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DocVerse's activity stream

Looks like Google is determined to remain competitive in the small business CRM market, as today they announced they are closing an acquisition of DocVerse, a service facilitating collaboration around Microsoft Office documents. Given the number of small businesses managing CRM via free online applications, this could be big news.

San Francisco-based DocVerse has previously been called a tool for turning Microsoft Office into Google Docs—once participating parties have downloaded the plug-in, they can share documents with one another and view them on the web. Whether users are online or offline, DocVerse will track, manage and sync changes and merge them into one updated document. Users can talk over changes through an included instant messaging platform. Another neat feature offered by DocVerse: an activity stream that is viewable with MS Office, any web browser, or an RSS stream.

In so many ways, this is Google returning the challenge Microsoft posed earlier this year when they announced Office 2010 would tout Web Apps, an online component allowing document sharing and real-time collaboration functionalities. They decided to make Office more like Google Docs, and now Google is upping the ante by actually taking Office to their own platform. The acquisition is not yet finalized, but it will be interesting to see how this online-documents brawl plays out next year. Plenty of small business users house their information with Google, but there are many who just use the Microsoft Office suite, and might not be swayed toward Google’s Office-friendly collaboration without an added incentive.

Google also recently acquired Appjet, creators of the real-time collaboration tool EtherPad, and that team has since been working with Google Wave, and the source code has been released. Still, it will be interesting to see if they bring Appjet and DocVerse talent together.

NetSuite for iPhone

In terms of mobile CRM, it looks like 2010 is going to be the year the iPhone and Android duke it out. Research in Motion reported better than expected Q3 earnings, but both the iPhone and Android are honing in on the BlackBerry’s livelihood: the enterprise market. (Needless to say, blackouts like the one BlackBerry had this week are also unpleasant.)

Practically since the iPhone’s inception, all the major players have developed iPhone CRM applications: Salesforce.com, Oracle, NetSuite, and the list goes on. Smaller companies are also jumping on the iPhone CRM bandwagon, and it’s no doubt that mobile components are especially important for any CRM vendor that wants to remain competitive. Each of these iPhone CRM apps vary in functional range—from NetSuite’s view-only data, to Bella Solutions’ fully functional application, announced today. As a vendor of web-based field-service management platforms, Bella Solutions is a company that acknowledges the importance of keeping commercial travelers informed, and their iPhone CRM application allows mobile users real-time access to back-office data.

But even if buyers are clamoring for iPhone CRM now, will they be within a year? It’s hard to take the iPhone’s “it” status away, but the Android is certainly trying. And not only is the phone being positioned as hip, but it is also going after enterprise customers in an attempt to poach from BlackBerry. Major CRM vendors already have Android CRM applications, and it’s likely smaller vendors will join in, as they have with the iPhone. Also, while this may not pertain to CRM applications, many developers are decrying Apple’s app-approval process; development on the Android, however, is only getting easier.

It’ll be exciting to see whether the iPhone takes the CRM torch away from BlackBerry, or whether the Android will pick up speed and dominate the enterprise market.

If this past year was all about social networking in CRM, 2010 will most definitely be met with the rise of collaboration products in business suites. Salesforce Chatter, despite being dubbed the “Facebook for enterprise,” is positioning itself as a CRM collaboration tool. Not to be outdone by Salesforce.com, SugarCRM announced Cloud Connects and Social Feeds, which will provide collaboration capabilities for their users. Each of these new products offer collaboration abilities, but there’s a reason why they are being considered Facebook-like platforms—they offer the ability to create personal profiles, status updates, and the like.

SugarCRM and Salesforce.com offer CRM platforms for companies of all sizes, but it is very likely that those companies using their respective collaboration/social networking tools are medium-to-large enterprises. In the next year, we are probably going to see more CRM collaboration tools like HyperOffice’s Collaboration Suite, which caters to SMBs. Collaboration Suite is a SaaS platform, and allows users to create personal and group environments, and touts a UI that is very like that of Microsoft Office. Its features have been described as basic, but we have to keep in mind that it is a product for small businesses, and they rarely require the same level of sophistication that larger businesses need.

