We Blog CRM

This month, Consona announced the availability of the first version of Consona Knowledge Driven Support (KDS) at the Technology Services World conference in Las Vegas. The product debuted last October, and draws on technology from the former Onyx CRM and KNOVA KM applications, as well as from the recently-acquired SupportSoft eService suite.

Since its release last year, Knowledge Driven Support has received Verified v4 status with the Consortium for Service Innovation’s Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS); every year the non-profit alliance highlights, or “verifies,” those products that it thinks best reflect their best-practice guidelines. Consona KDS is the only product that has achieved such verification for both knowledge and incident management, and aims to help external service and support organizations achieve best-practice objectives through unifying and measuring every agent on every channel.

Knowledge Driven Support will provide multi-channel support integrated with a single knowledgebase with consistent knowledge, automatic delivery of relevant knowledge based on specifics within the case in question, and analytics tracking use of knowledge in certain situations to ultimately pinpoint the causes of customer demand. In addition the official release of KDS will precede new price points and deployment options—namely a cloud-based SaaS option, adding an economical quality to its functionality.

Monday, Salesforce.com announced a new deal that will both improve Force.com’s CRM services and help the cloud application to branch out from its CRM mold: they signed a deal with Adobe to link Adobe Flash to Force.com. Analyst James Governor calls the alliance a means of pushing Force.com into its “2.0” phase by providing “rich internet application development experience.”

The Adobe Flash Builder will be the new provision for unified development, and will facilitate deployment of Flash applications on Force.com. Because this is an innovation to the Force.com platform, the overarching intention is that the builder be used to extend Salesforce.com CRM applications, but it can also be helpful for creating web sites, and desktop apps that can run outside the browser.

During its three-year tenure, Force.com has garnered some 63,000 customers, who’ve built 120,000 applications. With its Salesforce branding, Force.com attracts plenty of users looking mainly for CRM solutions, but also a fair number looking for non-enterprise solutions. A research analyst at Gartner noted that more and more companies look to Force.com to develop non-CRM applications. This partnership with Adobe Flash certainly gives an added accessibility to building CRM applications, and will thus be an undoubted success.

Last week, iLinc for Salesforce was named the “App of the Week” on the Force.com AppExchange. Every week, SaaS applications that integrate with Salesforce.com’s CRM platform are presented, and iLinc’s offering was featured for its ability to integrate webinar data with existing Salesforce CRM data, which in turn allows users visibility to effectively sell and communicate with potential customers, and reinforce loyalty with existing customers. Another factor in selection was that the iLinc app provides virtual meetings directly from Salesforce Lead and Contact records.

iLinc’s President and CEO, James Powers, stated that his company’s development strategy centers on working out tangible business problems, so an integration with Salesforce—establishing a real-time connection with CRM—was an obvious solution. The motive behind this particular integration is to get businesses to move webinars and online training sessions to the iLinc platform, and easily and effectively follow up with attendees using Salesforce CRM.

Reviews of iLinc for Salesforce have been positive so far, and as iLinc is a Gold Sponsor of this year’s Dreamforce (Salesforce.com’s annual user conference), attendees will learn more about the product during the November convention.

Another coup for the cloud: SplendidCRM announced this week that their latest version of Community Edition will run on the Microsoft Windows Azure platform.

SplendidCRM develops Microsoft-centric CRM solutions for open-source users, so the Azure connection is not entirely surprising. Splendid can be installed to run the database in SQL Azure with the web application running locally, and can also be set to run the database in SQL Azure and the web app in Windows Azure. The goal, of course, is for costumers to cut costs while enjoying increased functionality and quick deployment.

The Microsoft Silverlight 3 Toolkit has also advanced SplendidCRM’s product, as continued incorporation of the environment has recently replaced the previous flash-based and hand-made charts. And the latest incarnation of Splendid’s query engine has been optimized to handle millions of records by employing a custom paging program. Another new search improvement is the added ability to search for duplicate records and merge duplicates into a single record.

SplendidCRM has been tested on all current variations of Windows, and while reviews have not been issued yet, it will be interesting to hear what Windows users think of these new improvements.

Last week, IBM delivered a strong third quarter, and the success can be largely attributed to the company’s gradual shift toward software and services from hardware.

The better-than-expected profit and revenue growth can be summed up thus: $3.1 billion third quarter net income, or $2.40 per share. These numbers are down from a year ago, but Wall Street had projected earnings of $2.38 a share for this year. This ups IBM’s earnings for the year, as they are now expected to close 2009 at $9.85 a share.

Company CFO Mark Loughridge says they gained market share in both software and hardware, but their hardware growth is not doing as well as in previous years, with their mainframe server revenue down 26% from a year ago. Global business services numbers were also down from last year, but still represent a relative success with $4.34 billion in revenue. And though Loughridge was not forthcoming with details, he expressed confidence in corporate demand stabilizing in the next year, and IBM’s future (multiple) opportunities.

Last week, Salesforce.com announced it will partner with Cisco to deliver “the new face of customer service” by building a new contact center in the cloud. Combining Salesforce’s Service Cloud 2 with Cisco Unified Communications, the new solution uses gives SMBs the ability to run customer service entirely in the cloud. Both Cisco and Salesforce share a faith in cloud computing, and both encourage leveraging social networking sites for customer service.

