the major pharma CRM vendors from previous experience,” said Paul Bidawid, Vice President of Managed Markets & Supply Chain at ProStrakan.”SaaS is definitely where we’re heading.”

Matt Wallach, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Verticals onDemand, said SaaS technology is “much more flexible and cost-effective than client/server systems of ten years ago, making it attractive to pharma and biotech companies.”

DVD distributor Magna Pacific has decided to discontinue its use of Sybiz software and implement Microsoft Dynamics NAV as it feels that the old CRM application does not scale well. The company’s administration manager, Sarah Dowling said “In the warehouse, staff would frequently make errors while picking and packing orders. These errors could result in inappropriate product sent to customers so there was a great need for improved accuracy.”

The company tested products from Sage, Innicom, and Sybiz’s Evolution before selecting Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Microsoft Dynamics won the day on the strength of its scalability, custom features, and the extent of functionality offered by it.

Ribbit Corporation, a VoIP company, has added a service that allows users to push voicemail from their cell phones to a Salesforce database. This updates customer records and facilitates sharing of data. Voice messages are automatically converted to text, thus eliminating manual text entry. The new feature introduced by Ribbit allows “conditional call forwarding” wherein calls made by Ribbit customers get forwarded to Ribbit’s Web-based platform which diverts the data to Salesforce.

“We’re targeting a different and important area like Salesforce Professional Edition or customers who have got a team of people relying on their cell phone to do their job,” said Greg Goldfarb, general manager of software as a service at Ribbit , in a statement. “Such products are interdependent on having a certain type of infrastructure.”

AdventNet’s Zoho CRM has come out with an Enterprise Edition that is a low-cost subscription-based SaaS offering. It offers sales, service, marketing, and inventory management modules. It aims to fulfill the requirements of corporate customers who demand organizational management (including hierarchical group definitions), role-based security on data access and information sharing, SSL transport, and broader interface customizations.

Learn more about it here.

Although hosted CRM companies are mushrooming by the day and the march of SaaS seems to keep moving forward onerously, helped now by the promise of Storage-as-a-Service, the jury is still out on whether SaaS CRM is a good fit for all or can hosted CRM harm your business.

Perhaps the question can be answered better if we have clarity on what CRM offers the best business value.  The type of CRM activity, whether operational, collaborative, or analytical, often decides whether the particular CRM modules should be in-house or hosted. The company approach to data security is another contributing factor.

Hosted CRM offers the following benefits -

• Faster time to value.
•  Easy deployment.
• Frequent updates.
• Cost-effective.
• Often the only alternative for SMBs.

On the flip side -

• You need regular high-speed internet connectivity.
• Over time, the TCO can shoot up.
• Shifting to another vendor may not be easy.
• Data security is always a nagging worry because its not in your control.
• Customization and integration is not always easy.

Efforts by companies to get their staff used to mobile CRM are running into an unexpected problem. Company people are not comfortable with the idea of using their mobile devices for complex business applications; they are happy using it to check emails and run not-so-sophisticated programs. Sales people apparently do not want to turn their mobile devices into handheld versions of their PCs.

Add to that the fact that the mobile CRM market is constrained by small screen sizes and limited storage and memory plus weak computation power and you being to get an idea about why mobile CRM still has not been able to take off.

“A lot of business applications that are done in house have to do with analytics,” notes Saswato Das, a spokesman for SAP’s business applications unit. “If you want to run something fairly sophisticated that requires a lot of memory, that requires a lot of computing power, a handheld today is not the best place to do it.”