There will be an influx in CRM collaboration tools, and they are going to offer a range of sophistication levels. Not all services will offer Chatter-like features—specifically, the Facebook-like ones—and maybe this is a good thing. We always want to see greater innovation and complexity in each product iteration, in any technology segment; but when it comes to Web 2.0, sometimes the sought after innovations are just noise.

Personally, I’d like to see more collaboration tools that take the simple approach tibbr offers with its status updates. Not that Salesforce.com and SugarCRM’s products aren’t valuable for a number of business environments. They do offer a number of important collaboration abilities, but all that is currently shrouded in marketing that focuses on their social media aspects. It’d just be nice to see more CRM applications focusing on productivity, instead of the razzle dazzle of social networking.

Today, Zoho announced the production release of Zoho Reports, their online reporting and business intelligence tool. Zoho CRM products are wholly web-based, and Zoho Reports emerges with a new pricing model and features after two years in beta. It was formerly known as Zoho DB, and it facilitates data analysis for database administrators and developers.

The new functionalities found in the Zoho Reports’ commercial release are new dashboards and an iGoogle gadget; pricing plans for the new release begin at $15 per month (250,000 rows and 2 users). With the dashboard view, users can collate similar reports and view them all on a single page. The iGoogle gadget, meanwhile, allows users to embed the gadget version of Zoho Reports on their iGoogle homepage, giving them greater access to important data.

A free edition of Zoho Reports will be offered in addition, and features intrinsic to both versions include the ability to upload from a variety of data sources, including Excel and HTML files, and support for both on-demand and on-premise business suites and databases. Zoho Reports also offers a drag-and-drop interface, and collaborative tools through which users can work together on reports. Zoho is also promising secure data.

As a small business CRM vendor, Zoho competes with Google Apps and the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Office 2010, so they’ve implemented a less traditional business model: continually launching new products and offerings to their existing products. It’s certainly paid off—they currently have over 2 million users—and it will be interesting to see how Zoho, as the lesser-known brand, remains competitive during the next year.

BatchBook has always been positioned a small business CRM company, and with some recent additions to their product, they may begin changing what that CRM segment is all about. The co-founders of the three-year-old company are in awe of the capabilities social media provide, and one of their recent platform updates is a social contact manager with increased sales functionality. Another upgrade was an integration with web-based help desk software provider Zendesk, which is not the type of integration you’d most expect from a small business CRM offering.

The social network integration adds depth to the contact management space, and BatchBook’s product allows users to track their contacts’ conversations and generally get a better idea of what they are talking about. The dashboard is customizable and supports a number of social networks, from Twitter to LinkedIn to Flickr, and users can generate lists by searching, and by tagging functionality with the Social Media SuperTag.

There were also a number of new features added to BatchBook for Sales, like customized fields for deals management, a complex calendar, and a module for assigning leads to sales associates. BatchBook is also a part of The Small Business Web, which is a community of companies with open APIs, allowing them to integrate their offerings more easily.

The Zendesk integration provides users with a dashboard widget that displays open Zendesk tickets assigned to them, and it also provides an activity log widget on each contact record that displays any Zendesk tickets submitted by a contact. It offers a nice range of capabilities for BatchBook users, but it’ll be interesting to see exactly how many such features the company continues to add, as it could crowd the space traditionally offered in small business CRM packages.

SugarCRM announced today that their partnership with KnowledgeTree and iNetProcess will take them to the commercial enterprise content management (ECM) space. SugarCRM is known as a leader in open-source CRM offerings, and KnowledgeTree is an ECM provider that focuses on affordable document management software (DMS); iNetProcess is a European provider of services around open source CRM and DMS applications, and provides the architecture behind the new application, iNetDocs.

iNetDocs offers seamless integration between data stored in KnowledgeTree and SugarCRM, so users leveraging the app can search, browse, and retrieve information from documents and folders in the KnowledgeTree repository, and view them on the SugarCRM platform. A tab within the Sugar interface connects directly to the KnowledgeTree information, and said info can be added to lead and contact information when necessary.