Service Cloud 2 and Cisco’s Unified Contact Center—which helps companies smoothly integrate inbound and outbound voice call with Internet applications—are integrated by a connector, allowing customers to use Salesforce CRM as their primary agent desktop while having access to Contact Center’s capabilities. The solution is for companies with 30 to 300 customer service representatives, and features the Customer Interaction Cloud, a tool providing more efficient communications.

Salesforce and Cisco consider this new integration the answer to growing demands for cloud-based customer service solutions within the SMB market, as well as a new model for customer service. The cloud model allows companies to deliver “the expertise of the community” to their customers, and Salesforce reports that some 8,000 customers have already turned to Service Cloud 2 (launched earlier this fall) for their customer service needs.

In a move reminiscent of Salesforce.com’s initial marketing campaign, hosting service Rackspace launched NoMoreServers.com, a site dedicated to Computing-as-a-Service models. In 1999, Salesforce.com commenced with the “No Software” slogan that promoted Marc Benioff’s cloud-based CRM offering, and today NoMoreServers.com embraces the rise of the All Cloud Enterprise (ACE).

The site considers itself a rally cry of “the new computing era,” positioned at the center of this shift within business IT. They encourage enterprises to empower themselves by learning, keeping current, and debating the trend. NoMoreServers will be edited by hosting expert and recent Rackspace addition Andy Schroepfer, and will feature articles and daily commentary about hosting, cloud computing, and key vendors like Amazon, Google, and Salesforce, as well as a forum for discussions.

Rackspace is based in San Antonio, Tex., and provides hosting for about 70,000 businesses, and more than 51,000 of those are cloud computing businesses. And they are pretty intent on propelling enterprise into modernity, recently partnering with blogger Robert Scoble to launch Building 43, which encourages businesses to use modern technology and social media for increased productivity.

Salesforce.com and Dell have been longtime partners, and earlier this week they announced they are teaming up to target SMBs. They will offer joint, certified cloud-computing CRM bundles that will be priced as low as $9 per user per month (the cost of Salesforce’s Contact Manager Edition).

Salesforce and Dell have been testing the solution within their respective companies: Salesforce runs its datacenters and PCs on Dell equipment, and Dell has integrated Salesforce CRM with their on-premise applications using Dell’s PowerEdge servers and Integration Services. For Salesforce, this collaboration with Dell is a means of extending the adoption of cloud computing services, as it gives smaller businesses the obvious cloud-computing benefit of managing customer relations without the cost of managing infrastructure while utilizing pre-existing hardware.

Businesses with multipart IT systems will benefit from Dell Integration Services, which provides inexpensive and fast integration and migration for businesses using Salesforce’s cloud. Dell will more or less be reselling the stable of Salesforce.com products—from the Contact Manager to the Enterprise Edition—and offering the integration services.

Today Jive Software, a producer of what it terms “Social Business Software,” launched an integration with Microsoft SharePoint—the first in a series, called Jive Connects, that it hopes will liberate content in server suites.

After integration, Jive and SharePoint users will have a unified stream of content within both systems, and can also create content in one system and have access to it in the other. Jive users will also be able to search and link to SharePoint repositories and content from wherever it is they are working in Jive, from discussion threads to blogs.

Jive isn’t the first social enterprise provider to integrate with SharePoint, and it is certainly a smart move to join with the Microsoft product to enrich the Jive experience. Still, Jive’s SharePoint Connector is part of a bigger scheme, Jive Connects: a series of modules that’ll enable organizations to surface content activities from almost any CMS inside Jive, and is intended to bridge several gaps.

First, Jive wants to allow for a CMS solution that provides forums for content within the platform—normally conversation regarding content slips to “off-the-grid” emails, and having the feedback easily accessible will preclude the need for switching between applications. Adding a social aspect to enterprise is a wise move in general, but Jive wants to incorporate social networking features for searches, pointing out that social media is quickly changing the way people look for and expect to find information. Jive also recently launched a social media tracker to its platform, so it will be interesting to see what they’ll be doing in the coming year.

Call center software provider inContact announced this week it would be releasing an integration to cloud-based CRM. An undisclosed provider of performance solutions for the casualty claims industry will be using inContact’s product with Salesforce.com for several call centers that deal with about 200 insurance agencies total. Over the past couple of years, the solutions company used Salesforce.com for CRM and inContact for call center operations, and by integrating the former product into the latter, the company will expand the Salesforce presence throughout their business.

Aside from eliminating the hassle of switching between the two platforms, the integration will merge routing, call resolution, and reporting, thereby improving the general call-center cycle. Agents and managers will use the same UI to answer calls and create reports.

Being that both inContact and Salesforce are cloud-based platforms, the integration will provide the typical benefits of a SaaS model—fast deployments, measurable ROI, and a lower cost. The economy has recently made SaaS solutions of all breeds popular, so this is surely not the last cloud-based call center integration we’ll be seeing. Another coup for inContact this week: a report by DMG Consulting showed their on-demand solutions were the most implemented hosted contact center products of 2008.