The free community edition of iNetDocs has been available for about year to SugarCRM users, and the commercial edition will offer some new features and customer support. It will be available in the SaaS and on-premise versions of both KnowledgeTree and SugarCRM , and starts at $1490 for 20 users.

Content management and CRM systems are a natural fit, and this new venture will doubtless save users plenty of time switching between applications. The ECM space is growing pretty steadily, so it’ll be interesting to see exactly what the new features are offering in the commercial version iNetDocs that set it apart.

Intuit Software announced last month that they’ll be expanding their reach in the small business CRM space, this time with Intuit Customer Manager. Intuit is best known for its accounting and finance software, like Quicken and Quickbooks, but this latest addition puts the company in direct competition with CRM chiefs like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.

Naturally, many small business users aren’t working on streamlined management platforms, and rather are running their businesses across a series of products. Intuit’s accounting and finance offerings are already popular with many small businesses, so it isn’t surprising that Customer Manager is their next step in this space. Customer Manager gives users a simple way to see and update their customer data, and eschews the sophistication of large-scale CRM platforms. It provides a platform for contact information, pending tasks, appointments, and more. There’s a BlackBerry version, and Intuit execs say they will soon support other smartphones. Another smart move: businesses already using Quickbooks and Quicken can synchronize the data with Customer Manager, and also information from Microsoft Outlook.

Customer Manager is priced at $9.95 per month for up to five users, which is comparable to the pricing of similar products offered by other companies. Both Salesforce and SugarCRM released contact managers for small business users this year, and though both offer impressive CRM platforms, it’ll be interesting to see how Customer Manager fares considering there are already some 4 million QuickBooks users who can easily adopt the new platform.

With the recent releases of social-networking platforms for enterprise (see: Salesforce Chatter, SugarCRM Cloud Connects and Social Feeds), the influx of social-media tools for business is unsurprising, but watching it all unfold is quite a treat. This week, TIBCO Software announced that next year they’ll be launching tibbr, a social-feed service that apes Twitter. tibbr will be available internally in a week, and will have a general release in the first quarter of 2010.

Like productivity software providers before it, TIBCO is eschewing the “social network” context of their new tool, and is calling tibbr a device for “workplace communication.” While tibbr is very much a Twitter-like service behind the corporate firewall, one of the significant ways it differs from the micro-blogging platform is that you can follow and search for people and subjects, which allows enterprise users to focus on the real-time developments in departments and tasks relevant to their jobs.

Social media in enterprise has received a lot of flak for creating unwanted noise that detracts from business, and tibbr aims to cut down on the racket with subject filters that eliminate duplicate posts (what Twitter users would think of as retweets) and allows users to choose the form and frequency of information delivery. tibbr is built on TIBCO’s own cloud-based infrastructure, Silver, and integrates directly with any enterprise system.

On his ZDNet blog, Dana Gardner writes that tibbr could replace email in the corporate sphere, and become the space where people “live” at work. This could very well be the case, as tibbr is offering enterprise some of the most efficient implementation of real-time technology. Unlike Salesforce’s, and now SugarCRM’s offerings, tibbr does away with some of the distracting information—profile pages,  personal information, etc.—and gives a bare-bones update on the relevant subjects. When compared to Chatter and Cloud Connects, tibbr might seem cold and impersonal. But it’s through this personal distance that tibbr is poised to be the more efficient, real-time tool.

Below is a video TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé giving a brief overview of tibbr, and calling it a step toward “Enterprise 3.0” (the integration of real-time and enterprise platforms).

The end of 2009 is upon us, and as with every year’s end, research firms, bloggers, and others are weighing in on what they expect will be big in the future. Analyst firm IDC released a compendium of their 2010 predictions earlier this week, and it will likely not surprise most readers that one of the most noted changes will be the upsurge in mobile web usage. The projected scale of this swell, however, is unexpected: over a billion mobile users will be connected to the Internet by the end of 2010. Considering the prediction for desktop and laptop PC users is 1.3 billion users, and that mobile devices have a growth rate 2.5 times that of PCs, the consequences for mobile CRM, and iPhone CRM especially, are huge.

So why will iPhone CRM be more affected than another smartphone’s? We saw earlier this year that the iPhone App store on iTunes has some 100,000 apps offered, and IDC predicts that number will triple next year. Meanwhile, the current number of Android apps will likely quintuple (to total from 50,000-75,000), which is impressive but still doesn’t have iPhone-scale implications. IDC does predict the Android phones will pose more of a threat to the iPhone next year, but it won’t reach the same level of popularity.

Addressing the similar usage numbers between desktop PCs and mobile web, IDC predicted that while mobile devices like the iPhone won’t replace the PC, they will no longer be subservient to them. There are, of course, many iPhone CRM integrations offered by CRM vendors like Salesforce.com, Oracle, and NetSuite, but one aspect of iPhone CRM that I expect will grow is the productivity applications market.

The aforementioned CRM integrations often offer limited editing and creating capabilities, and there are a number of word processing and file sharing applications available for the iPhone. These applications—like the word processor, Documents 2 Go, and the file sharer, ezShare Pro—don’t entirely compensate for the lack of certain functionalities in existing iPhone CRM applications, but they will most certainly be useful to small business users wanting iPhone CRM, and hopefully portend the arrival of greater editing, creating, and file-sharing capabilities in future iPhone CRM applications.

Documents 2 Go Interface

SugarCRM released a broad upgrade today, and some of the features resemble those found in Salesforce.com’s newest offerings. SugarCRM 5.5 features a number of real-time functionalities, but their main achievements are a service called “Cloud Connects,” and Social Feeds.

Cloud Connects is a third-party web integration with LinkedIn, Jigsaw, and Hoovers, which touts social feeds with status updates, alerts, and notifications. Sugar’s Social Feeds is the dashboard that actually displays status updates and alerts; this information can be shared between users. Leveraging Cloud Connects and Social Feeds, users will also receive up-to-date account and lead information. People weighing in note that the combination of these services resembles Facebook, and therefore are compelled to draw similarities between the two and Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce’s real-time social network for enterprise. Salesforce.com announced the release of Chatter at their annual Dreamforce conference two weeks ago, and though CEO Marc Benioff insists that Chatter is a platform for collaboration, conference attendees christened it “Facebook for enterprise.”

Naturally, that Cloud Connect’s release is two weeks after Chatter’s precludes its being Sugar’s own version of Chatter. Still, considering SugarCRM staged a relatively successful guerrilla marketing campaign outside Dreamforce, it’s easy to see how many people drew that conclusion. You can see from screen shots of Cloud Connects, the program is more fragmented than Salesforce Chatter. Cloud Connects appears to be more of modular extension of Sugar’s existing CRM platform, while Salesforce Chatter looks, well, like Facebook.

Social Feeds

Cloud Connects' LinkedIn integration

There are a few other features in this upgrade, including a more streamlined Mobile Studio (Sugar’s mobile application) that allows for more editing and creating capabilities. There’s also Dynamic Teams, which improves collaboration on the CRM platform; and My Portal Dashlet, which allows users to view information from external sites and applications from the SugarCRM platform.

It will be interesting to see what other features Sugar adds to Cloud Connects in the future. They’ve been attacking Salesforce.com pretty aggressively, and I’d like to see if they make their social networking features more streamlined (like a “Facebook for enterprise”), or if they maintain the program as it is.